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Townhall...
Obama
and Irene: Category Four Forces
of Destruction
By Hugh Hewitt
8/26/2011
“I
hope,” I told Stuart Varney on his
excellent Fox Business Network program yesterday, “that President Obama
watches
the preparations for Hurricane Irene closely.”
“People
are battening down their
hatches, boarding up their houses or simply fleeing and they are right
to do
so. The storm might not hit them but if it does, they will wish they
had
prepared for it.”
“President
Obama’s economic policies
are to the private sector as Irene is to the East Coast, a vast
swirling
destructive force,” I continued. “Small businesses are fleeing the path
of
Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, the NLRB, the EPA, the prospect of much higher
taxes.”
“They
are pulling in their hiring, and
capital is hiding and some of it is fleeing off shore.”
I
reused the analogy on my radio
program an hour later and it worked again with the audience. It truly
explains
what has happened tour economy. It tells us who killed “the recovery?”
President
Obama did, as surely as
Casey Anthony killed her daughter and O.J. Simpson his wife and Ron
Goldman.
Sure, some stupid, willfully blind or self-interested people will deny
these
cause-and-effect connections, but denial by a few doesn’t change the
facts,
even if those few include the entire op-ed page of the New York Times.
Amity
Shlaes called it in her amazing
book The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. Economic
downturns worsen and go into prolonged mode when political leadership
takes the
business cycle and endlessly complicates it by changing rules and
infusing
uncertainty into every business decision.
Swirling
sets of rules and new sheets
of regulations are dizzying in their impact. “What does Obamacare
require of me?”
asks an employer. No one can really tell him, so he refuses to add to
the
workforce unable to calculate the costs involved.
A
corporation wants to open a new
manufacturing plant in a right-to-work state but sees Team Obama’s
attack on
Boeing’s new plant in South Carolina and decides, at least for this
year, to
wait and see how the radicals at the NLRB punish the aircraft company
before
pressing on.
A
hedge fund can invest in a start –up
in booming though besieged Israel or in a new venture in flat and
gloomy USA.
It is a tough call. What piece of the pie will the federal government
demand?
And
should the young couple who can
afford a house with the real cost calculated with the home mortgage
interest
deduction or should they look to the future and assume that the tax
farmers are
coming for that particular deduction with a fury?
“With
Hurricane Irene threatening a
full-force hit,” The New York Times reported today, “New York City on
Thursday
ordered the evacuation of nursing homes and senior centers in low-lying
areas
and made plans for the possible shutdown of the entire transit system.”
Prudent.
Very prudent. Get the old and
the infirm to high ground and limit the exposure that a flooded subway
system
could bring.
It
is what markets and banks are doing
vis-à-vis the national economy, scuttling to high ground, protecting
what they
have and watching for signs that the storm has passed or won’t hit them.
When
markets conclude that either Mitt
Romney or Rick Perry will bring the economic circus to an end and
restore the
private sector to the preferred position it has enjoyed since the
founding of
the Republic, then markets will begin to unlock and businesses to
expand.
When
the seemingly endless series of
self-promoting and self-pitying (“a run of bad luck”) presidential
speeches in
fact comes to an end in January, 2013, then capital and capitalists
will return
in full force and employment will rise.
But
until this storm of economic
ignorance and Alinskyite fury passes, expect nothing because the smart
money
knows there’s still a big chance of a big blow again.
Read
it at Townhall
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