85% of Small Businesses Say Obama Economy Is On The Wrong Track. Here’s Why.

Obama has devastated the American economy with his vile policies – and so much anxiety with the never-ending demand for more and MORE vile policies in the future – that they are paralyzed with fear that has shut down job creation.

January 19, 2012
Obamacare Hurting Jobs — And Patients

Yesterday the US Chamber of Commerce released its updated survey of small businesses. The polling data revealed what many Americans already know – that Obamacare is increasing uncertainty and reducing hiring. A whopping 74% of businesses said that Obamacare makes it harder for their firms to hire new workers, and 30% said they are not hiring thanks to Obamacare. The survey is consistent with other reports; analysts at UBS have stated that Obamacare is “arguably the biggest impediment to hiring, particularly hiring of less skilled workers,” and the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta has “frequently heard strong comments to the effect of ‘my company won’t hire a single additional worker until we know what health insurance costs are going to be.’”

Physicians are similarly unenthused about the impact of Obamacare on their practices. As an op-ed in this morning’s USA Today notes, “many doctors are becoming wary of the law at a time when only one in three Americans support it.” The piece cites a recent Deloitte survey of physicians, which found that 83% of physicians believe Obamacare will increase wait times, while only 27% believe the law will reduce costs through efficiency savings.

Speaker Pelosi famously said we had to pass the bill to find out what’s in it. The latest news shows once again how American job creators and American physicians have not liked what they discovered in the massive 2700-page law.

RPC Analyst Chris Jacobs

85% of small business owners believe that the economy is under a desperately wrong track under Obama.  Think about that figure.  Think about how many liberals also try their hand at small business; and think about the fact that nearly nine out of every single ten business owners see disaster in everything Obama has touched.

Small business owners largely know that ObamaCare was a massive power-grabbing tax scheme trying to pass itself off as health care reform.  It’s onerous requirements – which are already proving to have been based on outright lies and deception – will continue to stifle job creation as long as it is allowed to remain in effect. 

But it isn’t just ObamaCare; it’s the full weight of ALL of Obama’s policies and style of governance.

Business owners say that they need a forecasting horizon of about five years in order to know what to do with their business plans.  Under Obama, they’re not getting five months, let alone five years.

Obama signed the Bush tax cut extension that – in spite of its short window – could have given businesses a little security about the future.  But then almost immediately after signing the extension he began to demonize it again and call for Marxist-style redistribution of wealth from the people who take all the risks to the people Democrats want to exploit for their votes. 

Will their taxes go up?  Obama has continually beat the tom-tom of class warfare and demonized them and said they have to pay more and more than their “fair share.”  Their taxes will go up this year.  Or next year.  All they know for sure is that as long as Obama continues to be president they have no security and they cannot dare grow.

There has been a constant state of threat that has engendered a siege mentality in the minds of the small business owners who create most of America’s jobs.

The mountain of regulations and restrictions hurts them.  A large business such as a corporation only needs to add another compliance officer; but a small business is devasted.  The owner has to spend more and more of his or her time that he or she should be spending focusing on the business and the customers and workers filling out more and more paper work to demonstrate compliance.

And then there’s the massive costs of all of the Obama regulations – many of which Obama simply rammed down our throats by executive act of tyranny.  Here are some of the facts on that front about the massive hidden tax of Obama’s regulations:

A new report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) titled “Ten Thousand Commandments” reveals the vast amount of private-sector capital drowned in the sea of government regulations.

The report’s conclusion is mind-boggling. The cost of complying with federal regulations has hit the $1.7 trillion dollar mark.

That’s trillion, with a T.

To put that number in perspective, it’s larger than the President’s own anticipated 2011 budget deficit of $1.6 trillion. In fact, the current regulatory burden imposed on businesses across America now amounts to 50% of total government spending in one year alone.

That’s nuts!

But guess what? We can top it.

As the CEI report underscores, the compliance cost of regulation is larger than all corporate pretax profits in 2008 and dwarfs the estimated 2010 individual income tax receipts by nearly 50%.

That last point is worth repeating: The cost of abiding by all the government regulations tallies up to $1.7 trillion, which towers over the revenue brought in by all income taxes, in every bracket.

We can also add that the compliance costs amount to more than $8,000 per American employee, but we’ll have to stop the comparisons there or else this editorial would rival Atlas Shrugged in length—but with statistics. Yikes!

So every time you hear some Democrat bemoan the ill-informed view that America is an underregulated society, tell them to put the above numbers in a pipe and smoke them.

Seriously. America is hamstrung by onerous regulation. That anyone can say otherwise defies belief. CEI notes that the Federal Register, which spells out all the government’s proposed and confirmed regulations, runs practically 25,000 pages—an increase of 26% over the last decade.

And thousands more rules are being proposed each year.

A true “stimulus” to the economy would be to relax much of these regulations and allow entrepreneurs and business owners to spend their capital on expansion and product innovation, rather than conforming to the obligations of some bureaucratic scheme. That’s not to say scrap all federal oversight, but the way things operate now, agencies are encouraged to brainstorm new policies without taking into account how they would negatively impact the economy.

It’s worth noting how the report “Ten Thousand Commandments” explains such perversity:

“Agencies face overwhelming incentives to expand their turf by regulating, even in the absence of demonstrated need, because the only measure of agency productivity—other than growth in their budgets and number of employees—is the number of regulations they produce.”

Regulations are not just burdening and undermining the confidence of our job creators; they are doing the same thing to little children.  To prepare them for a life of statist misery, I guess.

Obama has devastated job creation.  He has personally demonized the people who create jobs and build wealth in the American economy.  He has devastated American energy production – which not only create more jobs but which literally lubricate the gears of our economy.  And instead of allowing Americans to create energy by drilling for our own resources he has banned such activity while “investing” billions of tax dollars into boondoggles such as Solyndra which benefit his campaign donors and his fellow leftist ideologues.

Meanwhile the cost of gasoline – yeah, that stuff we all desperately need – was more expensive under Obama in the year 2011 than it had EVER BEEN IN AMERICAN HISTORY.

Consider the real story of Obamanomics:

8 Illuminating Charts That Show How Truly Failed Obamanomics Truly Is

Obama Hell: When Bush Left Office Average Length Of Unemployment Was 19.8 Weeks; NOW IT’S 40.8 WEEKS

Obama ‘Added Jobs’ Only If You Count Them With Propaganda Math

Job Creators and small business owners understand how failed Obama and his policies are.  But Obama and his mainstream media propagandists are counting on your continued ignorance.

Tags: Bush tax cut, Obamacare, regulations, taxes