How to throttle small business

By Thomas Lifson

Uncertainty over health care costs is preventing small businesses from adding jobs, part of the reason for the so-called jobless recovery, said by some to be underway. Gary Fields paints a compelling picture of the worries and doubts faced by small businesses, in the Wall Street Journal. One employer:

... cut overtime for many of his 150 employees in anticipation of facing fresh health-care costs. He's worried about getting hit by higher taxes next year, which would cut into income to pay for expansion, raises, bonuses, new product lines and delivery trucks.

It is always safer to postpone spending, in the face of uncertain demands:

"No question, this is a tough issue for a lot of these companies," said David Wyss, chief economist at ratings firm Standard & Poor's. "It's all anecdotal, and it affects everybody differently, but the one common factor is people postpone decisions, and I'm afraid that's going to slow us down coming out of the recession."

Richard Baehr writes:

Obama and his team do not understand how businesses operate. They will destroy risk taking by small business and entrepreneurs, except those washed with federal money.

Ed Lasky writes:

Obama has routinely castigated and demonized free enterprise, and has issued one executive order after another that makes it difficult to run a business. ObamaCare threatens to make every employee additionally expensive beyond his or her salary, and also places union leaders/radicals in key positions of power. There is going to be a big problem motivating small businesses to hire and expand.

What is Obama's political tactic to deal with this self-created problem? Expand the SBA loan program, despite a long history of defaults and fraud problems. Throwing our money over the transom to buy support.

It is going to be a lot harder to start a new business, if the tax, regulatory, and health care burdens become more onerous. Future entrepreneurship will be stifled, leaving more and more people dependent on the government, especially as the federal takeover of large scale enterprise continues.

Strangle capitalism, and all that remains is the state, Or, as Barney Frank put it: "We are trying on every front to increase the role of government." (video-hat tip: Ed Lasky)

As they know so well in Chicago, if you take the other guy out of the race, you win.