If you haven’t believed me, take it from Intel CEO Paul Otelini. Or Carly Fiorina. Or Of course, Otelini’s credibility is a little low right now after he blew $7.7B on the purchase of McAfee at a huge premium. But we’ll ignore that for now.
He’s right about America’s business-unfriendly policies and that Obama is making them worse. This is important stuff – once the jobs are gone, it’s really hard to get them back.
Regarding current economic policy, Otellini said, “I think this group does not understand what it takes to create jobs. And I think they’re flummoxed by their experiment in Keynesian economics not working.â€
It’s curious that the people you quote are both suspect business people. By your own words Otelini just made a $7.7B boo boo and Carly Fiorina was run out of HP.
It’s hardly fair to call Otelini “suspect” just because I chided him about the McAfee acquisition -he’s certainly done a lot for Intel over the last 25 years. It’s also unfair to call Fiorina “suspect”. She ran HP in the post-dot-com-boom, and the board decided to hire someone else. That doesn’t make her unqualified.
Ask yourself why we have a jobs problem in America. Businesses are sitting on top of hoards of cash right now. Why won’t they hire? They’re fiscally conservative because Obama’s administration holds them in fear. Businesses don’t know how much medical care will cost tomorrow, they don’t know how much taxes are going to be raised by Obama (but everyone believes they’re going up!), and they don’t know what will happen with international labor policy. These are all uncertainties created by Obama which prevent job growth. The reason we’re not recovering is because Obama’s Keynesian approach is about spending cash, not removing uncertainties which will help business grow.
Even at the small business scale, this is an issue. In a small business (say <10 people), hiring even one person is significant. But what if you make that hire, and then next year Obama increases your personnel costs by 10% with mandatory health insurance for your employees? Well, now you're looking at layoffs. Net result: businesses aren't hiring.
But Otelini and Fiorina are really talking about long term effects. If you continue this practice of over-legislated, over-regulated, over-taxed and costly labor policies, businesses just move out of the country to countries offering more favorable climates. This isn't an American economy anymore - this is a world economy. And Obama is practically pushing businesses out. (Will he be sad when Exxon leaves and takes its $40B in tax revenues with it?)