Jeffrey Immelt, President Obama’s jobs czar and CEO of General Electric, told Fareed Zakaria that he has learned, as jobs czar, to appreciate how regulations prove more of a burden for small business owners than for large companies and said that the federal government should undertake “some simplification of regulations in the United States.”
To introduce his criticism of the regulatory code, Immelt offered a word of sympathy for small business owners and “what they go through” as a result of complicated regulations:
The fact is, is that GE and IBM and J.P. Morgan, we’re big enough companies that we can muscle through regulatory, you know, pressure. We can comply, we can do the things we need to do. If you’re a $50 million business, it’s just so much harder.
Immelt did not explain why small business face more difficulty with the government than bigger businesses, but he might have noted that the $50 million is barely more valuable than the lobbying portion of GE’s budget. OpenSecrets.org compiled statistics that show GE spent over $39 million on lobbyists in 2010, and then followed that – investment, let’s call it – with an additional $15 million and counting spent on lobbyists thus far in 2011.
With that in mind, Immelt’s praise for Obama – “He’s a good listener [and] he’s tough-minded” – seems understandable. Indeed, the president is probably the best listener $39 million can buy.
