Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Denial: Not Just a River in Africa…

The Weekly Standard has posted a revealing exchange from one of the President’s local television interviews yesterday.  A reporter noted that one business “very specifically said” that their decision to “close up shop…was a direct result of the health care” bill Obama signed into law.  In response, the President answered that a firm being harmed by Obamacare is “kind of hard to explain,” because small businesses “probably wouldn’t have been impacted” by Obamacare.  He went on to claim that despite “a perception sometimes that there’s all kinds of regulations coming out of Washington, the truth is actually we’ve seen fewer regulations coming out of my Administration than the previous Administration.”

The problem is, it’s not just a perception that there are all kinds of regulations coming out of Washington – there ARE that many regulations.  The Federal Register has been filled with over 12,000 pages of regulations and notices related to Obamacare in the law’s first two years alone.  And non-partisan experts have recognized that these regulations, and the 2700-page law they are designed to implement, have had a major effect on job creators:

  • Analysts at UBS have stated that Obamacare is “arguably the biggest impediment to hiring, particularly hiring of less skilled workers;”
  • The CEO of the Carl’s Jr. restaurant chain has said that Obamacare will reduce hiring within his firm, and that “employers everywhere will be looking to reduce labor content in their business models as Obamacare makes employees unambiguously more expenseive.”
  • And the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta has said that he has “frequently heard strong comments to the effect of ‘my company won’t hire a single additional worker until we know what health insurance costs are going to be.’”

President Obama may think the economy is doing fine thanks to Obamacare, but America’s job creators know that their firms are NOT doing fine because of it.