Obama: bad for business?

Great Debates
41

My thoughts exactly, I always believed that most of Obama’s policies were actually business friendly. Thus this thread, are their any policies of Obama’s that were unequivocally bad for business?

So you think my friend was deluded? It’s possible. Another friend of mine was bragging to me in April about how much lower her taxes were last year thanks to Trump until I pointed out that his cuts don’t take effect until this year. Mythology indeed.

The thing is that I don’t think Obama raised the federal minimum wage or taxes rates. I would be happy to be proven wrong, but I always viewed it as a failure on his part. I think this is one of the reasons that Trump’s populism has taken such hold; when you really get down to brass tax Obama did not really do anything to help those people on the margins in this country. I am not saying he could with his relationship with congress being what it was, but those people in the bottom 2 quintiles saw no real gains during his administration (my retirement funds did great though).

Agreed. And they are running these deficits when the economy is “red-hot” to boot. Fucking idiotic and I believe it truly threatens to do damage to this country that will take 100 years to correct.

42

You know how you constantly demand facts from others?
Point out the bias and provide counter-facts and figures.

43

Agreed. The quote from the AARP was very clear on why they thought it was a bad idea for their constituency. They did not come off as partisan in this judgement, simply focused. If D’Anconia has facts that show that these tax cuts are good for retirees and that the AARP is wrong, he should present it this being Great Debates on a message board dedicated to fighting ignorance. Better yet, he should post it in a different thread that is not about how Obama policies were bad for businesses. I know he would like to post it in this thread, but that’s only because I suspect he has nothing on the topic at hand.

44

Please stop using the word “regulation” as though it was a pejorative thing. The Code of Federal Regulations is simply the executive branch’s explanation of how it will interpret the laws passed by Congress. They are not “additional regulatory burdens” cooked up by bureaucrats. Congress writes a law that doesn’t necessarily spell out exactly how it works in all situations. The executive department then has to figure out what the law means for certain situations. There typically is a process where the executive department draws up a series of regulations and asks for comment from those that will be affected by it and those familiar with the issues surrounding the law. If the federal government were pushing out an order of magnitude more regulations, what it means is that they want to explicate the law better and not leave any holes in what Congress passed. The promulgation of regulations does not in any way increase the burden on any business owner, it more generally decreases the burden by letting them know what the rules are better than the existing legislation did. Only in cases where Congress explicitly gives the executive branch the power to create rules does the executive branch do so.

Now, if something was meant other than the regulations that compose the Code of Federal Regulations, then there might be a point. But if you’re talking about the executive branch promulgating regulations, that’s exactly what it’s referring to.

45

We could discuss his dastardly countenancing of the FCC writing those regulations on the internet. Look how badly that harmed the telecoms.

46

The “labor force participation rate” was only focused on by FOXGOP because the headline unemployment figures were so good under Obama, they had to find something they could spin as negative (and it’s possible with LFPR because even in a bouyant economy it can decrease).

It never gets a mention now. I wonder why.

47

Are you implying that you think McCain or Rmoney would have prosecuted anyone? Because that sounds like the reachingest fantasy imaginable.

48

When I googled it I got a whole bunch of hits on how often he raised taxes from right wing sources. But here is one I trust a bit more:

These are the people who supposedly would stop working if you raised their taxes, if you believed a lot of the threads we had here at the time.

As for minimum wage, he of course could not raise it - that took Congress. It did get raised in 2009. Cite. The minimum wage has been raised locally also in many places. I live in Silicon Valley where most if not all towns have raised the wage with no apparent impact on employment, based on the many help wanted signs I mentioned.

ACA certainly helped the uninsured (at least in states which did not reject Medicaid increases). The decline in unemployment helped also. Given the recalcitrant Congress, I’m not sure what else he could have done. But the point here is that if those on the margins think Trump is going to help them, they got another think coming. A trade war is going to raise prices for everyone, which will hurt those with low incomes most. Republicans in this election cycle, you’ll note, are not talking much about the tax cut since the masses have figured out that they aren’t getting much out of it.

49

re: labor force participation, it’s common to use the “prime age” (not my favorite label, but I didn’t pick it), i.e. 25-54, labor force participation rate so as to avoid most of changes due to students and retirees: Labor Force Participation Rate - 25-54 Yrs. (LNS11300060) | FRED | St. Louis Fed
It peaked in Q1 '99 at 84.6% (seasonally adjusted), had a brief rise to a local maximum of 83.4% prior to the last recession, then dropped steadily through most of the Obama years, bottoming out at 80.6% in Q3 2015. It’s since increased to 81.8% as of May.
That’s only a few points in either direction, but when we’re talking about a 25-54 population of over 126M, that’s about 3.5M more jobs that we’d have if the participation rate were back at its peak.

If we want to look just at Obama’s term, the participation rate dropped from 82.8% to 81.5%, and had already been on the upswing for five quarters. Although I’m skeptical of how much blame or credit can be ascribed to a president, past or current, for these numbers, especially given differing lags between different inputs and their effects.

According to a likely paywalled WSJ summary of an OECD report that the asshole reporter couldn’t be bothered to link to, “The OECD’s 35 countries—which include the U.S., most of the European Union members, Canada and FranceJapan—had a combined rate of 85.5% in the last three months of 2017.” “The use of opioid drugs ‘appears to be connected’.”

50

I already postulated an explanation upthread: Obama’s term coincided with the retirement of the baby boomers. Of course the labor participation rate would decline during that time.

It’s similar to how Obama is often blamed for an increase in racial tensions between Black people and cops. But his term also coincided with the proliferation of phones with cameras. Of course there’s going to be more visibility with regards to police/citizen interaction when everybody is walking around with technology in their hand that you used to have to balance on your shoulder. (Consider that the Rodney King beating was unique for its time because it happened when, to record something, you had to haul out cumbersome equipment that many people didn’t have).

QFT.
An example I can think of is when Obama closed a loophole with regard to guns which were being sold at gunshows. The law passed by congress required background checks, but excluded “occasional sellers”. They then left it up to the appropriate administrative agency (I think ATF) to define “occasional seller”. Obama’s change to the definition wasn’t some egregious form of overregulation. The regulation existed, by design, because the law didn’t define its term. Obama may have changed the regulation, but it’s existence was a given.

51

You postulated about a different phenomenon. The number I posted are:

52

Indeed I did. Mea Culpa.

The stats you gave are an interesting phenomenon to consider, since the percentage is not obviously good or bad, as can be seen by the fact that it was much lower in the 1950’s, when the middle class was expanding (plainly due to the fact that a lot of women worked inside the home). Is the reduction in labor participation under Obama do to a lack of available work? Or because married couples were doing well enough that more parents could stay home to care for the kids while their spouse continued in the work force? Perhaps there were more available educational opportunities enticing people to go back to school. I’m not sure the answer, either.

53

I think what it tells us is that even with low unemployment, we still have some wiggle room for employment growth. But yeah not really a good/bad binary, especially given historical numbers.

54

Here’s an article that tries to address the issue, but has no answers, either.

It does note (as do most articles I find) that the drop in labor participation is largely due to the Boomer retirement issue. But it also carves out the prime age, and notes its drop, with no real answer other than it is “structural” and that it started before Obama.

55

Well part of the issue is that a good portion of those people live in places where there are not sufficient jobs. Unfortunately, as we discussed in a thread on this board not long ago, they either refuse to move to look for jobs, or lack the resources to move. You can’t insist on living in a small town then demand that the jobs come to you. It doesn’t work that way.

56

Why is consumer protection considered bad for business? What do these business types think consumers do with the money that consumer protection laws save them if not spend it at other businesses?

57

They are bad for the businesses making money by ripping off consumers. And why does business A care of the consumer spends money at business B? As far as business A is concerned, the consumer could flush the money down the toilet.

58

Oh? Is this a new view? You’re on record calling trillions in tax breaks for the rich “chump change” — just “a rounding error,” no less! — dwarfed in magnitude by the quadrillions that will eventually come due because of liberal follies like SocSec and Medicare.

And, BTW, did we miss your answer to the direct question asking why the stock market quadrupled under Obama — at a time when other markets around the world were still in the doldrums — despite the onerous burdens Obama placed on business?

59

You’re not accounting for the “facts don’t matter” principle. It doesn’t matter whether one can point to actual incidents of excessive regulation, all they need to do is dream up false narratives that IT’S ALL OBAMA’S FAULT and in their minds the matter is settled.

60

This is just false, Sam. It’s absolute nonsense.

Smal lbusinesses do not deal with “untold numbers” of federal regulations. That simply is not a thing that happens in the United States or ever did. I have worked with lots of small businesses in the USA. They all did just fine under OBama - the economy was great for small businesses - and not a one ever said “Gosh, these untold numbers of regulations are killing us.” It doesn’t happen. They did not spend all their money on lawyers and I don’t remember ANY spending money on auditors at all. This is all Fox News baloney.

Of course there are many, many regulations - and it’s irrelevant. Most of them

  1. Do not apply to most businesses.

Every jurisdiction in the USA has a law for working at heights - training, fall arrest requirements, etc. Those regulations apply, in the legal sense, to every business. Of course, for 99%+ of all businesses, no one cares or is even aware of the regulations because why would they? Most workplaces don’t need to apply working at heights regulations because no one there is working at heights.

Your own Politico cite mentions a number of regulations that obviously apply only to a thin number of businesses. Clearer labelling on cranberry juice affects only companies that makes cranberry juice, and of course they already label the juice so it’s not even a “new” regulation at all, it’s just adjusting an existing one.

  1. Are passively met, anyway.

Any business is in a state of passively meeting any number of regulations - meeting the law without exerting any effort to do so. To use a really obvious example, all jusrisdictions, federal and state, have regulations about fair treatment and nondiscrimination in the workplace - but it doesn’t require effort to NOT discriminate, and for 99.9% of businesses it’ll never cross anyone’s minds that such rules are a thing.

  1. Are ignored.

I’m sure you’ve seen those Weirdo Law stories about how it’s illegal in the State of South Dakota to shoot a dolphin with a helicopter-mounted bazooka, or illegal in the City of Boston to chew gum within fifty yards of the Mayer’s wife or whatever. Most of the time these are ludicrous exaggerations of real laws (it’s illegal in most states to shoot any animal with any weapon from a vehicle) or just some law no one bothered to remove from the books.

Well, regulations are like that. In doing a quick Google search for weird regulations, I found that at one point the State of Texas had a regulation that said a computer repair person needed a private investigator’s license. that is stupid, of course, but it clearly wasn’t really the intent of the law, and no one bothered to enforce it, and eventually it appears they fixed it. Most such regulations are never enforced, but the right wingers count 'em all.

Look, if small business owners were drowning in regulations before Saint Donald came along, can you explain why small business did so well? Why was the economy booming?