Wednesday, November 03, 2010

The post mortems

Richard Cohen on the election........

The consequence has just been written across the electoral map - the loss of the House to the Republicans and the narrowing of the Democratic majority in the Senate. Of course, high unemployment and high economic anxiety played a role..........

This is a popular meme being perpetrated by the left but did it ever occur to anyone that it's because of the excessive laws and regulations on businesses that unemployment and economic anxiety remain high?

Let's take California, who voted yesterday not to suspend their environmental laws. How many businesses do you think will be locating there anytime soon?

But hey, don't ask me, ask a CEO who makes the decision to locate plants. From a post in August.........

Since an unusually sharp downturn accelerated in late 2008, the Obama administration and its allies in the U.S. Congress have enacted trillions in deficit spending they say will create an economic stimulus -- but have not extended the Bush tax cuts and have pushed to levy extensive new health care and carbon regulations on businesses.

"They're in a 'Do' loop right now trying to figure out what the answer is," Otellini said.

As a result, he said, "every business in America has a list of more variables than I've ever seen in my career." If variables like capital gains taxes and the R&D tax credit are resolved correctly, jobs will stay here, but if politicians make decisions "the wrong way, people will not invest in the United States. They'll invest elsewhere."

Take factories. "I can tell you definitively that it costs $1 billion more per factory for me to build, equip, and operate a semiconductor manufacturing facility in the United States," Otellini said.

The rub: Ninety percent of that additional cost of a $4 billion factory is not labor but the cost to comply with taxes and regulations that other nations don't impose. (Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers elaborated on this in an interview with CNET, saying the problem is not higher U.S. wages but anti-business laws: "The killer factor in California for a manufacturer to create, say, a thousand blue-collar jobs is a hostile government that doesn't want you there and demonstrates it in thousands of ways.")


Instead of looking down on the masses claiming they don't understand, maybe they could consider how their governance impacts the state of our economy.

But that would require a good dose of humility, the leading characteristic you won't find in a liberal.

Commerce, Commerce, Commerce

Without it you just have an economy of sharecroppers.

More.....

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