Obama Hypocrisy on Small Businesses and Jobs

Obama Hypocrisy on Small Businesses and Jobs
Lurita Doan
Tuesday, May 18, 2010

President Obama is in big trouble on jobs creation. It’s likely he will spend even more time making campaign speeches as he did in Buffalo, NY. Oh dear!

After 15 months in office, Obama has yet to make any good decisions to help small business or create jobs. Instead, additional levels of Obama Administration bureaucracy stifle innovation and burden American entrepreneurs with silly, new rules buried in thousands of pages of legislation. In short, Obama is killing the American growth machine.

Evidence of Obama’s assault on business, capital and innovation is everywhere. Job growth is anemic. The economy continues to falter. Yet, when speaking in Buffalo, Obama tried to claim a different reality. But facts, as Ronald Reagan often said, are stubborn things.

A study of the nation’s traditional high-tech areas, where American innovation and creativity propelled our economy, now shows stagnation. Entrepreneurs and technology companies are no longer firing the imagination, creating new jobs, new markets, and new products as they once did.

That’s why income, in Silicon Valley, Boston’s Route 128, the Northern Virginia Technology corridor or even North Carolina’s Research Triangle, loci of the nation’s, previously most productive, knowledge-workers, is declining, indicating that we may be losing our technical, creative, and entrepreneurial edge.

Obama, however, seems oblivious, emphasizing the jobs “created or saved” -- jobs almost exclusively in the government sector. Indeed, the greatest income growth is near large government installations in Fayetteville, NC, Houma, LA and Ft. Hood, TX.

Obama’s focus on government-centric spending has created a scenario that bodes ill for our country since our competitor nations, such as India and China, are encouraging their entrepreneurs, whose revenues grow in many areas of technological innovation.

America needs innovation to maintain a dominant position as an economic world power, and American companies need to innovate to create enough wealth to pay back the ferocious debt that the Obama Administration has incurred.

But, let’s be honest: Obama has no experience with wealth creation. Instead, his forte is wealth redistribution. Compounding his inexperience, Obama unwisely surrounded himself with a Cabinet and staffers that have little, or no, experience in job creation, with only the vaguest understanding of how entrepreneurs and small businesses create jobs.

Obama keeps delivering ill-considered speeches as in Buffalo, making it painfully obvious that he mistakenly believes that the federal government can create private sector jobs. Obama does not seem to understand that any government job, or government-created job, can only be paid for by increasing taxes or by borrowing. And sadly, the small businesses, which can, and do, create new jobs, are being strangled by the new, regulatory burdens, higher taxes, and lack of credit to finance growth.

Where does that leave us? SOL. With a President who arrogantly assumes that, because he has an Ivy League education, he has the answers to all the questions. It leaves us with a White House where over a thousand political appointees are scrambling, mindlessly adopting trendy ideas from academicians and inexperienced think tanks pundits because they need a solution to economic growth and job creation.

President Obama has decided that his best course of action is to travel the country and tell Americans what great things he is doing on job creation, despite the growing gap between the President’s statements and the actual facts.

Obama seems so insecure or so arrogant that he thinks the answer has to come from the JD-MBA-Ph.D. community with which he seems most comfortable. Obama seems to have trouble believing the answer to job creation could simply be a citizen who opens a coffee shop or an appliance store or a car repair shop because he has a dream and is willing to work long hours, with no guarantee of success, for the chance to change his stars. The only request this entrepreneur has is for government to get out of the way.

Obama could learn that lesson easily enough by talking to the many small business owners and entrepreneurs that are being squeezed by his job-killing policies. But that is not likely to happen. For example, many members of the Tea Party movement are small business leaders, sole proprietors and entrepreneurs, but, Mr. Obama routinely goes out of his way to insult and demean them.

If the American job creation machine is to every get started again, President Obama is going to have to find a way to talk to people he does not understand and probably does not much like. That didn’t happen in Buffalo and is unlikely to happen next week when the President takes to the campaign trail.

How sad is that for our country?