Category Archives: Business

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

So Why Aren’t Businesses Hiring?

10 Comments

(Democrat) Steve Wynn explains:

…this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business, and progress and job creation in my lifetime. And I can prove it and I could spend the next three hours giving you examples of all of us in this market place that are frightened to death about all the new regulations, our healthcare costs escalate, regulations coming from left and right. A President that seems, that keeps using that word redistribution. Well, my customers and the companies that provide the vitality for the hospitality and restaurant industry, in the United States of America, they are frightened of this administration. And it makes you slow down and not invest your money. Everybody complains about how much money is on the side in America.

You bet and until we change the tempo and the conversation from Washington, it’s not going to change. And those of us who have business opportunities and the capital to do it are going to sit in fear of the President. And a lot of people don’t want to say that. They’ll say, God, don’t be attacking Obama. Well, this is Obama’s deal and it’s Obama that’s responsible for this fear in America.

The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don’t invest, they’re holding too much money. We haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody’s afraid of the government and there’s no need soft peddling it, it’s the truth. It is the truth. And that’s true of Democratic businessman and Republican businessman, and I am a Democratic businessman and I support Harry Reid. I support Democrats and Republicans. And I’m telling you that the business community in this company is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he’s gone, everybody’s going to be sitting on their thumbs.

Anyone who ever imagined that Barack Obama was a “centrist” was using some pretty exotic drugs.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Why the Democrat Party is doomed:

Like it or not, Obama is not the new FDR, but the new Gorbachev: a man forced to preside over the demise of a political system he desperately wants to save.

Democrat champions in the punditocracy confidently predict that the future of the world’s oldest political party is bright. But in fact, the coalition that is the modern Democratic Party is doomed. Every pillar upholding its heavy roof is crumbling.

If so, it’s not a decade too soon. I hope he’s right.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

“A Chilling Interview”

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With tax cheat Tim Geithner.

If you are for individual liberty, and the American Dream it should be chilling. Shivers went up my spine. Geithner is a character straight out of central casting.

With regard to the debt ceiling, Geithner doesn’t offer up a compromise at all. It’s the administration’s way, or the highway. This means that there is only one way — vote out the Democrats by a significant margin in the House, Senate and get rid of Obama and his very left wing administration in 2012.

He also outright lies about what will get paid and what won’t.

Listen to his words on Dodd-Frank: “Don’t listen to the bankers because their interests aren’t aligned with the American people.” It could be a phrase right out of Atlas Shrugged.

Bankers need a healthy economy to make money. Geithner and Obama want a government directed economy where government de facto owns the banks.

Listen to him talk about the new activist “Consumer Financial Protection Agency” and avowed big government/public sector ownership advocate Elizabeth Warren. Geithner has no faith in the private sector, or the individual. He wants to trample individual rights.

Also, a bonus reference to advocates of limited government and liberty as “anarchists.”

[Update a few minutes later]

Federal expansion — the real issue in the debt-limit debate.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Government Fat Cats

An interview with Iain Murray (my colleague at the Competitive Enterprise Institute) on his new book.

[Update a few minutes later]

An excerpt:

LOPEZ: What do you have against the Consumer Product Safety Commission? Do you like lead in toys?

MURRAY: No, I don’t like lead in toys, but I don’t like people who make toys that have never been anywhere near lead being forced to pay $30,000 to prove that to the CPSC, which gets to almost double its budget to administer these ludicrous requirements. I don’t like the fact that libraries have had to sequester children’s books that were printed before 1985 and may have to burn them. Above all, I don’t like the fact that the people who did put lead in our children’s toys were able to lobby for and win an exemption to the testing requirements. Again, this is an issue where people who like wooden toys — often, in my experience, on the liberal end of the political spectrum — can come together with conservatives to oppose this insanity.

LOPEZ: Is anybody doing this reform right?

MURRAY: People such as Scott Walker in Wisconsin and John Kasich in Ohio have twigged that current conditions are unsustainable and have shown political courage in standing up to the government-sector special interests. It’s been a long fight so far and they may yet lose, but they’re showing the way. At the local level, there are municipalities that have done it right, essentially doing away with their government sector entirely. Sandy Springs in Georgia springs to mind. Some places, such as the Southside Fire Department, also in Georgia, have even worked out how to protect public safety without the bureaucracy.

LOPEZ: Does the Tea Party know this?

MURRAY: The Tea Party understands this can’t go on, but isn’t great when it comes to promoting workable solutions. I’m completely with the Tea Party in terms of motivation, so that’s one of the reasons I wrote the book, to give them some suggestions for workable solutions that can get us from here (Greece) to there (a functioning liberal democracy).

LOPEZ: How much of this is about the New Deal and the Great Society?

MURRAY: The New Deal showed the way, but much of this is more recent. In 1990, we spent $2 trillion in today’s dollars. By 2000 we’d only added $300 billion to that, but in the past decade that’s gone up by a further $1.4 trillion. Moreover, even at the height of the New Deal, FDR recognized that allowing government workers to unionize was asking for trouble.

Read the whole thing.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The President’s Bluff

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James Taranto has some thoughts on the fading/faded powers of Barack Obama:

A lot of people have been making fun of the president for supposedly saying, “Don’t call my bluff,” as if he’s admitting he’s bluffing. That seems to us a bit pedantic. Surely what he meant was something like “Don’t think you can call my bluff.”

What got our attention about this exchange as reported by Cantor is the president’s threat to take his case “to the American people.” Would those be the same American people who aren’t paying attention and don’t understand all this complicated stuff?

This seems to us an empty threat not least because since his election, Obama has a poor track record when it comes to taking his case to the American people–who still overwhelmingly oppose ObamaCare, give him poor marks on the economy, and think the debt limit shouldn’t be raised even though it pretty much has to be. He always ends up wishing he’d done a better job “explaining” his position, which at least sounds more humble than saying the American people don’t get it.

Of course, even if that’s what he meant, he’s still implying (in fact clearly stating) that it’s a bluff. And he’s right.

[Update a few minutes later]

Charles K. — “Call Obama’s bluff.”

[Update a couple minutes later]

Eric Cantor — “This is not a game.”

[Update a while later]

“Sounds like Obama won’t even call his own bluff.”

Business, Education, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

On The Chopping Block

14 Comments

(My CEI colleague) Iain Murray says that part of a budget deal should be to eliminate the Department of Commerce.

It’s not actually the first one I’d go after (I’d get rid of e.g., Education, Labor and Energy first), but I understand the potential appeal. But it does serve many necessary functions that would have to be redistributed elsewhere. For instance, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) wouldn’t find a comfortable home in the State Department, nor would NOAA or the weather service. Granted, the latter is kind of a mess right now, in terms of not getting needed new satellites up (particularly now that we’re headed into the heart of hurricane season), though it’s not clear whether that’s NOAA’s fault, or NASA’s, which actually manages the development of the satellites. Also, giving over the commercial export list to the State Department could make ITAR even more of a disaster than it already is. It would also raise the issue of finding a new home for the Coast Guard (and the Space Guard, if we ever get one).

There is a reason that Commerce has been around a lot longer than the three agencies I mention above as better targets — if it didn’t exist, we’d probably have to invent it in some form. And unlike education, energy, or labor, we actually do have a Commerce Clause in the Constitution (flawed and overstretched though its interpretation has become).

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

High-Speed Rail

…is dead:

Advocates have excoriated opponents to high speed rail, but have shown themselves largely utterly unserious about the enterprise as they have put no focus on overcoming major institutional barriers such as the steam road era thinking of the Federal Railroad Administration which is stuck in the 90s – the 1890s – or the mismanagement at Amtrak. Getting to an HSR system that works is going to involve major reform (or replacement) of those agencies since all proven, international HSR systems are illegal in the US under current rules. Witness here also the histrionics about a Republican proposal to privatize the Northeast Corridor rail operations rather than engage with it as a starting point. Even in Europe and Japan, many HSR operations are private, so there’s no reason they can’t be in the US too.

To be clear, though I myself have been ambivalent about the high speed rail enterprise, I do not consider myself anti-rail in the slightest. I agree that HSR could bring potentially significant benefits, particularly in the Northeast, although it’s a somewhat more speculative enterprise in most parts of the country. This is one on which reasonable people can disagree. But however one feels, getting to the benefits will require a properly designed and operated true high speed system, something few of the current proposals would provide.

It’s time to take a major gut check on high speed rail in America and rethink the direction. Clearly, with the budgetary and political situation, significant future HSR investments are unlikely. Even if some billions materialize, the experience of the stimulus suggests that they will be frittered away as salami slices sent hither and fro.

A better approach might be to take some time to think more clearly about what we want high speed rail to look like in America. It starts with learning from best – and worst – practices abroad, while noting the important differences versus the US. We need to put a proper regulatory regime in place and reform the FRA; to set up a framework for a successful privatization of any system, probably with operations contracted to an international operator with high speed experience; and to jettison any thought of Amtrak as the ultimate HSR system operator.

But all of that would defeat the true purpose of the system. And unfortunately, many of these programs will zombie on, especially in those states that can least afford them (like California) until the real economic tsunami hits. But I think I can already start to see the waters starting to recede…