‘Obama hates business’ is an idiotic distraction. Also: It’s wrong.
By Jared Bernstein
As an economist who’s mixed it up in the D.C. hurly-burly for decades by now, I’m pretty inured to the foolishness you read on a daily basis. So when something tweaks my outrage sensors, I tend to perk up and pay attention. What’s gnawing at me is this throwaway line in an editorial from the Economist about the very real problem of slower macroeconomic growth. In reference to an alleged spate of “anticompetitive regulations,” the magazine labeled President Obama “…the least business-friendly president for decades.”
It’s a silly, thoughtless thing to write, with little substantiation in the piece beyond red-meat talking points about “the endless sprawl of job-destroying regulations,” a line that makes sense at a Tea Party party, not a supposed piece of economic analysis.
It’s not worth picking apart some random op-ed (if you start shooting anything that moves in that jungle, you’ll never stop), but it is worth diving into this claim about the president being so mean to business. This is a real, and pervasive, theme: that policies under this president have been demonstrably bad for business. And if it’s true, then maybe in the name of stronger growth the president should back off when it comes to implementing the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank financial market reform. If it’s false, he shouldn’t.
Before getting into the metrics, let’s be clear: I’m not arguing that businesses do or should love everything Obama has done, including the two (congressionally passed) laws mentioned above. I’m asking the much more direct question: has the Obama presidency been bad for businesses’ bottom line?
No. Actually, hell no.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/07/21/obamas-alleged-unfriendliness-to-businesses-is-a-big-foolish-distraction-and-its-also-wrong/
