The Constituency Waiting For Its Candidate
Whatever small number of "new jobs" were purportedly created in February, (I forget the number), and reported by most of the media as encouraging, more than half were birthed by small business. That would be businesses owned by folks earning over $250,000 a year - those people that the president and liberals-united so desperately want to tax more. In many cases, those businesses are just big enough to be buried in new mandates and threats and costly compliance burdens secreted throughout Obamacare and Obama's financial reform, but way too small to bear those burdens.
I was talking recently to the vice-president of a small, local, locally owned bank (the kind of bank that lends to those small businesses). This woman, with 30 years' experience, told me she expected an all-time record number of such small, local , well-run, healthy banks absorbed into the few giants over next 24 months simply because of the crushing cost of compliance with the new Obama bureaucracies' regulations.
Small business is currently creating jobs despite the Obama headwinds: a terrible economy made worse by his every scheme, skyrocketing national debt and lurking inflation stealing from consumers' spending power, unresolved and worsening weight of collapsed housing market, and, of course, vilification of the rich. Small business owners tend to be very self-determined and obstinate and resilient, so they fight to prosper and grow even in adverse conditions.
Still, they can only be stretched so far before snapping and breaking.
The media suddenly focuses when the CEO of a company like Caterpillar threatens to pack up and leave its home state of Illinois due to obscene tax increases coupled with virtually no government budget or spending reforms. As the CEO pointed out, the problem is not just direct cost to the company but, by his calculation, $40-million in income tax increases to its employees - the same as $40-million in pay cuts. Causing many of its best executives to dust off their resumes and seek opportunities in other states. This, the media manages to report,the Governor makes phone calls, the CEO publicly back peddles and dissembles.
But the media misses, by and large, the emotion - ranging from intense anxiety to boiling rage - of the millions of small business owners. And they are, in aggregate, far more critical to their states' economies and to the national economy than is one Caterpillar, and they can't be so easily silenced or controlled.
That Tea Part Movement that Senator Durbin, D, Ill., and others of his elitist ilk are quick to smear and denigrate is chock full of these business owners. These employers. These job creators. We don't like being smeared, denigrated, disrespected, taken for granted, thoughtlessly buried in new costs, targeted for higher taxes, and demonized as evil rich. And, breaking news alert, we do not have to create jobs. If you want to see a double-dip recession, just keep spitting in our faces. You can spit, we can sit.
Some Republican presidential candidate might want to take notice of us. We are a very substantial and potentially influential constituency, absolutely convinced we are ignored.
As to the current president: I personally waver back and forth between giving him the benefit of doubt that he is a fool, or giving him credit as sinister evil-doer, with full understanding of the destructive war he wages on this nation. If he is the former, he ought consider that 50 percent of the jobs he needs created for the country to recover and for his personal, political survival are in the control of small business owners with whom he has never spoken respectfully or dealt honestly, and who hold him in extremely low esteem. Unless we save him, his most probable political future is as Jimmy Carter's successor: a disgraced, irrelevant former president, outcast even by his own party, wandering around in a sweater, welcomed only by America's worst enemies, to be used as their stooge.
