White House Outreach to Business Leaders
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-02-08/white-house-outreach-business-leaders
President Barack Obama talks with former President Bill Clinton and Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, July 14, 2010. The President was meeting with business leaders to discuss new ways to create jobs and strengthen the partnership between the public and private sectors to make new investments in the clean energy industry.
Official White House photo by Pete Souza via Flickr
President Obama has appealed to the nation's business leaders for help in revitalizing the U.S. economy. In a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce yesterday, he drew from John F. Kennedy's famous call to action. President Obama said, "Ask yourselves what you can do to hire American workers, to support the American economy and to invest in this nation." The president pledged to simplify the tax code and invest in infrastructure and technology. Some critics say the president was too conciliatory to business. Others argue that overly burdensome regulations must be lifted first. The White House and the U.S. business community.
Guests
Jared Bernstein
chief economist and economic policy adviser for Vice President Biden and executive director of the vice president's Middle Class Task Force.
Bill George
professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and former CEO of Medtronic Inc.
Dean Baker
co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of "Plunder & Blunder the Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy."
Elizabeth Williamson
reporter, The Wall Street Journal.
James Gattuso
senior research fellow in regulatory policy at the Heritage Foundation.
Bruce Josten
executive vice president for government affairs, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Comments
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uh-huh, I'm sure Obama would be reaching out to business without the "shellacking" he took in November. NOT!
And what about Obama's "true love" -- the unions?? They're so pro-business, aren't they?
He must hate this deviation from his real agenda.
He knee-caps business, big and small, for two years and then offers some non-specifics on his changed attitude just in time for the kickoff to the 2012 election preparation. I expect businesses, big and small, to take a wait-and-see approach.
As someone who has to manage an income statement, I am concerned that the revenue stabilization that has appeared in my business owes much to government largesse, and that when fiscal spending comes under control, as it has to, much of the air will come out of this recovery. As a result, I remain focused on cutting expenses line item by line item.
Heck yes! let's return to child labor, unsafe working conditions, putting family and friends on the payroll, not hiring minorities, less than living wages, 12 hour days, 7 day workweek. Perhaps jobs can be sold to the highest bidder.
I'm sorry you flunked education and empathy. Perhaps you would favor a cyanide pill for the unfortunate without basic human rights.
Please, I want the knee-caps General Motors and Chrysler got.
I appreciated the President's point in his speech to the Chamber yesterday that the perils of too much regulation are also matched by the dangers of too little. However, I believe that the burden of proof is still on business to show exactly how regulation is "job killing" as this claim remains weakly supported with evidence to date. Stepping up and helping to re-employ millions of unemployed Americans should not be used as a bargaining chip by corporations in their continued quest for less regulation.
General Motors and Chrysler: ask their stock- and bond-holders who got wiped out and non-unionized employees who were laid off by the thousands. These bailouts were union gravy-trains designed as payback for campaign contributions.
DR Show and other media pundits talk about jobs daily but refuse to even mention National Hiring Day.
The main problem with jobs is the medias refusal to consider new ideas like National Hiring Day #2. There are solutions that are non political, and demand very little sacrifice from anyone. What it does is ask for a very very very very very small amount of voluntary patriotism from corporations.. The real job story is the media's refusal to talk about the first National Hiring Day in January 2011 - a good solution to spark the job recovery. That includes about 100 news shows that talk about jobs daily including this one.
National Hiring Day #2 is suggested for a month or two from now. This is a day that corporations are encouraged to hire new employees. Corporations are called on to put patriotism first and help their country in hard times. Those corporations that cannot hire, are asked to stop firing for that month. The day was suggested by the 18 year old Dallas art and media zine Musea.
Time for a very very very very little corporate responsibility to help their country. The President should have called for a voluntary National Hiring Day or Week. With corporate America sitting on 1.9 trillion, and so many out of work, it's time for corporations to show some patriotism for their country. For those companies who can't hire, let them pledge to not fire on that day. There has never been a time when this would hurt corporations less or help the country more. Corporate responsibility is part of the solution.
National Hiring Day was first called by the 18 year old Dallas Zine Musea. http://wp.me/p5S9X-jW
Just heard it, knew it was coming. Supply side economics. Supply side economics is why business' have trillions in capital that they are sitting on while the middle class disappears. After 25 years of Reagan's supply side economic failures, we need to declare the experiment a failure and try something new to restore the real economic power house of the economy, the middle class, who by the way own most of the small businesses.
Please ask this:
If business is hoarding cash, then why shouldn't they distribute that non-working cash back to the shareholders via dividends? The shareholders "own" that money, and if Republicans say that money should be the the citizens' pockets, then that principle should apply to privately held money in corporate coffers.
The government could create a tax incentive for shareholders to receive cash dividends to increase shareholder pressure to have management make those distributions.
The downside is that the value of the corporation that distributes will be reduced (in that it no longer is holding cash), and thus the stock market value might go down, but a dip in the stock market equal to the money that goes to people's pockets can be explained to the American people.
Please ask this:
If business is hoarding cash, then why shouldn't they distribute that non-working cash back to the shareholders via dividends? The shareholders "own" that money, and if Republicans say that money should be the the citizens' pockets, then that principle should apply to privately held money in corporate coffers.
The government could create a tax incentive for shareholders to receive cash dividends to increase shareholder pressure to have management make those distributions.
The downside is that the value of the corporation that distributes will be reduced (in that it no longer is holding cash), and thus the stock market value might go down, but a dip in the stock market equal to the money that goes to people's pockets can be explained to the American people.
Diane:
Companies are holding onto capital in part because financial institutions are still not lending under what is considered reasonable terms (by business). Companies wanting to expand are looking to government loan guarantees to reduce risk associated with borrowing, so the process of financing has increased in complexity. Couple that with the bottle neck of processing loan guarantees through the Fed and you have significant project delays that extend in terms of years rather than months. So job creation is delayed....significantly
Leslie
Why do we always have to hear that regulation will cause job lost? We in Canada have a lots of regulation and nobody has lost a job because of it. Just the opposite it was because our banks were regulated that our banks did better than any others in the world economy during the recession and all kept their jobs.
Diane, in the past few years we've had spoiled peanuts, lettuce, spinach, ground beef, even adulterated dog food. We’ve had self-accelerating cars, numerous auto recalls and one of the largest oil spills/fossil fuel contaminations in the history of mankind. Bad medicines, whopping cough and spotted fever have reemerged. To top it off, we've had the greatest era of financial speculation and irresponsibility to rival the Depression, the worst financial hangover in our history. But, like a college freshman, the business community now wants to go out drinking again the next morning (and given the record levels of compensation that they've received, they have the coin to do it).
The fact is, the financial community is squeezing the public on consumer credit and hoarding cash and profits in the firm belief that they can bring the rest of us to our knees and get the Administration to turn the anti-regulatory spigot wide open. Clearly, there's a need for regulatory reform. Excessive government regulation truly can strangle growth. But to have a conversation starting with laissez faire capitalism, the thought that "greed is good," and the philosophy that the markets will "self correct" (again) is sheer folly. The business community and Administration need to find some middle ground, but goodness knows, we should not be climbing up the free market at any cost, Greenspan Hill again. When will we learn?
Kev
Wow, your illustrating photograph indicates Bill Clinton is in his third, going on fourth, term.
Do we want jobs? Just any old jobs? I don't think so.
What we really want is what the Egyptians are asking for, a more equitable distribution of the fruits of labor, and labor organized to benefit those who do the laboring.
When offshoring (laizzez faire globalism) and automation kicked in during the Reagan administration days we needed to shorten the workweek, subsidize education more, and build a solid floor to replace the safety net. We did just the opposite. By 1996 Clinton killed the inadequate welfare system.
Poor people lack political means. More and more of us are poor. (82 million are now outside the workforce, doing who knows what.) The surviving middle class is mostly sucking up to the wealthy to get by.
I believe low waged jobs are wage slavery. This country must embrace social engineering to survive. No one will care about a big feudal plantation, except the owners.
On the usefulness of regulation, isn’t the purpose to protect the public; to make sure that the environment is not violated in the name of ‘progress’ (profit). Is it not regulations that ensure safety of medicine. Is it not oversight that was missing from the banking community? Capitalism can be a wonderful thing but needs to be kept in check. Or, am I wrong in understanding that our form of capitalism really does require regulations to make certain it doesn’t get out of hand and destroy the good it has brought?
Businesses need to stop squeezing the last ounce of blood (increased productivity) out of employees. You will not gain more purchasers/consumers unless they are employed. Businesses broke unions, contracted the economy until it hit the level where employers can call all the shots, and the employee will take whatever they can get, including low wages, no benefits, and subsistence quality of life.
Businesses have more legal standing than individual human beings, and business feels no sense of responsibility to anyone/thing than their profit margin. These are not the patrician, noblesse oblige people/employers of Roosevelt's time
We are not going to return to past 4-5% unemployment levels. Welcome to the new norm. The disparity in wealth, eduation, health care are inconsequential to today's businesses.
duplicate entry, sorry
Bruce is selling snake-oil. American businesses want it all for nothing. A home is not just the American dream, it is all we have.
Since 1980, tax-cuts for businesses have destroyed us. He is also selling CAFTA - another treasonous proposal for American workers, just like NAFTA.
Put yourself in the position of a small business owner deciding whether to hire more employees. You are now facing additional costs and obligations due to:
The new health insurance bill, which obligates employers for more costly health insurance.
The stimulus bill, which allowed employees to continue to collect unemployment (which is paid for by the employer NOT the employee) while they attend college and can not actively look for a new job.
No matter what your ideology, would you be more or less inclined to hire more people given these increased costs every time you hire someone new?
Here are a couple ideas to increase American employment:
•Decouple health insurance from employment by totally eliminating the tax deduction subsidy for health insurance and assisting individuals in joining large health insurance pools like the one that includes federal employees. Every time a business hires a new employee, we employers are calculating that we will be responsible for several hundred dollars per month extra in health insurance costs. The current system makes it more cost effective to have existing employees work a few hours overtime than to hire another employee.
• Replace unemployment insurance collected directly from employers with general tax revenues. Currently, businesses not only pay an unemployment tax per dollar of payroll , if we lay someone off, or even fire them for all but the most egregious offenses, we are eventually responsible for their weekly unemployment checks. Do you think this would make us more or less enthusiastic about increasing the number of employees?
• Replace Social Security and Medicare taxes paid by both the employer and the employee with a simple, transparent national sales tax and /or a simple transparent national carbon tax.
Oh for heaven's sake, Wagoner, opposing the excesses of today's modern unions, does not mean one thinks we should go back to child labor etc.! Of course unions needed to be formed way back years ago, but when, for example, a (documented) bad worker today cannot be fired due to his union protection, the pendulum has swung too far.
There are so many current union abuses, I'm not going to spend the time to list them here.
Where does the pro-business side get off with arguing for more deregulation?
Freedom from regulations allowed our financial industry to "innovate"" us right into the Great Recession!
Deregulate? OK. Deregulate intellectual property rights, so I can use Apple's OS for free.Deregulate gambling so I can run numbers game from my dinning room.Deregulate drug use, so I can sell home grown pot to my neighbors.Deregulate food production so I can sell sausages with sawdust and rat dropping in them.
Why is it that republican love to regulate individual behavior, but cant abide regulating corporations, which are naught but artificial persons with nothing but profit as a motive.
While we are talking about it, what sense does it make to bet our economic future on workers enslaving themselves with consumer debt? How is this any different than the company store/share cropping lifestyle?
It's a lack of regulation that helped BP destroy fishing and tourism with an ecological and industrial disaster. A company still refusing to pay for the harm they caused.
At this point, American businesses are a nihilistic forcce.
The financial collapse was NOT DUE TO HOMEOWNERS or government policy encouraging home ownership as reported by the Chamber of Commerce speaker but to the over leverage of banks with Shadow Banking products such as Credit Default Swaps. The Chamber of Commerce wants to rewrite history by blaming it on homeowners instead of the lack of regulations of the Shadow Banking World. A Republican, Brooks Bornsley who worked in the Commodities Division of the SEC, warned Congress, the Head of the Federal Reserve Board, Treasury Department that these financial products could lead to a financial diaster. Her warnings were ridiculed and ignored. It is infuriating that the lies told by the Chamber of Commerce, Republicans, and Conservatives is becoming real in people's eyes.
So much for small business jobs, the state of Ohio just put us out of business: I surely hope people read what I have to say, this is so sadly true. I am from Toledo, Ohio and am the 3rd generation of heating contractors in my family. I recently had my heating contractors license revoked indefinitely, for the reason of...the OCILB licensing board in Columbus, Ohio has recently in the past few years been slapping us contractors with outrageous annual registration late fees. We protested them this past dec. 2010, and informed OCILB that our home is in foreclosure, and have been without Health INS. for some time. They cashed our check for their annual fee and revoked our license INDEFINATLY, for not paying the late fee! We have to shut down our business and start again in another state. The OCILB licensing board in Ohio was well aware of the issues affecting our nation, our States, our cities, and our neighborhoods, yet still would not hear anything, except pay the outrageous late fee, or we revoke your license, OUR RIGHT TO WORK!! That alone Is a crime on the people who just got so ripped off with our IRA's, ect. If they continue to deprive us of jobs and a lively hood our cities will continue to crumble. It seems so many of our leaders just like the sound of their own voice and do nothing.
It seems to me like regulating unsafe cribs out of existence and causing every daycare to replace them would stimulate the economy, oh if only we made cribs domestically. Couldn't we establish a business to retrofit cribs? Nope, our entrepreneur can't be trusted not to turn crib retrofitting into a ludicrous scam. How do you re-regulate the most corrupt populous on Earth?
The American public needs to recognize how we support jobs going overseas (China) by always demanding or choosing the cheaper products. The cheaper product (usually made in China) are the products that sell.
Per Anne's comment, there's an argument that is embraced by the House Financial Services Committee majority and others in Washington that the causation of the housing crisis rests with counter-productive federal housing policies that pushed the GSEs (Fannie and Freddie) to behave recklessly. This is a simplistic and specious argument. The reality is that the financial firms within the shadow banking system held the reigns during the years leading up to the financial crisis and they didn't have to create bad mortgages and permit their securitization if they didn't want to.
My brother is in his mid fifties and was unemployed for a year and a half because the store he managed for 25 years closed it's doors. Unable to find a new job after diligently searching for over a year he recently hired himself and opened his own business. He has enough customers to keep the business going so I simply do not accept the no demand excuse from big business. If you build it, they will come. In addition, he is grateful for the tax credit he receives for health care premiums and is looking forward to additional benefits from the health care bill in the near future when they are enacted. Government resources were immensely helpful in helping get his business started. The anti-govt sentiment in this country is poisonous to our growth, it keeps people from taking advantage of all the resources that are in place to help businesses and all citizens. The new Health Care Bill is a good thing for small and big business, it's a symbiotic relationship between business and government that is working effectively, let's stop demonizing something that has positive benefits for all involved.
For those who doubt here are some facts:
United Health Group, Inc., the nation’s largest health insurer, added 75,000 new customers working in businesses with fewer than 50 employees.
Coventry Health Care, Inc., a large provider of health insurance to small businesses, added 115,000 new workers in 2010 representing an 8% jump.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City, the largest health insurer in the Kansas City, Mo. area, reports an astounding 58% increase in the number of small businesses purchasing coverage in their area since April, 2010-one month after the health care reform legislation became law.