Sometimes Saying What You Really Think Is Not A Good Idea

Every time President Obama gets off the teleprompter, he gets into trouble. The most recent example of this is the statement, “If you got a business, you didn’t build that; somebody else made that happen.” That is an affront to every American who has worked 60-hour weeks to build a business to support his (or her) family.

Here are some figures from the U. S. Small Business Administration website:

Small firms:
•    Represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms.
•    Employ half of all private sector employees.
•    Pay 44 percent of total U.S. private payroll.
•    Generated 65 percent of net new jobs over the past 17 years.
•    Create more than half of the nonfarm private GDP.
•    Hire 43 percent of high tech workers ( scientists, engineers, computer programmers, and others).
•    Are 52 percent home-based and 2 percent franchises.
•    Made up 97.5 percent of all identified exporters and produced 31 percent of export value in FY 2008.
•    Produce 13 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms.

These are also the businesses that will be hit the hardest if the “Bush tax cuts for the rich” are allowed to expire. Just for the record, most small business owners are not rich.

An article at Power LIne compares President Obama’s recent gaffe about small business to President Ford’s comments about Poland during the 1976 debates. The article concludes:

Okay—let’s have that debate, and ask what business needs from government today.  Not high-speed rail in California (or anywhere else), investments in “green energy,” massive regulatory uncertainty from the EPA and Dodd-Frank, a health care law expanding by the day as the regulators figure it out, massive financial uncertainty from taxes set to explode in January, and a permit-process-from-hell to build anything bigger than an outhouse.  That’s just for starters.  I note that Obama hasn’t even met with his highly touted Jobs Council for more than six months now, which shows how unserious he is about all of this.  Bring it on.

I agree.