Payne: Obama’s War on Jobs (TheMichiganView.com 07.08.11)

Posted by hpayne on July 10, 2011

June’s backward slide to 9.2 percent unemployment – just 18,000 jobs were created – at a time when Americas is two years into recovery, should come as no surprise. The president of the United States is at war with American business.

A year ago, liberal journalist Fareed Zakaria – writing in The Washington Post – asked leaders among America’s 500 largest nonfinancial companies why they were sitting on an unprecedented $2 trillion of cash instead of sinking it into new plants, equipment, and workers.

The universal answer: Barack Obama “is, at his core, anti-business.”

That hostility had manifested itself in “the myriad laws and regulations being cooked up in Washington. (The) government was not in sync with entrepreneurs. ”

“Almost every agency we deal with has announced some expansion of its authority, which naturally makes me concerned about what’s in store for us for the future,” one CEO told Zakaria. Zakaria continued: “Another pointed out that between the health-care bill, financial reform and possibly cap-and-trade, his company had lawyers working day and night to figure out the implications of all these new regulations.”

This relentless politicization of the economy through a barrage of regulation and taxation has frozen business development. The evidence is in headlines everywhere you turn:

– Obamacare’s War on Business

The restaurant industry is reeling from a double D.C. shock – sharply rising food prices (caused in part by the diversion of corn to meet federal ethanol mandates) and the looming Obamacare law that mandates expanded employee coverage.

For example, Chili’s 1,300-strong restaurant chain is girding for insurance expenses to rise under Obamacare.

“The looming changes in health-care law are one of the bigger cost clouds on the horizon for restaurant chains,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “Under the new law, employers with 50 or more full-time workers would have to provide affordable health insurance (to employees).” As a result, big chains like Chili’s aren’t hiring – they are looking for areas to cut back on staff.

– The War on Oil Imports

Obamacrats – led by Henry Waxman and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – are holding up production of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada in the name of global warming. “Building the pipeline will create over 20,000 new American jobs in construction and manufacturing in the short term, and more than 250,000 jobs in the long run. . . . These jobs and revenue are critically needed as America continues its economic recovery,” writes Tom Donahue, CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in the Wall Street Journal.

– The Obama EPA’s War on Coal

EPA Green zealot Lisa Jackson – who told a religious convention in December that government and churches have a moral duty to fight global warming – is trying to shut down coal power production with a series of edicts from carbon and mercury reductions to new particulate restrictions.

The mercury rules have already forced American Electric Power – one of the country’s biggest utilities – to announce the closure of five plants and the loss of 600 jobs. The Detroit News reports that Michigan coal production is in the cross-hairs of a rule that even the EPA estimates will cost utilities $800 million. New reductionsannounced last week on sulfur and nitrogen oxides effect 1,000 power plants in more than two dozen states and threaten more job loss.

– The War on Light Bulbs

The Obama Administration’s support of a ban on the traditional light bulb – in the name of the global warming religion – has come at the cost of hundreds of American jobs from Virginia to Kentucky as manufactures have shut down plants and shipped jobs to China in order to produce more expensive CFL replacements (compact fluorescents cost ten times as much as 40 cent incandescents).

“The last major GE factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the United States is closing, ” reported the Washington Post in December. “Now what’re we going to do?” said Toby Savolainen, 49, who joined 200 fellow workers in the unemployment line.

– The War on Trade

Spurred by Big Labor, Obama’s team is holding up ratification of trade agreements with South Korea, Columbia and Panama.

In Columbia, for example, Caterpillar is losing sales to that country’s mines for bulldozers and other earth-moving machinery. Total U.S. soybean exports to Colombia dropped 51 percent in 2009 alone. The American Soybean Association tells the Wall Street Journal: ” As long as we delay (these agreements) we’ll continue to lose market share.”

– The War on Gulf Oil

A Department of Interior’s Inspector General’s report found “no evidence the decision to shut down an entire industry—at a huge cost to jobs and long-term drilling safety—was done with input from engineers, scientists, economists or anyone with day-to-day oversight of U.S. drilling,” reports The Wall Street Journal.

A study by LSU Prof. Joseph Mason found that 13,000 jobs were lost in the Gulf region due to the moratorium with national job losses estimated at 19,000.

– The War on Autos

Even in an industry where the White House intervened to save jobs, Obama has created a hostile climate going forward. The regulator-in-chief’s proposed 56 mpg edict for 2025 – effectively mandating hybrid-electric cars – could kill thousands of jobs, put a $55,000 sticker on ordinary family cars, and deliver only minor savings to consumers, according to a study by the Ann Arbor-based Center for Automotive Research CAR).

“There will be hundreds of thousands of job losses per year. What we’re arguing against is extremism,” says CAR economist Sean McAlinden.

-The War on Boeing

Obama appointees at the National Labor Relations Board have opened a new front against Boeing, one the nation’s key exporters, after it hired 1,000 workers in South Carolina to build its 787 airliner. The NLRB claims the plant violates labor law for locating in a Right-to-Work state.

“Since being approved as a Boeing supplier we have placed over 100 employees with them here in Charleston,” Neil Whitman, President of Dunhill Staffing Systems told a House panel in June. “If Boeing is forced to shut down . . . it would mean the loss of thousands of direct and indirect jobs.”

Struggling to understand why forecasts of job growth had given way to negative numbers foreshadowing a “prolonged slog for the United States economy,” The New York Times Saturday reported that “economists were stunned.”

The Times is talking to the wrong economists. Businessmen have been telling of this debacle for two years.

 

 

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