Review: Businesses Say Lack of Demand, Not Regulation, Kills Jobs

Posted on Oct 5, 2011

TalkMediaNews (CC-BY)

In a memo released to House Republicans, Eric Cantor said he will push for “the repeal of job-destroying regulations” and “pro-growth tax relief.”

On Aug. 29, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor asked fellow Republican lawmakers to make the repeal of “job-destroying regulations” a top priority in the upcoming Republican jobs agenda. Bruce Bartlett, former senior policy adviser in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, says bollocks.

In his opinion, “regulatory uncertainty is a canard invented by Republicans that allows them to use current economic problems to pursue an agenda supported by the business community year in and year out. In other words, it is a simple case of political opportunism, not a serious effort to deal with high unemployment.”

In 2007, he points out, the Bureau of Labor Statistics began asking businesses nationwide why they laid off workers. In 2008, only about 5,500 layoffs were attributable to government regulation, accounting for no more than 0.4 percent of total layoffs. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of employees were let go due to lack of demand, comprising a minimum of 30 percent of all layoffs in the years fully recorded. And job loss due to regulation has declined—not increased—since Obama became president. —ARK

Economix at The New York Times:

These results are supported by surveys. During June and July, Small Business Majority asked 1,257 small-business owners to name the two biggest problems they face. Only 13 percent listed government regulation as one of them. Almost half said their biggest problem was uncertainty about the future course of the economy — another way of saying a lack of customers and sales.

The Wall Street Journal’s July survey of business economists found, “The main reason U.S. companies are reluctant to step up hiring is scant demand, rather than uncertainty over government policies, according to a majority of economists.”

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