Your President has a 38% job approval rating. Many of you are on the verge of being voted out of office. You have been labeled spendthrifts. You are accused of trying to shift this country to a European-style Socialist Democracy. You threw a trillion in a stimulus bill that didn’t work. You passed a very unpopular health care bill.
You are perceived as the party that wants bigger government, more government control, more spending, bigger deficits, and continued economic pain for the country.
On you way out the door, you fail to pass a budget for the next fiscal year. You fail to deal with the expiring tax bill. That throws estate planning into no estate planning, since no one knows where the estate tax will be between the zero this year and the 50% potential for next year. Capital gains and dividends are up in the air. Businesses, tax advisers, and investors are left to sit on their cash and wait until they know what the rules will be.
Health care is the same issue. Over 100,000 waivers have been requested. McDonald’s is the most publicized. They have 30,000 employees on a basic insurance plan. It covers normal doctor’s visits, but no catastrophic health needs. Without a waiver, McDonald’s will stop offering this plan. And so on and so forth for business after business across the country.
Never have we seen a more hostile administration to business. Then, they wonder why no one is hiring. From firing a CEO of GM to calling Wall Street “fat cats” while trying to solicit campaign contribution from them, to financial reform, to wanting to tax small businessmen who make more than $250,000 a year, this President and his Congress richly deserve what they are getting.
They have shown they are incompetent, out-of touch with the public, and charging ahead on a mandate they thought they got, but didn’t.
Led by a man the public still finds likable, but not a man who can do the job he was elected to do, they have few options left.
I guess when you reach this point, you just leave town and go home and try to do damage control. Or, in the case of Obama, you go back on the campaign trail and use your 38% approval rating to make sure some of the people who followed you into the swamp find the alligators.
