Former Obama Kool-Aid drinker, magazine editor, publisher, and real estate billionaire Mort Zuckerman blasted Barack Obama’s continued demonizing of the business sector in today’s editorial at US News & World Report.
US News reported:
The unique danger today is the possibility that we may face longer-term stagnation as a consequence of relying too heavily on borrowed money. When the housing and credit bubbles burst in 2007 and 2008, the unemployment rate soared to double digits and caused a cascade of shock throughout the credit markets and the banking system. Washington’s ability to initiate a resurgence is now limited by the long-term dangers of our deficits and our debts.
But one unfortunate pattern that has emerged in the last 18 months is to lay all the blame for our difficulties only on the business community and the financial world. This quite ignores the role of Congress in many areas, but most glaringly in forcing Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Administration to back loans to people who could not afford them. And not to mention the role of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which in 2004 sanctioned higher levels of leverage for financial firms, from 12 times equity to over 30 times equity.
This predilection to blame business is manifest in the unnecessary and provocative anti-business sentiment revealed by President Obama in a recent speech that was supposed to be seeking the support of the business community for a doubling of exports over the next five years.
…It’s not just the rhetoric that undermines the confidence the business community needs to find if it is to invest. Consider the new generation of regulatory rules, increased bureaucracy, and higher taxes created by the Obama administration. For example, the new financial regulation bill includes nearly 500 “rule-makings,” studies, and reports, compared with just 14 in total for the controversial Sarbanes-Oxley bill, passed after the financial scandals of Enron and WorldCom. The disillusionment has spread to the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), which represents small businesses that normally account
for roughly 60 percent of job creation.The chief economist of the NFIB, William Dunkelberg, put it clearly: Small business owners “do not trust the economic policies in place or proposed.” He also said, “The U.S. economy faces hurricane force headwinds and the government is at the center of the storm, making an economic recovery very difficult.”
Our economic Katrina, in short.
What exactly did these people expect from a community organizer who considered a Marxist to be his spiritual mentor?
