Last week, I flayed the American Small Business League’s Lloyd Chapman for his absurd claim that legislation introduced by Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) would close the Small Business Administration (see here). As I expected, Chapman’s response is equally absurd.

In an ASBL press release, Chapman actually threatens to take me to court over my calling him a “conspiracy theorist”:

The next time you call me a conspiracy theorist, be ready to back it up with facts. You just might find yourself in court.

Good luck with that, Lloyd. In the meantime, let’s allow the court of public opinion to decide if the following claim you recently made is the stuff of a conspiracy theorist:

Clearly Republicans like Senator Burr, his supporters and groups such as the CATO Institute are directed like puppets by the defense and aerospace industry.

I can’t speak for Sen. Burr, but Chapman’s assertion that the Cato Institute is being “directed like puppets by the defense and aerospace industry” is ridiculous. Cato’s Downsizing Government website, which I co-edit, lays out the case for cutting the Department of Defense.

My Cato colleagues past and present have consistently advocated for a limited U.S. presence abroad:

Cato’s foreign policy vision is guided by the idea of our national defense and security strategy being appropriate for a constitutional republic, not an empire. Cato’s foreign policy scholars question the presumption that an interventionist foreign policy enhances the security of Americans in the post-Cold War world, and maintain instead that interventionism has consequences, including the formation of countervailing alliances, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and even terrorism. The use of U.S. military force should be limited to those occasions when the territorial integrity, national sovereignty, or liberty of the United States is at risk.

Does that strike the reader as anything the defense and aerospace industry would direct Cato to advocate? Clearly, Chapman is hopelessly lost in a fantasy world of his own creation.

Perhaps realizing that he embarrassed himself by threatening me with legal action, Chapman now says that he wants to take a different approach:

I am sure that Tad DeHaven and the staff at the CATO Institute have seen my press release in response to their attack on my credibility. I’d like to take this opportunity to try a different approach and appeal to their sense of patriotism, logic and reason.

He then proceeds to talk about all of the jobs that small businesses create and the fact that federal contracts set aside for small businesses sometimes end up instead benefiting large businesses. Uh, Lloyd, in my “attack” on you, I never said otherwise. I even noted that “Chapman is correct that government contracting is fraught with fraud and abuse.” In my testimony on the SBA before the Senate Small Business Committee, I discussed examples of fraud and abuse in government contracting, including federal contracts set aside for small businesses that ended up benefiting large companies like General Electric and Lockheed Martin.

As I noted in my “attack,” Chapman is focused on the contracting issue whereas I’m primarily focused on the SBA’s loan guarantee programs. I frankly don’t care what firms receive federal contracts so long as work is performed at the lowest cost to taxpayers. I’m more concerned with reducing the size and scope of government, which would mean lower taxes and fewer burdensome regulations for small businesses. Moreover, does Chapman not understand that those government contracts are paid for, in part, by other small businesses through taxes? I would argue that the strength of the small business community should be measured by the goods and services produced for private consumption, not government consumption.

Finally, if Chapman is so pro-small business/anti-big business, why isn’t he concerned with the SBA’s loan guarantee programs? I challenged Chapman on this issue:

I’m all for a serious discussion and debate on the SBA. The SBA’s loan guarantee programs benefit a relatively tiny number of small businesses at the expense of the vast majority of small businesses that do not receive government support. Moreover, the biggest winners from these loan guarantees are big banks who reap the profits but get to kick the bulk of any losses to the government. One would think a pro-small business/anti-big business guy like Chapman would be concerned by this. Instead, Chapman consistently resorts to wild exaggerations and conspiracy theories. As a result, I can’t take him seriously. It’s too bad policymakers do.

The silence from Chapman on this matter is deafening. In addition to resorting to wild exaggerations and conspiracy theories, we can now add the threat of legal action. Until Chapman dispenses with the antics, policymakers should stop taking him seriously.

The Curious Case of Lloyd Chapman is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Last December the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) adopted new standards for crib design, a step mandated by the famously overreaching Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA). The commission decided to go well beyond a set of voluntary design standards that had been widely adopted the year before; it also chose to make the new rules retroactive, rendering unlawful the sale of many existing cribs whose overall safety record is otherwise acceptable—no one would think of subjecting them to a recall, for instance. Commissioner Nancy Nord:

The day care industry did protest that the rule, as proposed, would result in approximately a $1/2 billion hit to a group that could not immediately absorb costs of such magnitude, especially on the heels of having just bought new cribs to meet the standards of 2009. As a result, at the last minute just before finalizing the rule, the Commission agreed to amend the proposed rule to delay the effective date for this group by 18 months. There was no analysis behind this date; basically, it was pulled out of a hat.

Manufacturers and sellers fared less well, however, and were stuck with a deadline of June 28, 2011, that is, today. Commission staff predicted that retailers would not suffer significant economic harm, which turned out to be wrong, as the commission learned when they began hearing from “small retailers who are stuck with stranded inventory that they cannot sell, also asking for a delay,” according to Nord.

How much stranded inventory? Quite a lot, says Commissioner Anne Northup:

The retailers of these cribs, which the Commission deemed were safe enough to continue to be used for another two years in day care facilities, stand to lose at least $32 million dollars when they are required to throw out noncompliant cribs on June 28.

That’s a lot of landfill space that may be needed in coming days. Nord again:

An internal survey of 5 retailers found that those companies had at least 100,000 non-complying cribs in inventory. A survey done by a trade association representing one part of the small retailer community found that 35 companies had 17,500 cribs that cannot legally be sold in two weeks.

Retailers pleading for a longer transition period got no mercy from the hard-line pro-regulation Commission majority led by Obama appointee Inez Tenenbaum. In a similar way, the much vaster stranded-inventory problems and compliance nightmares engendered by CPSIA as a whole keep getting worse rather than better, due to an equally obdurate attitude from the commission’s current leadership and its Democratic allies in Congress. Politically and with the press, there seems to be little downside in striking cost-no-object For the Children postures, even if the result is to place untenable burdens on the sorts of local shopkeepers and service providers who specialize in meeting the everyday needs of children.

Related, at my website Overlawyered: “Thanks for standing by for eight months after we told you to stop selling your infant slings pending a recall. We’ve decided no recall is needed. What, you’re out of business? Never mind.”

100,000+ Cribs May Be Headed for Dumpsters Today is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

“Cat groomers, tattoo artists, tree trimmers and about a dozen other specialists across the country . . .  are clamoring for more rules governing small businesses,” reports the Wall Street Journal in a front-page story today. “They’re asking to become state-licensed professionals, which would mean anyone wanting to be, say, a music therapist or a locksmith, would have to pay fees, apply for a license and in some cases, take classes and pass exams.” And despite all the talk about deregulation and encouraging entrepreneurship, “The most recent study, from 2008, found 23% of U.S. workers were required to obtain state licenses, up from just 5% in 1950,” according to Morris Kleiner of the University of Minnesota.

The Cato Institute has been taking on this issue for decades. In 1986 Stanley Gross of Indiana State University reviewed the economic literature on the impact of licensing on cost and quality. Kleiner wrote in Regulation in 2006:

Occupational regulation has grown because it serves the interests of those in the occupation as well as government. Members of an occupation benefit if they can increase the perception of quality and thus the demand for their services, while restricting supply simultaneously. Government officials benefit from the electoral and monetary support of the regulated as well as the support of the general public, whose members think that regulation results in quality improvement, especially when it comes to reducing substandard services.

Occupational Licensing: It Isn’t Just for Doctors and Lawyers Any More is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

During a recent CNBC debate on federal spending, I argued that government policies are creating uncertainty in the business community. Businesses are reluctant to invest or hire because they’re concerned that the president’s big government agenda will mean higher taxes and more onerous regulations.

I mentioned that every business owner I’ve spoken with has expressed this concern. In fact, the owner of the TV studio I was in told me that he wants to hire more employees but is afraid he may have to turn around and fire them later on thanks to Washington. My debate opponent dismissed my argument on the basis that “you cannot conduct macroeconomic policy by anecdote.”

Unfortunately, there is plenty of evidence to support my concern beyond what I’ve heard from folks in the business community. Yesterday, the chairman of the Business Roundtable, which the Washington Post calls “President Obama’s closest ally in the business community,” said that the president and his Democratic allies are creating an “increasingly hostile environment for investment and job creation.”

From the article:

Ivan G. Seidenberg, chief executive of Verizon Communications, said that Democrats in Washington are pursuing tax increases, policy changes and regulatory actions that together threaten to dampen economic growth and “harm our ability . . . to grow private-sector jobs in the U.S.”

“In our judgment, we have reached a point where the negative effects of these policies are simply too significant to ignore,” Seidenberg said in a lunchtime speech to the Economic Club of Washington. “By reaching into virtually every sector of economic life, government is injecting uncertainty into the marketplace and making it harder to raise capital and create new businesses.”

Big businesses aren’t the only ones complaining. Surveys of small businesses conducted by the National Federation of Independent Business continue to point to government taxes and regulations as their single biggest obstacle.

Even the Washington Post’s editorial page is now acknowledging that government-induced uncertainty is an issue:

But as analysts ponder the mystery of weak private-sector hiring despite signs of economic growth, it’s worth asking what role is played by government-induced uncertainty. With the federal government promoting major changes in health care, financial regulation and energy law, it wouldn’t be surprising if some companies are more inclined to wait and see than they might otherwise be. And that’s especially true when they look at looming American indebtedness and the effect that could have on long-term interest rates.

The uncertainty caused by expanding government that we are facing today isn’t a new phenomenon. Economist Robert Higgs coined the phrase “regime uncertainty” in a study that showed that FDR’s anti-business policies prolonged the Great Depression. Had the Roosevelt administration heeded the “anecdotes” from the business community in the 1930s, perhaps the country could have been spared some pain. Let’s hope history doesn’t repeat itself.

Uncertainty More Than Anecdotal is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Atlantic has posted (h/t Future of Capitalism) an article by Virginia artisanal meat provider Joe Cloud sounding the alarm about how as regulation intensifies, only producers with the scale and sophistication to deal with it will be left standing:

Although species go extinct on Earth on a regular basis, every so often there is a major event that comes along and wipes out 40 or 50 percent of them. The same thing happens in the small business world. A few businesses fold every year due to retirement, poor management, and changes in the market, and that is quite normal. But then every so often a catastrophe comes along and causes a wholesale wipeout.

For small meat businesses in America, catastrophic events result from changes high up in the regulatory food chain that make it very difficult for small plants to adapt. The most recent extinction event occurred at the turn of the millennium, when small and very small USDA-inspected slaughter and processing plants were required to adopt the costly Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) food safety plan. It has been estimated that 20 percent of existing small plants, and perhaps more, went out of business at that time. Now, proposed changes to HACCP for small and very small USDA-inspected plants threaten to take down many of the ones that remain, making healthy, local meats a rare commodity.

I’ve been following this particular controversy for a while, and perhaps its most depressing aspect is how very typical the pattern is. In 2008, following demands that it do something about much-publicized Chinese toy recalls, Congress passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, which devastated many hundreds of smaller manufacturers, importers and retailers of children’s clothing and playthings while leaving relatively unscathed Mattel, Hasbro, and the biggest discount retailers (all of which had in fact supported passage of the law). More recently, major food and agribusiness firms have signed on to support a major new round of federal food safety regulation despite warnings that it could pose big compliance challenges for many local bakers, fruit-baggers, and other small providers whether or not their products pose any notable risks.

I generally share many of the views of the “locavore” movement regarding the value of distinctive local food cultures and the importance to kids and cooks of getting a more direct sense where food comes from. Trouble is, some of us who imagine ourselves friendly to locavore thinking reflexively support whatever regulatory proposals are billed as most stringent and thus most protective. By the time we realize the choices we have lost, it can be too late.

Goodbye to Locally Processed Meats? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Obama has announced his intention to use $30 billion in TARP funds to create a new small business lending fund.  In all likelihood, this is $30 billion the taxpayers will never see returned.

First of all, the problem facing small business, outside of the massive uncertainty being created by Washington, is one of credit availability, not cost.  For those who can get credit, its quite cheap, arguably too cheap.  So if the president doesn’t intend to lower the cost of credit, the plan must be to lower the quality; using the $30 billion to cover expected credit losses.  Of course, we tried throwing lots of taxpayer money at unsustainable homeownership, is there any reason to believe throwing taxpayer money at unsustainable businesses is going to work any better?

Using TARP funds for this program is also somewhat disingenuous.  This program adds $30 billion to the deficit regardless of whether it’s funded by TARP or by Congressional appropriations.  Taking from the TARP only allows the President to keep treating the TARP as his personal slush fund.  Nowhere in the TARP legislation can you find language authorizing the use of funds to cover credit losses on new loans.  Being a constitutional scholar, the President should know very well that the spending power rests with Congress, not the President.  If we are to have a new small business lending program, it should be designed and funded by Congress, not bureaucrats at the Treasury Department.

Historically the two main sources of small business start-up funding have been home equity and credit cards.  Clearly the availability of home equity has declined.  Sadly as well, with the passing of credit card “reform” the availability of credit card lending has also declined.  If the President truly wants to help small business, then the first thing to do is ask Congress to repeal the credit card bill and then just get out of the way.

Obama Small Business Lending Fund Likely A Bust is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Cato experts put some of President Obama’s core State of the Union claims to the test. Here’s what they found.

THE STIMULUS

Obama’s claim:

The plan that has made all of this possible, from the tax cuts to the jobs, is the Recovery Act. That’s right — the Recovery Act, also known as the Stimulus Bill. Economists on the left and the right say that this bill has helped saved jobs and avert disaster.

Back in reality: At the outset of the economic downturn, Cato ran an ad in the nation’s largest newspapers in which more than 300 economists (Nobel laureates among them) signed a statement saying a massive government spending package was among the worst available options. Since then, Cato economists have published dozens of op-eds in major news outlets poking holes in big-government solutions to both the financial system crisis and the flagging economy.

CUTTING TAXES

Obama’s claim:

Let me repeat: we cut taxes. We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families. We cut taxes for small businesses. We cut taxes for first-time homebuyers. We cut taxes for parents trying to care for their children. We cut taxes for 8 million Americans paying for college. As a result, millions of Americans had more to spend on gas, and food, and other necessities, all of which helped businesses keep more workers.

Back in reality: Cato Director of Tax Policy Studies Chris Edwards: “When the president says that he has ‘cut taxes’ for 95 percent of Americans, he fails to note that more than 40 percent of Americans pay no federal incomes taxes and the administration has simply increased subsidy checks to this group. Obama’s refundable tax credits are unearned subsidies, not tax cuts.”

Visit Cato’s Tax Policy Page for much more on this.

SPENDING FREEZE

Obama’s claim:

Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years.

Back in reality: Edwards: “The president’s proposed spending freeze covers just 13 percent of the total federal budget, and indeed doesn’t limit the fastest growing components such as Medicare.

“A better idea is to cap growth in the entire federal budget including entitlement programs, which was essentially the idea behind the 1980s bipartisan Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law. The freeze also doesn’t cover the massive spending under the stimulus bill, most of which hasn’t occurred yet. Now that the economy is returning to growth, the president should both freeze spending and rescind the remainder of the planned stimulus.”

Plus, here’s why these promised freezes have never worked in the past and a chart illustrating the fallacy of Obama’s spending claims.

JOB CREATION

Obama’s claim:

Because of the steps we took, there are about two million Americans working right now who would otherwise be unemployed. 200,000 work in construction and clean energy. 300,000 are teachers and other education workers. Tens of thousands are cops, firefighters, correctional officers, and first responders. And we are on track to add another one and a half million jobs to this total by the end of the year.

Back in reality: Cato Policy Analyst Tad Dehaven: “Actually, the U.S. economy has lost 2.7 million jobs since the stimulus passed and 3.4 million total since Obama was elected. How he attributes any jobs gains to the stimulus is the fuzziest of fuzzy math. ‘Nuff said.”

State of the Union Fact Check is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The board game Monopoly first took off during the Great Depression. A different game has become popular during today’s Great Recession. In this game, politicians race against high unemployment to create jobs in order to save their own. The players (politicians) have unlimited tax and borrowing authority, and can call upon friendly economists to help them maneuver. The players even get to keep score, although the media can penalize shoddy scorekeeping. Ultimately, voters will decide which players win and lose in the fall elections.

Okay, I’m being facetious. But as politicians continue to throw trillions of dollars at the economy in a vain effort to create jobs, and the media continues to go along with it by obsessing over meaningless job counts, the entire spectacle has become surreal. If government job creation is a game, the losers have been the taxpayers underwriting it, as well as the employers (and their employees) who are closing shop, laying off workers, or not hiring because of uncertainty over what big government schemes will be next.

Two news articles point to this “regime uncertainty” being generated by Washington.

First, the government’s chief technology officer, Aneesh Chopra, received a somewhat hostile reception at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas according to the BBC:

“The government doesn’t spur innovation or entrepreneurship. The government often gets in the way,” said Mr. [Gary] Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) which stages CES.

It [CEA] also had little support for President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus act calling it “panic spending” and warned of the growing federal deficit.

“The government is often a barrier,” said Mr. Shapiro. “High taxes and regulatory bureaucracy are barriers.”

Mr. Chopra’s response was typical of the political-bureaucratic mindset:

He said the US government was planning a summit with a number of chief executives from the “most innovative companies in the country to directly advise us to make government more efficient and more effective”.

Ah, another summit.

In the other article, the CNBC headline says it all: “Many Reluctant to Hire Because of New Taxes, Rules.” The article makes it clear that what businesses don’t need is another orchestrated summit:

The prospect of increased federal and state regulation and taxes has been particularly disruptive to the hiring plans of small- and medium-sized businesses, which have historically generated about two-thirds of the nation’s jobs. “I don’t really see the private sector hiring much in the next few months,” says Brian Bethune, an economist at Global Insight. “For the small-business sector there is just too much uncertainty about what happens beyond 2010.”

In reporting that its small business optimism index fell for the second straight month in December, the National Federation of Independent Business Tuesday said members’ No. 2 reason for not expanding payrolls was the prospect of government policy initiatives…”We’re hearing it more and more from our membership,” says Bill Rys, the NFIB’s tax counsel. “At the federal level, there’s uncertainty about tax rates, health care costs, energy costs. You also have what’s going on at the state and local levels, with new fees and taxes. They’re reluctant to jump back in.”

Unfortunately, instead of heeding the business community’s message, the Obama administration is focusing its energies on tinkering with the game’s scorekeeping. From ABC News:

The Obama administration has taken some heat and mockery for using the nebulous and non-economic term of jobs being “saved or created” by the $787 billion stimulus program.

So it’s gotten rid of it.

In a little-noticed December 18, 2009 memo from Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag the Obama administration is changing the way stimulus jobs are counted.

The memo, first noted by ProPublica, says that those receiving stimulus funds no longer have to say whether a job has been saved or created.

“Instead, recipients will more easily and objectively report on jobs funded with Recovery Act dollars,” Orszag wrote.

In other words, if the project is being funded with stimulus dollars – even if the person worked at that company or organization before and will work the same place afterward – that’s a stimulus job.

The American people are rightly growing tired of this nonsense. But it’s important that they understand that the idea of government job creation was flawed from the get-go. The government cannot simply wave a magic wand and create jobs without making private sector jobs disappear at the same time because of higher taxing and borrowing. There is no free lunch with government.

Federal Job Creation is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• Whether you’re insured, uninsured, get health insurance on your own or through an employer, own a small business or work for someone else,  this is what the health care bill means for you.

• An update on the hidden taxes in the health care bill.

• Why Obama should order the DEA to make more pot available for medical research.

• The U.S. Constitution mentions only three federal crimes (treason, piracy, and counterfeiting). Today, there are more than 4,000.

• Podcast: “Myths of Health Care Reform.”

Tuesday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today’s Politico Arena asks:

The WH Jobs Summit: “A little less conversation? A little more action? ( please)”

My response:

Today’s White House ‘Jobs Summit’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Despite the economic stimulus and various financial bailouts, our economy continues to shed jobs.  One of the reasons for continued job losses is the decline in new hires, especially the lack of new hiring by small business.

As bank analyst Meredith Whitney discusses in the Wall Street Journal [$], all the major credit programs created by Congress and the Federal Reserve have been targeted at big corporations and Wall Street firms.  However, small companies, especially start-ups and partnerships, do not issue bonds in the debt markets, nor do they borrow from Goldman Sachs.  So these firms have been left out in the cold, as federal credit inventions have favored corporate America.

Adding insult to injury is that not only has Washington subsidized credit to large firms, it has taken actions that restrict the credit available to small firms and start-ups.  The prime example of this is the Credit Card Reform Act signed by President Obama in May.

As Whitney reports, “Credit cards are the most common source of liquidity to small businesses, used by 82 percent as a vital portion of their overall funding.”  In restricting the usage of credit cards and reducing the ability to risk-base price, Washington has eliminated the most important source of credit to small business.

Of course, being unable to project their future health care costs, or tax burdens (yes, they are going up, but by how much), many small businesses have either been forced to or chosen to sit on the sidelines of our economy.  Washington needs to recognize that Wall Street and corporate American are not the sum of our economy, if we hope to turn the employment situation around.

Credit Card Act Is Affecting the Job Market is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog