Obama: Don't know much about business

President Obama held a "jobs summit" yesterday, which resulted in more hand-wringing over why the private sector (and small business in particular) isn't hiring now. What a joke. It is abundantly clear that there isn't a soul in the Obama Administration who has ever made a payroll or started a small business, and thus has no earthly idea of what really motivates businesses to hire workers. Our president has never even had a real job in the real world, let alone ever signed the front of a paycheck. Others in his economic brain trust are academic eggheads and former policy wonks who are truly mired in their indifference curves.

They don't get it, so the business community is indifferent.

It's pathetic. As a small business owner myself, I can tell you that uncertainty in the market is the killer of growth. No business hires new workers when they can't be sure of what the next month will bring, and when every economic indicator as far as the eye can see is full of new taxes, new deficits and new regulations.

Helloooooo! Is anyone out there??

There is a great letter to the editor today in the WSJ that deserves reprinting here. It sums up perfectly the problem with the economy:

The clear theme running through Christina Romer's "Putting Americans Back to Work" (op-ed, Dec. 2) is that the government is now at the point of having to implore the private sector to increase hiring, as the policies that she promotes have not had the intended effect of any significant turn-around of our economy, especially when it comes to jobs. The difficulty for this administration is the dark cloud of uncertainty that will continue to hover over the private sector in terms of the impact of government spending that really has no end in sight.

Those of us in the private sector see increased taxes in our future: increased taxes to pay for ObamaCare, the repeal (or allowing the expiration) of the Bush tax cuts, the increase of the estate tax which hits small businesses so extensively, the potential tax on those who are making more money to pay for the Afghanistan surge. We all know that once this tax is in place, it will be continued and thus be applied to something else. Then there is the continued discussion of a value-added tax as all the taxes previously mentioned are unlikely to be able to pay for the trillions in debt the government has run up and which it plans to run up further, undermining the dollar. No small-business owner, of which I am one, would hire in this unpredictable climate. The current administration cannot have it both ways: You cannot have "fairness" in taxation and expect those of us who are the engine of the economy to hire more people in the current climate, since we are left with so much less money with which to do this.

Until the government provides the business community with relief from its looming, burdensome tax policies, the overall climate for hiring will remain poor no matter how much pleading we hear from the present administration.

Erik Dahl M.D., MBA

Bethesda, Md.

Dr. Dahl clearly lives in the real world, where jobs don't grow on trees and where incentives really do matter. The Obama Administration, sadly, lives in a socialist world of its own making, where government is the engine of growth and where hiring should be a public right, not the product of a good economy with sensible tax policy.

If only someone in Washington were listening!