Washington’s lack of focus on economic growth, especially President Obama’s anti-growth agenda of Obamacare and stifling energy development, are putting the American dream in jeopardy and forcing Americans to accept a lower standard of living, a U.S. Chamber of Commerce group charged in a new report.
“America’s future is in jeopardy,” said the report from the non-profit U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. It recommended reforms to taxes, immigration, energy policy and entitlements as the keys to sparking a new economic burst.
The report, meant to spark a new focus on growth by Congress and the White House, said that the last seven years of low growth is unprecedented and threatens to be a new normal that will cost Americans their typical standard of living.
“Slow growth threatens the American Dream,” said Foundation President John R. McKernan. He urged Obama and Congress to change policies to add just one percent more to the recent annual growth levels of about two percent. That would be a 50 percent increase over the past seven years.
“Policies are to blame,” explained report author Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum and a former top Republican White House economic advisor. His group authored the report in partnership with the Chamber Foundation and both singled out Obamacare as an anti-growth program
The report is the opening shot in the Chamber’s campaign to push Congress and the nation to reject low growth as the future. “We should not be used to 2 percent,” said Chamber economist Martin Regalia.
McKernan said his foundation is fighting those satisfied with low growth. “What bothers us as the foundation, more than anything else, is economists that say, ‘Hey, maybe 2 percent is the new normal.’ Anybody who cares about the future of America can’t accept the fact that 2 percent is the new normal. It will not be the kind of America we want in 10, especially 20 years, if that’s the best we can do,” he said.
Regalia said, “It is as much a plea for not being complacent, or not being accepting of the 2 percent.”
Doing so, he added, means “you are suggesting, you really are selling the American people a much lower standard of living in the future.”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
