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Economist Paul Rubin: Obama Is Killing Small Business

Wednesday, 01 August 2012 08:07 AM EDT

The Obama administration’s regulatory burdens are killing small businesses right and left, according to Paul Rubin, a professor of economics at Emory University.

“[B]usiness is certainly not getting ‘a climate that helps us grow’ from the current administration,” Rubin writes in The Wall Street Journal. “That administration has instead created a hostile climate through its regulatory policies.”

There are reports almost daily regarding new regulatory burdens, notes Rubin.

Editor's Note: Obama Donor Banned This Video But You Can Watch it Here

Indeed, according to a March analysis by the Heritage Foundation titled Red Tape Rising, during its first three years, the Obama administration adopted 106 major regulations, defined as those with costs of more than $100 million, that added more than $46 billion in new costs per year compared with 28 such regulations in the George W. Bush administration.

“Heritage notes that there are 144 more such major regulations in the pipeline,” says Rubin.

President Barack Obama says that government sets the state for the creation of business by providing infrastructure for the economy to operate.

In mid-July, he said at a campaign stop in Roanoke, Va., “If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. … I’m always struck by people who think it must be because I was so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there.”

Another common thought is that “it must be because I worked harder than everybody else,” Obama said. “If you have a business, you didn’t build that, somebody else made that happen.”

However, Rubin points to a major example of government investment that is not helpful for businesses — roads and bridges.

“A transportation system needs roads, but it also needs gasoline,” Rubin says. “This administration’s policies — its refusal to allow a private company to build the Keystone XL pipeline, its reduction in permits for offshore drilling and increased Environmental Protection Agency regulation of pollutants — retard the production of gasoline.

“If transportation is an important input from government to creating a favorable climate for business, shouldn’t we be encouraging, not discouraging, gasoline production?”

Moreover, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, signed by Obama, makes raising capital and investing more difficult.

“Since many regulations needed to implement this law have not even been written, business cannot know how to adapt to them,” Rubin points out. “This increases uncertainty and so reduces incentives for investment.”

Add to that an increased minimum wage signed into law at the beginning of Obama’s administration that discourages hiring of entry-level workers, the uncertainty regarding future labor costs unleashed by Obamacare and pro-union decisions by Obama appointees at the National Labor Relations Board and you have a climate that simply will not help the economy grow.

Editor's Note: Obama Donor Banned This Video But You Can Watch it Here




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