BIG MISTAKES

Barack Obama and Company have made with American Businesses

One of the biggest problems a lot of the politicians in D.C. is that they have come to believe that they're smarter than everyone else and can run people's businesses better than they can do it themselves.   The longer they remain in office, the more they believe this false assumption.

In actuality, even if they were smarter than most other people, experience usually trumps brilliance.  It should come as no surprise that a politician like Barack Obama who has never run a business, is failing so miserably.  He has very little idea of what the real world impact of his actions will be.

Meanwhile, people are wondering why corporations are  hoarding cash, and refusing to hire people right now. The biggest reason for it is sitting in the Oval Office. At any moment, Obamacare may have some unknown complication, a government agency may implement some incredibly costly new regulation, the White House may go after them to help a connected Democrat donor, or Obama may impose a new tax in the name of "fairness."

Here are just a few examples that illustrate just how little Barack Obama really knows about business.

General Motors: Democrats hail GM as a wonderful success story that shows how well the government and private industry can work hand-in-hand to save jobs! The cost of that "wonderful success story is roughly 13 billion dollars in taxpayer money and a 45 billion tax break.  If that’s a victory, I’d hate to see his idea of a failure.

Solyndra: This is one of those "green jobs" Obama talks about incessantly.  To quote Dr. Phill, “How’s that working for you?”   Solyndra received 535 million dollars of your money via stimulus loans and now they just laid off 1100 workers and went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Health Care at AT&T, Verizon, Caterpillar, Deere, Valero Energy, AK Steel, 3M and McDonald's: When Obama tried -- and failed -- to sell health care reform to the public, he was promising everything to everybody.  Among the many, many false promises that were made was that the bill would reduce health care costs and that people could keep their current health care if they wanted it.

 Unfortunately, although not surprisingly, Obama was either lying or had no idea what he was talking about because health care costs are going to explode under the law and numerous companies are considering dropping their coverage when the law comes into force.

On Thursday and Friday AT&T, Verizon, Caterpillar, Deere, Valero Energy, AK Steel and 3M announced publicly that a tax provision in the new health care law will make it far more expensive to provide prescription drug coverage to their retired employees.

McDonald's Corp. has warned federal regulators that it could drop its health insurance plan for nearly 30,000 hourly restaurant workers unless regulators waive a new requirement of the U.S. health overhaul.

Thirty percent of employers will definitely or probably stop offering health benefits to their employees once the main provisions of President Obama's federal health care law go into effect in 2014, a new survey finds. The research published in the McKinsey Quarterly found that the number rises to 50 percent among employers who are highly aware of the health care law.

Johnson Controls, Inc.: Under Obama massive amounts of government money have flowed to well connected or politically correct green industries with little emphasis on results.  For example, 300 million dollars of your money was given to Johnson Controls, Inc. as part of a stimulus grant so it could make high-tech batteries.  So far, this has created only 150 jobs, which comes out to be 2 million dollars per job created.

Evergreen Solar, Inc.: Not only did Evergreen Solar receive stimulus cash, it received tax dollars from the state of Massachusetts. So how well was your money spent?

Last week, the Massachusetts-based Evergreen Solar filed for bankruptcy, after laying off 800 workers in March.  Now, they are slated to dump another 65 workers by closing a plant in Michigan.  This, after receiving an undisclosed amount of stimulus cash, in addition to $58 million in state aid.

Gibson Guitars: It was raided -- again -- for the terrible sin of supposedly buying illegally harvested wood from another country.   It’s probably just a coincidence that Gibson's CEO contributes to Republicans while one of its biggest competitors, C.F. Martin & Company, has a CEO who contributes to Democrats.   Gibson Guitars may have to fire their American workers and hire people in Madagascar to do the same work.

Boeing: Unions dramatically drive up costs, make it more difficult to fire political workers, are more likely to strike and have been responsible for decimating whole industries in the United States.  Naturally, no company ever WANTS to work with a union if it doesn't have to do it.  Unfortunately for Boeing, unions are too important to Barack Obama's re-election campaign; so he's stacked the National Labor Relations Board with union puppets who, for the first time in the history of the United States, refused to allow Boeing to open a plant in South Carolina because the plant would use non-union labor.

Deep into the recent recession, Boeing decided to invest more than $1 billion in a new factory in South Carolina.  Surging global demand for our innovative, new 787 Dreamliner exceeded what we could build on one production line and we needed to open another. 

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) believes that those actions were unlawful.  It claims they improperly transferred existing work, and that the decision constituted “retaliation” against union-represented employees in Washington state.  In other words:  Boeing must build the assembly line where the NLRB tells them to build it.

This is the eternal dilemma of the American businessman: At any point some politician, bureaucratic, or left-wing judge may come up with some haywire interpretation of a law or regulation and screw up the works.

Obama will do whatever it takes to keep the Union vote and the Hispanic vote, and if the country goes to hell, so be it.

I had to make a really tough decision between watching Obama’s speech tonight or watching the Okla. State Football game.

GO COWBOYS