The Fallacy of Business Uncertainty

As I mentioned earlier, it is important that Democrats address the "uncertainty" argument with urgency and clarity.  Kevin Drum at Mother Jones lays out many of the problems with the persistent uncertainty meme in a post Sunday:

• PPACA has no impact on small businesses and only a minuscule impact on large businesses. Medium-sized businesses face a modest penalty if their workers use federal subsidies to enroll in private insurance programs via the exchange. In other words, the overall financial impact on the business community is pretty modest. What's more, there's really not much uncertainty here. The broad impact of PPACA's rules is already clear, and they don't take effect until 2014 anyway. This is not having a significant impact on business investment decisions in 2010.
• There's no excuse for Congress leaving tax policy up in the air for as long as it has. But even with that said, the Bush tax cuts affected personal tax rates, not business rates. And despite demagoguing to the contrary, even if the Bush tax cuts expire completely the effect on small businesses would be close to zero.
• Financial reform was a fairly modest affair, and in any case its effect is almost entirely restricted to the financial sector. Its effect on the rest of the business community is slight.

He concludes:

The uncertainty meme is just mind boggling. Businesses always have a certain amount of regulatory uncertainty to deal with, and there's simply no evidence that this uncertainty is any greater now than it usually is. (It is, of course, entirely believable that business owners who spend too much time watching Fox or reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page might believe otherwise, but that's a whole different problem — and one that Imrohoroglu should spend his time debunking, not promoting.) The only significant real uncertainty that American businesses face right now is financial uncertainty: that is, whether there will be enough consumer demand next year to justify hiring more workers and buying more equipment today.

There is plenty more to say here, but the point is to not roll-over on these Republican memes.  It is simply not true that Obama has introduced economic uncertainty with his policies and Democrats should not be afraid to say so.  If anything, the GOP is creating uncertainty with their consistent obstruction and promises of passing impossible legislation.