Obama; Job Killer

I wish during the years I was in public office I had this firsthand experience about the difficulties businesspeople face. ... We are choking off business opportunity.

That quote came from Senator George McGovern who tried to start a business after leaving office and ran into a wall of regulations he helped create.  I found the quote today in an article written by John Stossel explaining why job creators are fighting back against the demonizing of business by Obama, another policymaker who has zero business experience.  Please read it but I’ll give you the money quote:

Tom Stemberg, founder of Staples, got involved with the Job Creators Alliance because he's annoyed that the government makes a tough job much tougher.  He complains that government mostly creates jobs — that kill jobs.  "They're creating $300 million worth of jobs in the new consumer financial protection bureau," Stemberg said, "which I don't think is going to do much for productivity in America. We're creating all kinds of jobs trying to live up to Dodd-Frank ... and those jobs don't create much productivity.

I have a school principle that can’t get a loan to buy my late mom’s house because of Dodd-Frank.  He has excellent credit, a good job, but because the house is in a small town and there haven’t been enough home sales in the area to meet the appraiser’s mandated requirements for comps the banks can’t lend.  Small businesses everywhere are running into the same problem, lending to small companies is at a five year low. 

Dodd-Frank is preventing them from getting loans and thereby killing jobs.  Think about that; Congress’ response to a crisis they created is creating another crisis.  This should not be surprising; Dodd and Frank had a big hand in creating the first crises through irresponsible bank regulations.  Ronald Reagan once remarked that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help'.”   Thomas Sowell recently wrote Gridlock to the Rescue? where he shows how history proves that government intervention into the economy has always resulted in a worse outcome than doing nothing. 

Of course according to leftists if you are against government regulation then you want dirty air and dirty water.  Problem with such simplistic thinking is that regulation has long ago cleaned up most pollution problems.  Nevertheless leftist politicians continue to try and put more and more restrictions on business just to show that they are earning their salaries by eliminating imaginary threats.  Witness how Obama is trying to regulate the newest pollutant, carbon dioxide  (essential to all life and nontoxic at 100 times ambient levels),  as a back door cap and trade move that is predicted to increase energy costs by $129 billion and according to a Commerce Department analysis  would cause job losses of 40,000 to 60,000.  Obama promised to bankrupt coal and openly admitted that “electricity prices would necessarily skyrocket”.  Fewer dollars in everyone's pockets will cripple an already shaky economy causing even more job losses.  Proposed EPA regulations on 200,000 boilers and process heaters will have companies trying to measure trace amounts that are so small it will be difficult if not impossible to achieve, yet Barbra Boxer says if we don't we "will kill 8,100 more people more than would have otherwise been killed from pollution".

Obama was saying pass my jobs bill when he hadn’t even submitted one while at the same time he delayed signing free-trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama.  He finally just signed them but since he was praising them in his 2010 State of the Union address no one can understand the year and a half delay.  Obama’s own trade website reveals that the South Korea agreement alone would create more than 60,000 jobs.  Obama has delayed the Keystone pipeline even though his own State Department has said there is no real issue about the environment that requires further investigation.  He wants to wait till after the election so as to not anger his base at the expense of 20,000 jobs and five billion dollars in property taxes that TransCanada will pay over the lifetime of the project.  He delayed a shale gas project in Ohio to study how hydraulic fracturing might contaminate groundwater despite the fact that there are no confirmed cases of groundwater contamination from fracking ever anywhere.  Groundwater contamination has occurred but not as a direct result of the process, it is the result of waste water evaporation ponds and poorly constructed pipelines taking the waste water and chemicals to processing facilities.  These are normal haz-mat concerns that every industry must monitor and control but is being used as a straw man to vilify a new energy boom that in the Marcellus Shale region alone could create 280,000 new American jobs and add $6 billion in new tax revenues.  The left always bemoans the fact that we are loosing so many jobs to China but never say why.  When a communist country has a lower corporate tax rate than the United States you know we are screwed.  The left's answer, raise those taxes more even though the United States has the fourth highest corporate tax rate in the 30-nation Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.  The Cato Institute reports:

The combined U.S. federal and average state rate of 40 percent is almost 9 percentage points higher than the average OECD top corporate rate of 31.4 percent. Only Belgium, Italy, and Japan have higher rates than that of the United States.

  As one disillusioned Obama donor recently noted:

"Businesses adding jobs" is a headline every elected official loves to read. Sadly, it's one that's getting harder and harder to find because of a policy and regulatory landscape that makes it increasingly difficult for businesses to see why and where creating new jobs makes sense.

Obamacare, the biggest job killer of all needs several posts all by itself.  With all the delayed jobs, lost jobs, and killed jobs Obama and the left have caused one might wonder how unemployment could be dropping.  Easy answer, they are cooking the books.  315,000 people who have given up looking for work and have no job are no longer counted as unemployed.