Only 26 percent of the public approves of
President Obama's handling of the economy
in the latest Gallup poll, conducted Aug.
11-14, while a whopping 71 percent said
they disapproved.
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The public's growing dissatisfaction shouldn't be
surprising. Going back to 1890, reports the National
Bureau of Economic Research, the only U.S. president with a worse record than Obama in job creation in
his first two and a half years in office, measured in
terms of percentage change, was Herbert Hoover, presiding over the emergence of the Great Depression.
"Official unemployment is 9.1 percent," stated a New
York Times editorial on August 15, decrying the nation's
jobs picture, "but it would be 16.1 percent, or 25.1
million people, if it included those who can only find
part-time jobs and those who have given up looking for
work."
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First, by the government's own numbers, small
businesses have created 64 percent of the net new
jobs in the U.S. economy over the past 15 years.
In fact, that understates the role of small business,
since the vast majority of America's medium-sized and
large businesses began as small businesses. The Heinz
corporation began when 16-year-old Henry Heinz grated
piles of horseradish at home, using his mother's recipe,
and sold the bottled product door-to-door out of a
wheelbarrow in the small Pittsburgh working class
neighborhood of Sharpsburg.
Second, 39 percent of small business owners said
in a Chamber of Commerce survey in July that the
Obamacare health care law was either their greatest
or second-greatest obstacle to new hiring.
The President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta,
Dennis Lockhart, concurs, stating that "prominent"
among the obstacles to hiring is the "lack of clarity
about the cost implications" of Obamacare.
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Additionally, 84 percent of small business owners in
the Chamber survey said the economy is on the wrong
track, 79 percent view the current regulatory
environment as unreasonable, and 79 percent
believe Washington should get out of the way of
small business, rather than offering a helping hand
(14 percent).
Instead, employment at the federal regulatory agencies
jumped 13 percent since President Obama took office,
while private sector jobs shrank by 5.6 percent,
reported Investor's Business Daily recently.
Similarly, the Heritage Foundation reports that the
Obama administration imposed new regulatory rules in
its first 26 months in office that will cost the private
sector $40 billion. In July alone, reports Sen. John
Barrasso, federal regulators imposed a total of 379
new rules that will impose some $9.5 billion in new
costs.
