A Department of Business Is None of Obama's Business
Election '12: Eight days before election day, President Obama proposes creating a new "Secretary Of Business" cabinet post. Just what the country needs: Another layer of bureaucracy to hound the private sector.
After assuring the public "the private sector is doing fine," yet facing a strong challenger who's championing the embattled private sector for real, what should our president come up with to bolster his flailing campaign but a hastily cobbled together new plan to create yet another government agency, this time for business.
Seems that with this president all it takes to revive the enfeebled U.S. economy and win votes is yet another new government department to layer on top of all the others. It won't work.
"I've said that I want to consolidate a whole bunch of government agencies. We should have one Secretary of Business, instead of nine different departments that are dealing with things like giving loans to SBA (Small Business Administration) or helping companies with exports," he told MSNBC.
Almost sounds reasonable, but where has the president been these past four years?
He's already got a Secretary of Business in the Department of Commerce. And, say, isn't "commerce" a near-synonym for business?
Whatever that agency does - and its missions are so sprawled out, no one knows for sure - it's no match for the real problems burdening business in the Obama era: tax hikes, political blasts at outsourcing, demonizing individual companies for political purposes, new environmental regulations, uncertainty over health care mandates, a failure to open new markets abroad and government czars who say they'd like to "crucify" oil companies.
Because the reality is the problems troubling U.S. businesses and harming confidence and competitiveness aren't the lack of such agencies, but the fact that government just keeps getting bigger.
Adding another agency to supervise business, no doubt led by some college professor acting as "czar," isn't the answer. Making big government smaller is.
