To the Editor:
Now that President Obama’s “Summer of recovery” is over, we hear that the recession ended in June of 2009. Well, bless me, I guess that makes everything just fine.
But, what about the nearly ten percent unemployed? The additional ten percent underemployed or discouraged workforce drop-outs? The record levels of Americans in poverty? The miniscule economic growth rate? The media described President Bush‘s five percent unemployment rate as a disaster. The media describes President Obama’s numbers as the “new normal”.
Unfortunately, if President Obama’s policies are continued, these numbers, and the personal disasters they represent, may be the “new normal”. Few businesses will invest and hire people when they cannot estimate their expenses because of the many unknown costs of President Obama’s agenda, e.g., Obamacare, cap and trade, card check, executive compensation limits, personnel policies, taxation, etc. What business executives will take risks when the government can declare a business “too risky and too important” and just take over the business, dismiss the executives, and wipe out investors as it did with car company investors?
As long as President Obama and the other liberals (or “progressives” as some prefer) smear business executives and investors, create a treacherous economic environment, and…
…threaten to tax away the rewards for risk taking and hard work, then it doesn’t make sense to take the risks of investing and creating jobs.
If you disagree, feel free to start your own business and hire people. Work 12 – 18 hours a day to make your business successful. Deal with unpredictable government actions and new major and petty regulations like creating 1099 forms for every company from which you purchase $600 or more annually. Knowing that most businesses fail in the first year and, if successful, most of your earnings will be taxed away, feel free to put your home, your savings, and your family at risk of total loss.
Faced with the risks and questionable rewards of creating their own businesses, most people want to work for someone else. Despite their own unwillingness to take risks and do whatever work is needed to run a successful business, some people are jealous of those who do.
Some jealous people get a sense of satisfaction by seeing that successful people are stymied in their desires to do well for themselves by serving customers well. But how does hurting businesses and business people help the rest of us who want to buy goods and services or who want a job in a growing successful business?
There is a joke going around the internet, “Recession is when your neighbor loses his job, depression is when you lose your job, and recovery is when Obama loses his job!”
Unfortunately, President Obama has only increased the kinds of liberal (progressive) programs that have driven hundreds of American businesses out of business and driven away millions of good paying American jobs since World War II.
As long as the American people support liberal (Progressive) oppression of business and demonization of business people, then twenty percent un- or under-employed may really be the “new normal”.
However, when the American people wake up and realize that free enterprise, not government, is the goose that laid the golden egg, and that people who run successful businesses should be honored, encouraged, and emulated, then our country can again be an engine of growth and employment that raises the standard of living of all Americans and of people around the world.
