Reading the various commentaries this morning on the debt limit deal, I ran across one that suggested “common sense” says government should focus on creating jobs, not cutting spending.

Ummmm…how can the government “create” jobs without spending more money…which it does not have?

I think the message the business community has been sending to Washington for a long time is “get out of the way” of creating jobs.

One thing business hates is uncertainty. We’ve had a lot of that.

Another thing business hates is taxes. Seems like the line has been drawn and held by the Tea Party that the feds are not going to be raising federal income taxes on business anytime soon.

High interests rates stifle economic growth. Interest rates are as low as they have ever ben. All we need is someone willing to lend money now.

But one of the biggest drags on job creation is all the costs of doing business due to all the governmental regulatory schemes around.

Here is just one example….there is a $2 billion solar  energy project over in California. Tucson’s own environmental litigation factory Center for Biological Diversity was trying to block the project to protect 1,100 desert tortoises under the Endangered Species Act.

According to a report from the Associated Press, BrightSource Energy Company…the developer of the solar project…cut a deal with the CBD to buy some tortoise habitat and CBD would drop its opposition to the project. The details of the deal are secret. I’ll bet CBD got some legal fees out of the settlement as well.

Due to the Endangered Species Act, we are seeing all kinds of hostage deals around the country. El Paso Natural Gas agreed to throw $22 million at Western Watersheds Project, another infamous enviuronmental litigation factory, to drop is opposition to a natural gas pipeline in Nevada.

Every where one looks there are costs being added to projects due to extortion from the US Fish and Wildlife Service and radical environmental groups.

That’s just on the Endangered Species Act front. The endangered species tax

Look out across the spectrum and there is a vast net of regulatory schemes that government imposes on business to protect this or that special interest.

For example the Davis Bacon Act which guarantees union jobs for federally funded construction work.

Indeed there are many regulations which actually have a public health and safety propjection purposes…but there are also a lot of regulatory impositions that have nothing to do with protecting the public interest and everything to do with just raising the cost of doing business because some special interest got their way in Congress.

And that is not limited to Washington. We have our own job killing stupid regulation madness in Tucson and Pima County. Ever try and open up a business in Tucson? You know what I’m talking about.

If government really want to be a partner in creating jobs…instead of spending borrowed money to create jobs…government needs to review its regulatory schemes and get rid of job killing regulations.

That applies in Washington as well as in Tucson.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 1st, 2011 at 9:07 am and is filed under politics. Tags for this post: create jobs, economy, kill jobs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.