A few weeks ago, President Obama purported to promise an overhaul of the Federal regulatory regime, pledging to look at bloated and outdated piles of red tape in order to make the tough cuts necessary, in his mind, to stimulate economic growth.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Obama stated, ““Regulations do have costs; often, as a country, we have to make tough decisions about whether those costs are necessary…But what is clear is that we can strike the right balance. We can make our economy stronger and more competitive, while meeting our fundamental responsibilities to one another.”

But as Big Government demonstrated just a few short weeks ago, the progressive left did not respond favorably to the President’s call for balance between public welfare and private-sector growth. Progressive special interest groups have outlined, instead, a plan of attack on Obama’s regulatory agencies, demanding an iron-fisted regulatory regime designed to punish some of the nations most prolific industries. A few short examples:

• Just days before Christmas, the FCC voted in “Net Neutrality,” an unprecedented power grab on par or greater than Obamacare. Under this scheme, the FCC essentially gave itself regulatory power over telecommunications companies, a job it was never intended to do.
• Speaking of Obamacare, contained within it’s own regulatory scheme is a terrifying Medicare reform project called IPAB, the Independent Payment Advisory Board. IPAB consists of 15 unelected officials charged with making drastic cuts to Medicare benefits – cuts that don’t require Congressional approval and can only be reversed by a Congressional supermajority.
• On the education front, it seems that the Department of Education has been relying on the advice of noted short-sellers as it and Congress formulates policy on for-profit colleges. New rules like the “gainful employment” rule threaten to punish students for choosing not to attend favored non-profit schools and universities in favor of career-oriented schools.
• Across the country, the National Labor Relations Board has been threatening legal action against state legislation designed to protect workers from “Card Check” legislation at the behest of the Obama Administration.
• Although the Clean Air Act was never intended to regulate carbon emissions, the EPA is threatening to use it to punish energy-producing industries that it doesn’t like, like biomass, a plan that could cost Americans nearly a million jobs. At the same time, the EPA is revoking permits for clean coal operations, and despite promising to restore oil and gas production in the Gulf, the Obama Administration has failed to issue new drilling permits, resulting in a de-facto moratorium on domestic oil production.

The Republicans have just introduced draft legislation that could force the Obama Administration to live up to it’s promises to investigate regulatory overreach and institute real, job-saving reforms.

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Unemployment jumped to 9.8 percent in a very disappointing November jobs report. Nonfarm payrolls increased by only 39,000 and private jobs expanded by just 50,000. This is way below what the economy needs. Most discouraging, the smaller-business household employment number fell for the second time in a row, down 173,000 in November after a 330,000 drop in October. This is the nineteenth straight month with unemployment above 9 percent.

Now, after the severe financial panic of two years ago, it seems clear that too many tax and regulatory obstacles are blocking satisfactory job creation. And it also seems clear that a number of fresh new incentives will be necessary to spur the kind of prosperity that Americans desire. Following the deep recession, we need shock-therapy, pro-growth, tax-cut and deregulatory incentives.

Post-election, is the Washington war on business really over? Has the war on successful earners and investors truly ended? Is the class war against capital still being waged by the White House?

Will Obama bring senior business people into his inner circle? Are we going to get pro-growth tax reform for individuals and corporations? Are we truly going to limit government spending in order to reduce the onerous budget deficit? Is King Dollar currency stability on the table?

These are all key questions for the economy’s future and the murky unemployment outlook.

Perhaps the only saving grace from the poor jobs report is that it will spur a quick resolution to extend all the Bush tax cuts.

Democrats keep shilly-shallying with all these silly class-warfare amendments, like a $250,000 limit, or a $1 million limit. This has everything to do with left-wing redistributionist social policy and nothing to do with economic growth. The fact is, passing the bill to freeze the tax rates will help business confidence. Why don’t Democrats understand this?

But there’s more.

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On this Thanksgiving holiday, the economy itself might be thankful if Congress would take a machete to the regulations strangling business and job creation.

From transportation to trade, from communications to banking and from telecommunications to technology policy, policy makers of both parties have at times challenged the moral legitimacy  and economic rationality of federal regulatory intervention. For example Democrats helped spearhead transportation deregulation decades ago; both parties rolled back unfunded mandates in the 1990s.

Regulations are frequently anti-competitive and anti-consumer, annually costing consumers hundreds of billions of dollars. The Small Business Administration, in a study by Mark and Nicole Crain, peg today’s cost at $1.7 trillion. Policymakers still largely do not know the full benefits and costs of the regulatory enterprise. Meanwhile, regulatory agencies grow in power and budget; simply look at EPA carbon-dioxide regulation campaign, FCC’s net neutrality hunger, and the rules-to-come from the health care and financial reform bills.

Many reform ideas have been proposed. Strengthening cost-benefit analysis of new regulations, however informative it may sometimes be, is politically unpopular; nor does it actually bring the largely unaccountable regulatory state under any congressional control, so there’s nothing in it for voters to react to.

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By Reps. Marsha Blackburn, Darrell Issa and Peter Roskam:

Last January, President Obama declared, “Jobs must be our number one focus in 2010.”

Since that time, more than 2.5 million Americans have lost their jobs and unemployment stands at 9.6%. Some focus. The President and his Democrat allies in Congress instead chose to unleash a torrent of bills that do anything but create jobs, like the so-called financial services reform bill that didn’t fix the real problem of government meddling in mortgages, and another round of “stimulus” spending that only deepened states’ addiction to Washington bailouts. Last week, Congressional Democrats canceled a vote on tax relief for all Americans until after the November elections, creating more economic uncertainty while delaying private sector job creation.

The primary job killer is the trillion-dollar folly of ObamaCare. The bill hits America’s struggling small businesses and their families with 2,801 pages of new taxes and complicated rules, creating a climate of hyper-regulation and uncertainty that the nation’s most important small business alliance – the National Federation of Independent Businesses –has called “death by a thousand cuts.”

Just a couple of those painful wounds: by 2018, self-employers and small firms will be hit by a $14.3 billion health insurance tax, while a projected $17 billion will be raised by taxing every business-to-business deal over $600. Washington insiders pushing ObamaCare appear to ignore these truths and clearly don’t understand the negative impact the law is already having on entrepreneurs.

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The Senate votes this week on a small business tax-break bill which also contains controversial provisions to boost community-bank loans to small business. That is, Washington wants to “nudge” small banks into making loans that they’d otherwise avoid. Kind of like what the government did with home mortgage lending, with results some party poopers might characterize as catastrophic, but hey, who’s paying attention to things like that anyway.

One tries in vain to argue that the answer to recovery is not to artificially stimulate anything, or to overrule prices and rates in the marketplace; those are signals about underlying realities to heed and allow to play out. But beyond that, we must cut regulations that paralyze business and job creation. The starting point is to inventory all the regulations that impact a small business as it grows, and set about rolling them back.

Below is the rough inventory I’ve compiled, but I’m sure it’s out of date and some things have changed. And this doesn’t even address industry-specific rules (see endnote), themselves desperately in need of reform. And it certainly doesn’t address yet-to-come from the new financial reform and Obamacare legislation. I welcome any additions and subtractions.

FEDERAL WORKPLACE REGULATION IMPOSED ON GROWING BUSINESSES* (Draft—Wayne Crews)

ONE EMPLOYEE

• Fair Labor Standards Act (overtime and minimum wage [27% min. wage increase since 1990])
• Social Security matching and deposits
• Medicare, FICA
• Military Selective Service Act (90 days leave for reservists; rehire discharged veterans)
• Equal Pay Act (no sex discrimination in wages)
• Immigration Reform Act (eligibility must be documented)
• Federal Unemployment Tax Act (unemployment compensation)
• Employee Retirement Income Security Act (standards for pension and benefit plans)
• Occupational Safety and Health Act
• Polygraph Protection Act

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California is facing nearly The Toughest of Times.  We face historically high unemployment, perennial budget crises and more.  Don’t think it could get any worse?  Think again.  If Jerry Brown is elected, in one short stroke, he could deal a potentially crippling blow to the California economy before it gets a chance to get back on its feet.

Even for a committed political observer, volunteer and commentator such as myself, it seems implausible – but true – that the stakes for elections grow with each successive election.  For California, the 2010 gubernatorial election unquestionably could be the most important election ever – and not necessarily for a good reason.  If Jerry Brown is elected, he and his fellow Democrats could deliver a devastating blow to California.

We well know that California’s unemployment rate is above 12%.  We also know that well over 100,000 people are leaving California on a yearly basis.  Beyond that, California faces an exodus of businesses – large and small alike.  So it can be no surprise that state revenues have declined nearly $40 billion over the last three years as a result of the declining taxpayer base.

We also well know why California is having a tougher time than many other states.  In recent years, California is consistently ranked near the bottom of states in which to do business.  According to Joseph Vranich, president of JV Executive Consulting Inc. in Irvine:  “It’s no mystery what causes companies to leave California: High taxes, undue regulation, workers’ comp costs, a legal environment stacked against businesses and lengthy and costly construction permitting requirements.”  Indeed, California finished tied for last in the Country in Forbes’ Overall Tax Burden survey measuring tax burdens and structure.

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The liberal Democrats in New Hampshire have sunk to a new low. They are smearing a private citizen in the press because he opposes the Obama-Pelosi agenda. I’ve never really seen anything like it, but I fear it is emblematic of what will happen to other small business owners who are suffering from Obama’s policies.

Last Thursday I held a press conference in my race for Congress in New Hampshire’s First Congressional District with a gentleman named Alan Silberberg, whose auto dealership was shut down arbitrarily by Chrysler, Obama’s “car czar” and his “Auto Task Force.” The purpose of the press conference was to demonstrate how Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and my Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter’s policies are destroying our economy.

It’s important to know that Alan wasn’t shut down because his business was failing. He was shut down because the government’s policies put his business on the chopping block without transparency and without accountability. To let people know how he felt, Alan painted a sign on his storefront that reads, “This business now closed because of Obama’s economics.”

Folks don’t need to listen to me or to Alan. They can listen to Neil Barofsky the special inspector general for TARP:

The Obama administration’s push to accelerate General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group LLC dealership closings, aimed at helping the companies compete, may not have been necessary and added to unemployment, a U.S. watchdog said.

The Treasury Department should have considered whether speeding up the closings was worth the potential loss of tens of thousands of jobs, according to a report released yesterday by Neil Barofsky, special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The U.S. had rejected reorganization plans from the carmakers in March 2009, in part citing a “slow pace” for GM to scale back its dealer network.

“Such dramatic and accelerated dealership closings may not have been necessary and underscores the need for Treasury to tread very carefully when considering such decisions in the future,” Barofsky concluded.

The report may prompt congressional criticism of the administration’s handling of the automaker bailouts. Lawmakers have already complained about the job losses in their districts from dealership closings and the process by which retailers were selected for shutdowns.

Of course, the Democrats attacked me in the press for having the guts to stand up to Obama’s policies.  I’m a candidate for Congress. I expected it and I can handle it.

But I didn’t expect them to attack Alan.

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After World War II, Cleveland was booming, thanks to its leadership role in heavy industry and a business-friendly climate. Today, the city’s high taxes and onerous regulatory demands make it nearly impossible for new businesses to set up shop while choking the life out of existing companies. While relatively laissez-faire cities such as Houston are growing even during the current recession, Cleveland remains stuck in a rut. How can city officials make the city a more welcoming place for entrepreneurs to thrive?

Reason Saves Cleveland with Drew Carey is written and produced by Paul Feine; camera and editing by Roger Richards and Alex Manning; narrated by Nick Gillespie; music by the Cleveland band Cats on Holiday.

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Showing complete disregard for the free speech rights of small business owners, the City of Dallas bans businesses from putting commercial signs in the upper two-thirds of any window or glass door, and on more than 15 percent of any window or glass door. Only ineffective signs are allowed by the government: tiny signs placed at people’s feet. The law also bans signs that cover more than 25 percent of a building’s façade. Failure to take down the signs means you are at risk to be hit with a fine up to $2,000.

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