Last week President Barack Obama invited business leaders to a meeting in the White House to try and allay fears that the economy would move back into a recession if the more than $600 billion in tax increases take effect Jan. 1.
Obama meeting with business leaders? It’s like asking the maintenance person in a hospital to practice brain surgery. It’s already been painfully proven that Obama knows next to nothing about creating jobs, and neither do members of his staff. So what did he possibly talk about?
The usual. According to The New York Times, “Mr. Obama did not present a detailed plan at Wednesday’s meeting or reveal what he would propose in terms of new corporate taxes.” That sounds familiar.
CNNMoney reaffirmed that “Obama’s relationship with business has been strained over his first term thanks to new laws like the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act and Affordable Care Act.” The strain can be seen through the lens of campaign contributions.
A majority of the large companies in the president’s Jobs Council favored Republican candidates over Democrats in the latest election. General Electric’s corporate political action committee gave $258,000 more to Republicans than to Democrats, according to Center for Responsive Politics data cited by CNNMoney.
Remember the Jobs Council that was going to reinvigorate the economy and create millions of jobs? Well, it hasn’t met since January of this year — and nobody has missed it. The Council probably threw up their hands in frustration, like everybody else with ties to business. Federal subsidies and bailouts do not create private-sector jobs, but they do create cronyism.
If you want to get a glimpse into the future of this administration’s policies and its impact on business, there have been several stories that presage a rocky outlook for job creation.
John Metz, who owns some 40 Denny’s restaurants and a few Dairy Queens in Florida, recently told the Huffington Post that his method of dealing with the re-election of Obama and the impending healthcare costs via the Affordable Care Act is to take hours away from his many employees and to add a 5 percent surcharge to customers’ bills. He said it is the only alternative he’s got, and announced because of Obamacare, “we are going to be cutting front-of-the-house employees to under 30 hours, effective immediately.”
Zane Tankel, CEO of Apple-Metro, the New York metropolitan area franchisee for Applebee’s, announced that he would be laying off workers and stop hiring new employees as the Affordable Care Act is implemented.
He is quoted as saying: “We’ve calculated it will cost some millions of dollars across our system. So what does that say — that says we won’t build more restaurants. We won’t hire more people. If you have 40 or 50 employees at a restaurant, and the penalty is $2,000, and you’re going to pay $80,000 or $100,000 penalty, there goes the profit in your restaurant.”
Papa Johns’ CEO John Schnatter reported that he would have to reduce workers hours because of Obamacare. He also stated that some of the cost would be passed on to consumers, with prices going up between 11 and 14 percent.
A Las Vegas business owner fired 22 employees because he feared he could no longer keep up with the costs that would be imposed on his business due to regulations such as Obamacare.
The list goes on and on. From small businesses to large ones and across all industries. Last week during an interview on The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann, I held up eight pages of companies that announced major layoffs since the election and this is just the beginning.
For those who want proof of an economy off the rails and leadership that does not have a clue of where to start to fix it, what more do you need?
What is it going to take for the president to admit that his policies are a mistake? How many more employees will it take to join the 25 million unemployed or underemployed workers in this country? When will this country come together again to do the great things we are capable of?
It seems to me we’re going backward. Instead of creating jobs, we’re losing them.
Countless stories have been told that to cure an addiction or disease, you must hit rock bottom before starting to heal. This is what concerns me most. This country is broken. How many more people must suffer before we find out where the bottom is?
It looks like we are going to find out.
NOV
