One of the first acts of the Obama administration was to pay the Teamsters Union for its support in the election. They restricted Mexican trucking access to American roads. Mexico has now retaliated by raising tariffs on $2.4 billion of our exports. The Obama action was stupid in any case, but especially so in light of the recession. All we need to make matters worse is to incite trade wars with our important trade partners. Mexico is one of our most important trade partners.
Obama is trying to enlarge the trade wars. The administration is talking about how they will raise tariffs on the goods of countries who do not restrict the use of energy as Obama plans to and whose goods will therefore be relatively cheaper than ours. Of course, Obama can raise tariffs and protect American domestic market sales of our newly expensive goods. But .... he can do little to then make other people throughout the world buy our over-priced goods. In other words, we will lose much of our export markets. This could result in about 1 in 10 Americans becoming unemployed!
On economic issues, it is very clear that few Democrats ever think. They do not seem to do any better with foreign policy or with matters of national security.
He seems to have made mostly, "all the wrong moves" considering the recession that is consuming us. While the Conference Board gets "rosy" feedback form Main Street, economists see a bleak picture ahead. Some predict that the recession will not end until the 2nd quarter of 2010.
ReplyDeleteHi Rick,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment.
The anti-business mindset of Obama and his crew is very unsettling to investors thinking about expanding production facilities, hiring and training new employees, investing in new equipment, and performing research and development which may take years to pay itself off.
Couple this with the erratic nature of his policies, his tendency to apply new rules to the past, his fulminating trade wars, his depriving management of its ability to manage private firms, his plan to destroy the health care industry, his huge contribution to destroying the retirement funds of the Baby Boomers, his determination to leave the Medicare and Social Security underfunding crisis unaddressed, his proclivity to allow the interests of other nations to take precedence over those of the U.S., and his determination to destroy the complete energy infrastructure of America, you surely have an insanely destructive effect upon the confidence of any rational businessman.
Yet the American business community is incredibly resilient and innovative. It will find a way to come back eventually. Nonetheless, Obama has been doing us all a huge disservice by repeatedly shooting the legs out from under businessmen.