It may have been negligent job-slaughter in the beginning, but now surely even President Obama is beginning to realize that it’s his policies that are killing jobs.
The president–like the rest of us–must feel the deathly stillness in the economy. New jobs are not being created, old ones are being lost. This is odd for Americans, who’ve always taken dynamism and growth for granted. What’s wrong?
Investor’s Business Daily has come up with an excellent term to describe what is behind the loss of so many jobs: “government caprice.” Here are some examples of job-killing moves that didn’t have to happen:
A year ago, three oil rigs fled the Gulf of Mexico for better opportunities abroad. Now, it’s 10. Make no mistake, the toll is rising on a business environment marked by the Obama administration’s uncertainty.
It’s a sorry spectacle when rigs, the mighty instruments for extracting oil and gas from miles under the sea floor, are quietly pulling away from U.S. coasts for better business environments oceans away – namely the Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Egypt and Brazil.
“When you have companies that would be spending hundreds of millions of dollars, or in some cases billions of dollars, they need certainty,” Louisiana Oil & Gas Association President Don Briggs told BigGovernment.com. “We don’t have that now, and I don’t expect we will anytime soon.”
The administration’s capricious behavior towards the oil industry, one of the most scrapegoated of all businesses, became apparent immediately after BP’s Gulf spill. Remember the $20 billion clean-up fund the president demanded? Whatever you think about the fund, it left behind the “image of a president who could extract what he wanted from any unpopular company.”
More government caprice: an arbitrary drilling on offshore drilling that was transformed into a permit moratorium when a federal court in Louisiana ruled against the drilling moratorium. I’ve already written about Exxon’s recent discovery of a huge field in the Gulf that could add jobs to our stalled economy. The administration pulled Exxon’s permit, citing a technicality.
Exxon spent $300 million to find the new field. But because of government caprice, it won’t be hiring people to drill there in the near future.
Is there a word for job-homicide?
Jobocide?