Saturday, July 10, 2010

Obama's Business Supporters Regretting Their Choice

from the DAILY CALLER:
  Lack of jobs increasingly blamed on uncertainty created by Obama's policies

There is one word being mentioned by business leaders and economists
more frequently when the conversation turns to why jobs are not
returning more quickly to the U.S. economy: uncertainty.

“By reaching into virtually every sector of economic life, government
is injecting uncertainty into the marketplace and making it harder to
raise capital and create new businesses,” said Verizon CEO Ivan
Seidenberg at a
speech
in Washington in late June.

Federal Reserve Governor Kevin Warsh said in a
recent speech
in Atlanta: “Owing to a less-than-assured economic
outlook and broad uncertainty about public policy, employers appear
quite reluctant to add to payrolls.”

Roberton Williams, senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, said in an
interview, “The whole tax situation is very much in flux, very
uncertain. It makes it hard to plan.”

“It’s clear that firms are not yet hiring. A lot of them are sitting
on big bundles of cash,” Williams said, citing the examples of Google
and Apple, which are both hoarding
about $30 billion in cash
instead of investing it or using it to
expand.

Seidenberg’s comments last month were a significant political moment.
The Verizon CEO has been one of President Obama’s strongest allies in
the business community, and as president of the 170-member Business
Roundtable, he had tried to cooperate with the Obama administration on
its trademark agenda items – health care, financial reform and energy
legislation.

But, Seidenberg said he was “troubled” by Obama’s agenda, so much so
that he had “reached a point where the negative effects of these
policies are simply too significant to ignore.”












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