Why Barack and Bubba Will Be A Bust With Business

Businesses won’t buy Barack and Bubba’s blarney.

In his latest signs of desperation mixed with deception, President Obama shoehorned former President Clinton into a White House meeting with business leaders this week to try to help make the -- unbelievable -- case that the Obama administration isn’t really hostile to business.

Barack and Bubba want businesses to spend, hire and expand despite a flood of new costs, regulations and other government intrusions baked into Obama’s health care and financial reforms.

Add to that the quest by Obama and the Democrats to shove new taxes and bureaucratic hairballs down businesses’ throats on everything from energy to dividends.

But a decade after Clinton and 18 months after Obama, many businesses have wised up to the reality of combining "slick-o-nomics" and "O-cialism."

Here are seven reasons businesses will sit on $1.8-trillion in cash rather than be bamboozled by Barack and Bubba:

1.      Why risk spending and investing now when in a few months the November elections could bring in different lawmakers with different to-do lists?

2.      Former President Bill Clinton only capitulated (or triangulated) to a more business-friendly agenda after getting whupped in the 1994 midterm elections. Obama seems much more ideologically inflexible than Clinton and might even dig in after electoral defeat, so why believe Obama’s sudden charm offensive?

3.      Clinton bought deficit reduction and the ability for government to spend lavishly by gutting military spending. But Obama is mired in massive spending on the military and on his pet special interests—and businesses are footing those bills, along with taxpayers.

4.      Businesses were saved during Clinton’s tenure from high costs and bureaucratic suffocation when Hillarycare health care died in Congress. But Obamacare has passed and its poisonous effects on businesses are unlikely to be reversed by an antidote even if the Republicans take back Congress.

5.      Clinton was willing to deny the unions protection when he supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Obama has never denied unions a payoff, perk or political favor of any kind.

6.      During his administration, Clinton let his vice president, Al Gore, extol the benefits of environmental extremism without bankrupting the country. Obama is drinking Gore’s green Kool-Aid and is willing to drown the economy in it.

7.      Clinton got it. “It’s the economy, stupid” and he compromised here and there. Obama only gets that “It’s the stupid economy” and refuses to compromise.

Along with most Americans, businesses are sick and tired of putting their money where Obama’s mouth is.

Communications consultant Jon Kraushar is at www.jonkraushar.net.

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