Small businesses across the country, struggling today just to survive let alone expand, were joined over the weekend by some very big guns in business; Steve Wynn of Las Vegas and Bernie Marcus, founder of the formidable Home Depot chain came out swinging formerly http://frontpagemag.com/2011/07/25/debt-ceiling-deadlock/ against the Obama administration’s anti-business ideology;
Marcus made his feelings known in an interview with Investor’s Business Daily. Asked what the single biggest impediment to job growth was today, Mr. Marcus was blunt. “The U.S. government,” he answered. “Having built a small business into a big one, I can tell you that today the impediments that the government imposes are impossible to deal with. Home Depot would never have succeeded if we’d tried to start it today. Every day you see rules and regulations from a group of Washington bureaucrats who know nothing about running a business. And I mean every day. It’s become stifling.”
And lest anyone thinks Mr. Marcus was referring strictly to large corporations, he made it clear that he was not. “If you’re a small businessman, the only way to deal with it is to work harder, put in more hours, and let people go. When you consider that something like 70% of the American people work for small businesses, you are talking about a big economic impact,” he said. He further noted that while the president’s speeches are “wonderful,” his actual results are “incredibly bad,” and that even as the president speaks about cutting regulations, “they are now producing thousands of pages of new ones. With just ObamaCare by itself, you have a 2,000 page bill that’s probably going to end up being 150,000 pages of regulations,” warned Marcus.
Steve Wynn, speaking July 18 at the Q&A portion of an earnings conference call formerly/http://seekingalpha.com/?part=qanda#article/279999-wynn-resorts-ceo-discusses-q2-2011-results-earnings-call-transcript/, knocked Obama for a lack of leadership;
I believe in Las Vegas. I think its best days are ahead of it, but I’m afraid to do anything in the current political environment in the United States. You watch television and see what is going on on this debt ceiling issue and what I consider to be a total lack of leadership from the President, and nothing is going to get fixed until the President himself steps up and wrangles both parties in Congress.
He went on to describe the climate of fear holding business back thanks to Obama’s scorched-earth policies;
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 is 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 say, oh God, don’t be attacking Obama.
Well, this is Obama’s deal. And it is Obama that is 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 are holding too much money.
You know, we haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody is afraid of the government and there is no need soft-pedaling it. It is the truth. It is the truth.
What the liberal elite at the Washington Post like to call Wynn’s “Silly Tirade” is in fact an accurate description of what smaller voiceless business people really feel; afraid.
An author at WaPo who’s never met a payroll, or never had to look a person with a family in the eye and lay them off MIGHT be excused for calling Wynn’s remarks “silly”. Although you could call that writer “ignorant”, and worse.
The simple fact is, Obama’s administration has today, either stupidly or willfully, paralyzed the US economy; he may try to call it a “Jobless Recovery”, and pin the blame on businesses who “refuse to hire”, but the stubborn facts remain. Private business is what drives the US economy, not government. You can’t force businesses to hire people, you have to create conditions where businesses have to hire to keep up with demand. He either doesn’t get that concept, or he has reasons he wants the US on the ropes. I’m inclined to believe the latter, but either way things aren’t going to ever get better as long as Obama is President.
Call that “silly”? I call it “reality”.
