Small Businesses are Not Hiring – Why Should They?
21st August 2010
Businesses have a legitimate worry about health care costs, rising taxes, and other artifacts of Obama’s legislation.
On the consumer side, this is not a typical recession. This is a credit bust recession with consumers still deleveraging. With savings deposits yielding close to 0% and with credit card rates over 20%, common sense dictates consumers pay down bills rather than make new purchases. The housing bubble has burst and boomers are headed into retirement with insufficient savings.
That Mr. Fleischer fails to articulate reasons that others agree with is irrelevant. The pertinent fact is he is not hiring.
In other words: It doesn’t matter whether a business owner is right in his reasons for not hiring; the key fact is that he’s not hiring. And unless the government can change his mind, he’s not going to be hiring in the near future. Ponder what the government has done so far to encourage job creation — such as passing out money to local governments so that they can pay government workers, bailing out large financial and manufacturing enterprises, mandating new and expensive entitlements, and increasing the national debt like a balloon vendor at a state fair. What is there in all of this to encourage a small business owner to hire anybody?