Scott,To me your conclusion is rational. Businesses are feeling cowed by a hostile and intimidating government that threatens them with more regulations and compliance issues while attempting to increase their taxes in the near future...then having the audacity to browbeat them for not adding more workers. Small businesses are hunkering down and maybe taking on a temp or contracting out specific jobs but avoiding permanent comittments like the plague. Large multinationals are looking at projects and concluding it can be done elsewhere where their investment is appreciated or are so uncertain that it is being deferred. "Money goes where its wanted and stays where its well treated" (Walter Wriston former chairman of Citibank). Somehow I don't sense money is 'well treated' by this government...Paul Otellini (CEO Intel) doesn't think so either: "at one point no country was more attractive for startup capital (than the USA). That is no longer the case." If America's ruling class continues down this road "people will not invest in the United States..they will go elsewhere."'Jobs' are job 1? "I think this group does not understand what it takes to create jobs." continues Otellini. "I can tell you definitively that it costs $1 BILLION (yes, BILLION..emphasis mine) more per factory for me to build, equip, and operate a semiconductor manufacturing facility in the US". He added that 90% of that added cost is due to taxes and regulations that other countries don't have. 'Jobs' are job 1? People are employed by businesses. If you want more jobs, cultivate your businesses. So simple...and this government is so clueless.
Add to the regulatory burden a military-foreign policy-VA complex that now sucks $1 trillion a year out of the jobs- and wealth-creating private sector, and relentlessly gets bigger and more expensive every year--even the collapse of the one adversay of weight, the Soviet Union, only slowed its growth for a while. Military outlays (in real terms) have doubled in the last 10 years. Now we fight few punk-terrorists who hide in mountains and use homemade bombs. But the expense to productive U.S. taxpayers gets gets bigger every year.
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