Bring On Obama's E-Team 2.0, Please
Washington,
Oct 22, 2010 -
Columnist George Will aptly described the Obama administration as "implacably hostile toward free enterprise." One example of this its crusade to arbitrarily demonize American couples who make more than $250,000 as rich, greedy and unworthy.
Couples who make less than $250,000 per year are encouraged to resent, and exact tax retaliation, on their countrymen who make more. The political calculation of this Obama-generated class warfare is transparent.
However, entrepreneurs and small businesses create over two-thirds of net new jobs, and most job creators are organized as Limited Liability Companies, subchapter S corporations or other business entities whose tax liability is "passed through" to their individual owners.
Consequently, their job-creating businesses transgress into the administration's contrived status of "the rich."
As pass-through individual income becomes fodder for Mr. Obama's tax increases on "the rich," these funds are redirected from creating jobs and instead fall into the federal tax abyss, to be used to pay interest on our staggering national debt and contribute to unreformed and unsustainable entitlement programs.
Our $1,400,000,000,000 annual deficits are "Obamacits," created by this administration's reckless discretionary spending. No amount of blaming others belies the fact.
As Americans beg for austerity, there is no restraint exercised by the administration: our nation's financial black hole becomes increasingly dangerous and increasingly irreversible.
The president's most recent Keynesian profligacy in borrowing $26 billion to pay for union-affiliated local government jobs further crowds out private investment capital and damages the job creators in the economy.
One might reasonably ask why an entrepreneur would start a new business knowing that once she navigates the usual business risks, negotiates the regulation-burdened, lending-leery Main Street banks, now reluctant to finance a new venture or expansion, and she climbs the trough of the J-curve into profitability, the tax man is hovering to further dampen the business' prospects.
In my rural state, financial reform, health care reform and the estate tax loom large on the job-killing horizon. While for big banks, financial reform is an irritant, the costs of which can be passed on for clients to absorb, Wyoming's community banks, which did not cause the financial crisis and were assured they would be minimally affected by new regulations, are reeling under compliance burdens, unable to pass along the costs to their rural customers. They will instead reduce staffing.
Small-business owners in Wyoming had their spreadsheets out when I visited them in August to illustrate the choices they face as employers who currently provide health insurance to their employees.
The only scenario that can save their businesses is to drop their insurance, pay the penalty and dump their employees onto the government-mandated exchange. Even paying the penalty may push low-profit-margin rural small businesses into the red, forcing them to downsize their work force.
Perhaps the most pernicious of the administration's tax policy concoctions is the 2011 reinstatement of the death tax. Aged ranchers and farmers contemplate dying this year rather than next, when the tax goes from the current zero rate to a maximum of 55%.
As a result, some intend to discontinue dialysis or other life-extending treatments this fall, going to their graves with the knowledge that they could not cheat death but that they could keep the family ranch in the family.
In agriculture circles, Dec. 31, 2010, is being referred to as "Kevorkian Day" — I kid you not. The president and his departing team of advisers are apparently oblivious to such concerns, advocating for such class-based tax increases in 2011.
Mr. Obama needs economic advisers who understand these fundamental truths. Current federal economic policies undermine the small-business entrepreneurs who create jobs. President Obama should replace his departing economic advisers with entrepreneurial-savvy startup business creators, including early-stage private equity experts.
The new team's first assignment should be to adopt tax and regulatory relief; hopefully the debt commission's work will also be useful.
Their second assignment should be a much-needed sit-down with President Obama, soon-to-be Speaker John Boehner and his young guns in the House, and Senate leaders to cut spending and enact bipartisan entitlement reforms, including ObamaCare reform, and replace the administration's "implacable hostility toward free enterprise" with job-focused, entrepreneurial economic policies that will awaken American ingenuity and free the job creators to do what they do best — put millions of their fellow Americans back to work.
That might even evoke kudos from George Will.
