By John Hawkins
4/6/2012
If America's economy were a minority, Barack Obama would be guilty of a hate crime for the things he's done to it. If the economy were a kidnap victim, Barack Obama would be telling it to "put the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again." If this were the movie Saw, Obama would have the economy chained to a radiator and he’d demand that it cut off its own foot to escape. Had Obama literally done nothing except watch Gilligan's Island reruns since he was elected, not only would the economy be in considerably better shape today, but he could learn a lot of tips from the Skipper on how to properly handle Joe Biden.
Instead, because of Barack Obama, we've had the weakest economic recovery from a recession since the Great Depression. Just to give you an idea of how bad things have gotten because of Obama, we would have to create 15 million new jobs just to get the ratio of employed Americans up to the same place it was in 2007. We've also had 37 months of 8% or higher unemployment, which again, is the longest streak since FDR was in office. This is no accident. Barack Obama may not have created the recession, but he is personally responsible for the anemic recovery.
1) Gas: Solar, wind, and algae are bad jokes. All of them combined supply roughly 2% of the energy in America and that's probably being generous. Obama can talk about how important all of those energy sources will be in the future, but the reality is that's very iffy. They might be important or they might be about as relevant as whale oil in 50 years. Our economy runs on coal, natural gas, nuclear power and most importantly, oil. By refusing to drill ANWR, blocking the Keystone Pipeline, fighting offshore drilling, slow walking drilling on federal land, trashing fracking, and attacking oil companies on a regular basis, the Obama Administration has driven up the cost of oil. Not only does this take money out of the pocket of consumers, it increases the cost of just about everything in the economy via higher shipping costs. Despite the phony rhetoric you hear about reducing gas prices, Obama's own Secretary of Energy has said he wants to "boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe." That's more than $8 a gallon.
2) Obamacare: Obama's attempt to take over health care has been an unmitigated disaster. The CBO now projects the cost of Obamacare has doubled to 1.76 trillion, it says 20 million Americans could lose their health care, and premiums will increase between 10-13%. Obamacare also will implement a number of new taxes and makes it difficult for many businesses to project their health care costs over the next few years -- if they don't stop providing health care to their employees altogether because of the law. The bigger corporations that can afford to do detailed estimates, like AT&T, Verizon, Caterpillar, Deere, Valero Energy, AK Steel, 3M and McDonald’s, are projecting large cost increases and some of them are already threatening to drop their employee coverage as a result. If Barack Obama's actual goal had been to drive up costs for American businesses and make them less likely to hire people, he couldn't have intentionally come up with anything much better than Obamacare.
3) Regulations: American businesses were vastly over-regulated before Obama got into office, but he has kicked things into high gear. Hundreds of new regulations are being added each month. There are different ways to estimate the staggering compliance cost for all of these regulations, but the numbers go as high as 84 billion dollars. That's 84 billion dollars A YEAR that could be used to expand businesses, buy new equipment, and hire workers to increase production instead of doing paperwork for the federal government. If anything, given the state of the economy, Obama should be working to dramatically lower the number of new regulations instead of increasing it.
4) Uncertainty: Businesses don't know if the Bush tax cuts will expire or continue, whether Obama will raise taxes or not (Bet on "yes" if he's reelected), what new regulations are coming, what industries Obama may take over, which businesses he will be demonizing next, whether Obama will bend the law to help his union allies (See what was done at GM and Chrysler along with blocking a Boeing plant for examples of that) -- it's pure chaos. This is why American corporations are sitting on record high cash reserves instead of expanding, hiring, and looking for bargains created by the recession. Obama has made it impossible for them to even plan a few years ahead.
5) Spending: While Obama's incessant tinkering with the economy has created short term uncertainty, his rampant over-spending has created long term uncertainty. The government has been going into debt for years, but Obama has ramped this up to levels never before seen in human history. At a time when even Barack Obama admitted we needed to cut back on spending, he racked up bigger deficits in just 3 years and 2 months than George Bush did in two terms. Now America has lost its AAA rating, Obama is still adamantly opposed to making any spending cuts, and for the first time, it seems entirely possible that America will end up defaulting on its debt within a decade or two. That would lead to an economic Armageddon that America might never truly recover from. Because this possibility is now on the horizon, it's impacting the ability of businesses to make long term plans. How do you make a 15 year business plan when America may be a westernized version of Zimbabwe by then?
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To read another article by John Hawkins, click here.
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