Letters to the Editor for Sunday, February 7, 2010

How to really get America moving
Like many days, today’s included someone coming to my business to ask me for a job.

While it is becoming more and more commonplace, it is also becoming harder to engage in hopeful conversation about jobs with the folks who are assertive enough to keep trying to get one.

The actions (or perceived actions/suggestions) on the part of the Obama administration make it even tougher for this business owner, and I suspect many others, to even begin to suggest that expectations of better days are just around the corner.

For President Barack Obama to believe that all it will take for businesses to start hiring again and the economy to rebound is the easy availability of credit is shortsighted and foolish at best, and his lack of focus is bordering on cruelty, if not incompetence. If any of these folks were involved in running small businesses, they would know that it is not credit that we need, it is customers, and it is customers with customers.

Furthermore, it is customers whose lives have been made easier by a willing government who is not standing in their way. On top of that, we need government as partners and not as competitors; we have enough of them in China and other places where our government is in debt.

Most of us have credit; banks are quick to offer lines of credit based on the values of our inventories and personal assets. Not a week goes by when I have not received several offers of credit. That, however, only leads to debt. Loans and debt only weigh us down, not free us, to satisfy the needs of our business. Debt is short-term relief and is not a cure to long term problems. Sounds eerily like the federal government doesn’t it? So, I will ask all my fellow citizens and business owners if they want to run their business like the federal government, as the president is asking us to do.

This present group running the government will not solve the economic problems by insisting that all is needed is for small community banks to have money to lend. The government must provide the incentive to hire with aggressive tax credits, lower or eliminated business shares of Social Security and Medicare taxes, and relief from regulations that keep a business from expanding and being as prosperous as possible. Fears of cap and trade taxes and the effects of a projected deficit of more than $1.4 trillion don’t help either.

Mr. Obama, if you want us to start hiring, get out of the way of business creativity, free enterprise and entrepreneurism and make it possible for us to make the profits we need to hire and expand. Allow for increased buying by lowering personal taxes and putting more money into the hands of individuals and businesses.

A recovery will occur quicker than you can say, “Cut expenses and lower the deficit!”
MIKE WARNALIS
Bedford