Let the next crisis go to waste

After talking with a number of clients this past week, I think we can now attach the adjective "malaise" to the business community.

It's not so much the current situation but the long term prospects of having employees in this country.

Nearly every priority with our current president and congress involves making it more and more expensive to hire employees. Just yesterday, one of my clients brought in his workers comp statement for a tree cutting operation. Granted tree cutting is a very dangerous job and this particular employer does have a claim in the past five years, which precludes him from getting a group rating (that's Ohio workers comp jibberish). None the less, his rate went up to 70%. That means for the cutter he pays $25.00/hr, he has to ante up another $18.00 just for workers comp. With FICA match, he's already into an employee for $45.00 an hour before you even consider benefits.

Let's say you start a tree cutting business today. Your worker's comp rate in Ohio starts at 50%. I'd like to see any liberal make that work.

But hey don't just take my word for it. Take the word of a liberal regarding our current economic malaise...........

Rather than acting as a prudent guardian of the public good in a time of economic turbulence and hardship, Obama and the Democratic Congress have hurried to check the boxes on their partisan wish list precisely when the nation most needed a restorative break from transformative ambition.

It’s not as though the administration doesn’t understand the vital importance of stability. Consider a recent comment from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. "[B]usinesses want certainty," Geithner said. "They need certainty so they can make long-term plans today. And that’s why it’s so important that Congress gets health care behind us, that we bring financial reform in place so people know what the rules of the game are."

Geithner is right that business needs certainty about the rules of the game in order to make long-term plans. And the government probably did need to step in to the financial sector once it started to implode. But every other marquee initiative introduced by the Obama administration has hampered economic recovery by casting the future of the economy even further into doubt. To have waited for the economy to stabilize would have been to let a serious crisis go to waste.

Geithner makes it sound as if a debate over the health-care system -- a debate over the structure of the institutions that now account for one sixth of all spending in the economy -- simply fell from the sky and needs to be resolved ASAP in to restore clarity about the economic rules of the game. But added uncertainty about the nature of the health-care system was consciously introduced by Obama and congressional Democrats during the worst downturn since the Great Depression.

And that’s not all. The administration didn’t need to nationalize GM, the country’s largest automaker, but it did it anyway. Existing law was up to the task of efficiently dissolving failed corporations, without adding another dangerous too-big-to-fail bailout precedent. How about the ongoing attempt to empower labor unions, and thereby to alter the relationship between employers and employees, by abolishing secret ballots in workplace votes over unionization? Is a high tide of unemployment the right time to fight that fight? Legislation to install a cap and trade carbon trading system -- a system meant to reach into every corner of the economy -- certainly didn’t need to be introduced during a profound recession, but Democrats insisted on it anyway. One might think that at least the stimulus legislation was called for by circumstance, but it certainly didn’t have to take the form of a porktastic carnival of government spending, from $4 billion to shore up California’s state budget to $1.5 million for a new golf course club house in Roseville, Minnesota .

It is totally predictable that an attempt to get the maximum political mileage and the most far-reaching structural changes from an economic crisis would chill new investment and encourage a wary, wait-and-see attitude among the entrepreneurs and businesspeople who keep the economy moving. That the administration chose to go for the political gusto anyway reveals an all-too-familiar set of warped priorities.

This is what I find most curious. If now is a bad time to introduce some of this stuff because it stagnates employment in bad times, what make someone think there is actually a good time to introduce this crap?

Read the whole thing............