Shapiro Calls Obama Administration Most ‘Anti-Business’ of His Lifetime
CEA President Gary Shapiro thinks the administration of President Barack Obama is the most “anti-business” of his lifetime, he said in a debate Friday night on CNBC’s The Kudlow Report. Facing off against Shapiro on the program were Howard Dean, former Democratic National Committee chairman, and Robert Johnson, chairman of the investment firm RLJ Companies and former chairman of Black Entertainment Television.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
As evidence of how bad he thinks the administration has been for business, Shapiro, who has described himself as a political independent, said its regulatory agencies have proposed 219 rules on the workplace that would cost industry $100 million each if they were implemented. “We have an attack on iconic American brands” like Gibson Guitar and Google, he said. “You have the union agenda being played out. You have tax uncertainty. You have so many different actions that are designed to basically freeze business from making hires.” In the case of Gibson, Shapiro was referring to a government raid on Gibson facilities in Tennessee last month over alleged violation of Indian law on imported wood for its guitars.
CEA canvassed its 2,000-plus members in a straw poll in 2008 and found most then were strongly “pro-Obama,” Shapiro said. “But if you asked them now, I doubt you would get the same response.” As Shapiro travels the country, he meets business owners who think President Obama “is a nice guy,” but they don’t think “he has a head for business and certainly he’s put people in … regulatory agencies who clearly have an ax to grind,” he said. “They don’t care about business or the consequences of the rules they are proposing."
Dean said he doesn’t think Obama “is against business.” Rather, Obama “understands, as most people in politics in both parties understand, that business creates jobs and we need jobs,” Dean said. “The business community has a much bigger problem than President Obama. The American people are fed up with business” because of past abuses on Wall Street and in the banking industry, Dean said. To that, Shapiro retorted that polls show most Americans, including Democrats, think businesses are “over-regulated."
Johnson takes a middle ground because he thinks the administration “owes it to talk to business people more, to get a better understanding of what our needs are, to get this economy growing,” he said. But he disagrees with Shapiro that Obama is “the worst president for business ever” and with Dean that “consumers have turned on business,” he said. Dean thinks Obama is trying “to protect the American people against the terrible things that the business community, particular the banks, have done” to consumers, he said. Shapiro shot back to say that “American people need jobs, they don’t need protection."
Johnson thinks the point-counterpoint between Shapiro and Dean typifies “what’s wrong with Washington,” he said. “You've got people throwing spears at each other, solely for the purpose of wounding and not trying to solve a problem. The problem, I think, with President Obama: He simply has not had the business community involved and engaged in his policy initiatives. His legislation has not been open to dialog with the business community. The business community wants to see a recovered economy. They want to see people back to work. They want to see America grow and compete globally. But unless we're at the table, having absolute input into how this country is going to develop economically, we're going to sit on our hands, and frankly, sit on our cash.”