President Obama often complains that corporations want to write their own rules when he campaigns for his economic plans, but he might need to start campaigning against small businesses, too.
Obama received an implicit rebuff from the 22 percent plurality of small business owners who, in a Gallup poll released today, identified “complying with government regulations” as “the most important problem facing” their businesses. Nine percent of small business owners indicted “poor leadership [from the] government/President,” which cracked the list of the top five problems for small businesses mentioned on the survey.
Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg, an Obama supporter, argued that the Dodd-Frank bill and other policies created “negative effects . . . simply too significant to ignore.” He also said that “government is injecting uncertainty into the marketplace and making it harder to raise capital and create new businesses.”
Seidenberg’s distaste for government regulations parallels casino titan Steve Wynn’s complaint against President Obama. “[T]his administration is the greatest wet blanket to business and progress and job creation in my lifetime,” Wynn said on a now-famous conference call. “[I am] frightened to death about all the new regulations, our healthcare costs escalate, regulations coming from left and right.”
Obama often criticizes the GOP for wanting to “let corporations write their own rules.” This charge ignores how one of Obama’s favorite agenda items, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street regulation bill, facilitates the corporations writing their own rules because Congress deferred the responsibility of writing most of the regulations in the bill to the executive branch. As a result, financial companies assembled an army of lobbyists to help government write those rules.
Taken together with the lobbying numbers, the Gallup survey undermines Obama’s attack on corporations. 36 percent of small business owners told Gallup they are moderately or very worried about going out of business, while the same poll showed that government regulation, not corporate greed, poses the greatest threat to small businesses in the United States.
Here’s a chart from the Gallup survey:
