Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Steve Wynn, Dem businessman from Vegas has strong words for the administration.
… And I’m saying it bluntly, that this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business, and progress and job creation in my lifetime. And I can prove it and I could spend the next 3 hours giving you examples of all of us in this market place that are frightened to death about all the new regulations, our healthcare costs escalate, regulations coming from left and right. A President that seems, that keeps using that word redistribution. Well, my customers and the companies that provide the vitality for the hospitality and restaurant industry, in the United States of America, they are frightened of this administration.And it makes you slow down and not invest your money. Everybody complains about how much money is on the side in America.
You bet and until we change the tempo and the conversation from Washington, it’s not going to change. ..
Editors at Investor’s Business Daily say Wynn is not alone.
… In such a climate, it’s no surprise that executive outbursts are erupting like lava from scorched earth. Wynn’s remarks echo those on a lengthening list of CEOs including:
• 3M’s George Buckley, who blasted Obama last February as anti-business. “We know what his instincts are,” Buckley said. “We’ve got a real choice between manufacturing in Canada or Mexico — which tends to be more pro-business — and America,” he told the Financial Times.
• Boeing’s Jim McNerney, who in the Wall Street Journal last May called Obama’s handpicked National Labor Relations Board’s suit against his company a “fundamental assault on the capitalist principles that have sustained America’s competitiveness since it became the world’s largest economy nearly 140 years ago.”
• Intel’s Paul Otellini, who told CNET last August that the U.S. legal environment has become so hostile to business that there is likely to be “an inevitable erosion and shift of wealth, much like we’re seeing today in Europe — this is the bitter truth.”
• Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, who observed to radio host Hugh Hewitt last month that Obama “never had to make payroll,” that “nobody has ever created a job in this administration” and that the president is “surrounded by college professors.” …
John Tamny says there is a real cost to our economy when there are fewer start-ups.
… First up is the loss of innovation that results from reduced startups. Though Reaganomics is 30 years old, Bartlett made a point that likely remains true today that “the largest proportion of important new inventions are still the result of individuals working virtually alone, rather than by big corporate laboratories.”
At first glance we can see that a reduction in the formation of companies formed in the proverbial garage means less exciting inventions down the line. Reduced startups mean less innovation. Simple as that.
Sarbanes-Oxley also comes to mind here in that an ill-conceived law that turned public company CEOs into accountants has surely poured gasoline on the above fire. To put it very simply, Sarbanes-Oxley has made going public far less attractive to smaller, innovative companies lacking the infrastructure to comply with the law.
As a result, some have chosen to be purchased by larger companies over floating their shares to investors. Given a first pass we can see that what we’ve all lost here is the ability to put our savings into exciting companies, only to watch them hopefully grow.
Secondly, big companies, by virtue of being large, are more bureaucratic, and they’re understandably more careful given how much they stand to lose if they fund egregious errors. So in swallowing existing startups that are less eager to navigate the jungle of being public, we as individuals lose for the larger acquirers to varying degrees snuffing out the risky dynamism that characterizes startups, along with startups that eventually go public. …
Harvard econ prof says Boeing is right to take flight from high cost locales. His article was in Bloomberg.
Americans, and their companies, have long benefited from their freedom to move throughout our country.
In the 19th century, we moved in search of natural resources, exchanging the stony soil of New England for the rich soil of Iowa. In the 20th century, Americans were more likely to migrate in search of better political environments, like the blacks who fled the Jim Crow states of the South.
The profound role that mobility has played in our country, enabling repeated reinvention, causes me to be deeply worried about the possibility that a National Labor Relations Board complaint will prevent Boeing Co. (BA) from moving plane production from Washington state to South Carolina.
I am an economist, not a lawyer, and I have nothing to say about the legal issues surrounding the NLRB’s complaint. I am sure the NLRB is doing what it understands to be its legal duty, preventing retaliation against union activity.
Yet I also dearly hope that the judicial process will affirm the right of companies, and people, to freely choose their locations. The U.S. economy — especially our challenged manufacturing sector — needs more, not less, freedom to adapt and innovate.
The story of America is one of constant geographic movement. In 1816, before DeWitt Clinton had dug his ditch, it cost as much to move goods 30 miles over land as it did to ship them across the Atlantic, and Americans remained tethered to the Eastern Seaboard. …
John Podhoretz says relax on the polls.
The big news Wednesday in Washington was a Washington Post-NBC News poll that shows both a pox on all your houses attitude toward the president and Democrats and Republicans on the handling of the debt issue, but a particular shadow over Republicans because while 58 percent of respondents said Obama was being inflexible in negotiations, 77 percent of them said Republicans were. Also startling is the fact that those who identify themselves as Republicans say Republican lawmakers are being too intransigent–and that 46 percent of Republicans say they believe a mix of tax cuts and spending cuts is the way to go, basically in a statistical tie with the 50 percent who say spending cuts only.
Such a poll is a dagger in the heart of the rejectionist stance of the Tea Partiers in Congress, no? No, actually. Why? Because this is a poll of adults. Not registered voters. Not likely voters. Adults. As a practical matter, a politician judges the danger to himself from a political stand based on how actual voters will respond. In this case, the poll offers no guide to that. Turnout in the 2010 midterm election that brought 63 new Republicans to the House was 41 percent of registered voters. Registered voters make up 61 percent of all adults. Therefore, the actual constituents to whom Republican House members must respond constitute something like 20 percent of the universe of adults who make up the respondents of this poll.
There are two reasons to do a poll of adults only on a complex matter involving Congress in a non-election year. One is cost; it is more expensive to do a rigorous poll of registered or even likely voters. The other is to skew the debate. I report. You decide.
Washington Post reviews a biography of Barack Obama, Sr.
… When Obama (Sr.) flew to Hawaii in August 1959, he left behind a young Kenyan wife already pregnant with their second child. At the university, he pursued a demanding course load and a highly active social life. In the fall of his second year, hardly six weeks elapsed before one new female classmate, 17-year-old Stanley Ann Dunham, became pregnant with their child. The university’s foreign student adviser told U.S. immigration agents, who took an active interest in foreign students whose visas required annual renewal, that she already had cautioned the married Kenyan about his dating habits. When Obama informed her in April 1961 that he and Dunham had married two months earlier, Obama also asserted that he had divorced his Kenyan wife. The adviser told the immigration agency she was dubious of that claim, but that Obama had told her that “although they were married they do not live together and Miss Dunham is making arrangements with the Salvation Army to give the baby away.” That sentence is redacted in the copy of Obama’s immigration file viewable on the Web, but Jacobs, working from a differently processed version, is unable to fully capture the emotional impact of the memos’ tale of ongoing official enmity.
Given Obama’s seeming lack of interest in parenting his offspring, adoption may have appealed to him, but no other evidence suggests that Ann Dunham actually considered giving her firstborn child away. Within weeks of Barack Jr.’s birth, Dunham and the baby left Honolulu for her previous home town of Seattle, leaving behind the husband with whom she had never lived. When Obama prepared a resume just before leaving Hawaii for graduate school at Harvard in 1962, he listed “a wife and two children in Kenya,” Jacobs reports. “He made no mention of Dunham or Barack Jr.” …
Another book on Obama’s parents has received a lot of interest because it turns out one of the president’s constant refrains during the campaign, and the health care debate was false. His mother was not denied coverage “for a pre-existing condition” as Obama claimed time and again. Makes one wish he followed in his father’s footsteps and made women the destination of his serial lies, rather than voters. Of course, if we had a press in this country we might have had these facts when the country had a chance to avoid 2008′s mistake. Byron York has the story.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama often discussed his mother’s struggle with cancer. Ann Dunham spent the months before her death in 1995, Obama said, fighting with insurance companies that sought to deny her the coverage she needed to pay for treatment.
“I remember in the last month of her life, she wasn’t thinking about how to get well, she wasn’t thinking about coming to terms with her own mortality, she was thinking about whether or not insurance was going to cover the medical bills and whether our family would be bankrupt as a consequence,” Obama said in September 2007.
“She was in her hospital room looking at insurance forms because the insurance company said that maybe she had a pre-existing condition and maybe they wouldn’t have to reimburse her for her medical bills,” Obama added in January 2008.
“The insurance companies were saying, ‘Maybe there’s a pre-existing condition and we don’t have to pay your medical bills,’ ” Obama said in a debate with Republican opponent Sen. John McCain in October 2008.
It was a simple and powerful story, one Obama would tell many more times as president during the national health care debate. But now we’re learning the real story of Ann Dunham’s health coverage is not quite what her son made it out to be.
So, how is wind power working in Denmark? American.com has some answers.
… Not surprisingly, Denmark, like other early adopters of renewable power, is finding it unsustainable, and is backing away from the technology. As Andrew Gilligan reports in The Telegraph, the Danish state-owned power industry will no longer build onshore wind turbines, and consumers are complaining about high energy rates and environmental despoliation:
“Earlier this year, a new national anti-wind body, Neighbours of Large Wind Turbines, was created. More than 40 civic groups have become members. “People are fed up with having their property devalued and sleep ruined by noise from large wind turbines,” says the association’s president, Boye Jensen Odsherred. “We receive constant calls from civic groups that want to join.”
Danish GDP is approximately $270 million lower than it would have been if the wind-sector workforce was employed elsewhere.” …
John Tierney looks at playground design.
When seesaws and tall slides and other perils were disappearing from New York’s playgrounds, Henry Stern drew a line in the sandbox. As the city’s parks commissioner in the 1990s, he issued an edict concerning the 10-foot-high jungle gym near his childhood home in northern Manhattan.
“I grew up on the monkey bars in Fort Tryon Park, and I never forgot how good it felt to get to the top of them,” Mr. Stern said. “I didn’t want to see that playground bowdlerized. I said that as long as I was parks commissioner, those monkey bars were going to stay.”
His philosophy seemed reactionary at the time, but today it’s shared by some researchers who question the value of safety-first playgrounds. Even if children do suffer fewer physical injuries — and the evidence for that is debatable — the critics say that these playgrounds may stunt emotional development, leaving children with anxieties and fears that are ultimately worse than a broken bone.
“Children need to encounter risks and overcome fears on the playground,” said Ellen Sandseter, a professor of psychology at Queen Maud University in Norway. “I think monkey bars and tall slides are great. As playgrounds become more and more boring, these are some of the few features that still can give children thrilling experiences with heights and high speed.” …