One of the main things that U.S. businesses, large or small, could use right now to encourage hiring and expansion is a little breathing room - meaning less federal government interference and intrusion.
But that is the very thing the Obama administration is unwilling to give them.
During a recent speech, the president said his administration would be issuing "more proposals, week by week, that will help businesses hire and put people back to work."
That sounds good, of course: Who, after all, doesn't want more people working in a time of 9.1 percent unemployment?
But what is the evidence that the president's previous "proposals" created jobs? Unemployment is far higher now than it was before the supposedly job-creating "stimulus" bill was enacted more than two years ago. And economic growth this year has been painfully slow. Some think we are heading for another recession, if we ever really got out of the last one.
The president has a fundamental misunderstanding of government's proper role in the economy. Government is not itself the engine of job creation. It can, however, create conditions that foster job growth, by doing things such as protecting property rights, keeping taxes low and imposing only truly necessary regulations for protecting public safety and preventing fraud.
Instead, the nation is being saddled with thousands of pages of regulations under ObamaCare, plus costly new environmental regulations.
The president's promise of "more proposals, week by week" is a step in the wrong direction - unless those proposals involve rolling back Washington's undue intrusions in business and in all of our lives. Regrettably, that doesn't appear to be the case.