IBD on ‘Obama’s New America’

IBD on ‘Obama’s New America’: "

Yep:

Obamanomics has done more than just keep unemployment high during a modest recovery. It may also be keeping high joblessness permanent by raising the costs to businesses of hiring new workers.

… Obama’s New America (is) … a government-run economy, with special benefits for unions and plenty of government jobs, but few private ones.

Businesses today face rising burdens — from ObamaCare, the financial overhaul, the expiration of tax cuts for entrepreneurs, the threat of new energy taxes or the surge in growth strangling regulations on business — that discourage hiring.

“The real threat to a robust recovery on the labor side,” Gary Becker, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, warned recently, “has come from employer and entrepreneurial fears that once the economic environment improves, a Democratic Congress and administration will pass pro-union and other pro-worker legislation that will raise the cost of doing business and cut profits.”

It’s never been costlier to hire and keep a worker employed. And as ObamaCare kicks in and Bush’s tax cuts expire — not to mention the huge tax hikes that will be needed to make Social Security and Medicare solvent — businesses will simply quit hiring.

Becker’s statement is in bold because it rings true. In Ohio a while back, Ted Strickland and Ohio’s unions and leftists wanted to put a mandatory employee-leave law on the ballot, but decided not to — not because it’s a lousy idea that would make the Buckeye State even less competitive than it already is, but only because the economy was so bad that they knew it wouldn’t fly. If the economy recovers, and as long as Democrats have significant power in the state, they’ll be back. The “employer and entrepreneurial fears” Becker has cited are real, and justified.

It can’t be emphasized enough that during the 1930s, the last time all-stimulus, all-the-time, Big Labor-Big Government-Big Company approach to things was chosen, the unemployment rate never fell below 12%, while Europe’s was never above that. Except that the figure might be a still completely unacceptable 8% or 9% instead of 12%, what reason is there to expect that things will be any different this time if the administration doesn’t change course?

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