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Our Struggling Economy

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 12, 2009

Imagine you're an American businessman. You run a company of anywhere from 50 to 1,000 employees. You recognize that the economy is currently struggling through a difficult phase. Your experience with economic cycles over the years has been gained within a broad framework of American entrepreneurism, capitalism and free enterprise.

Now, with a view to preserving your company's competitive position, market share, profitability and other objectives, you need to establish realistic levels of capital investment, hiring goals and other policies. In short, you need to develop a strategic plan for the next three to five years. You've done this successfully in the past, but now you feel paralyzed.

Desperate, you talk to management colleagues and even friendly senior executives in other companies, only to discover that they are as uncertain, fearful and paralyzed as you are.

In the Obama era, how could any CEO or senior manager in America dismayed by the size, shape and destructiveness of financial, energy and healthcare initiatives already in motion, not be troubled about the number and dimension of other shoes that will surely drop over the next three years from this White House and Congress.

Theoretically, you could canvass business managers who worked under communist regimes behind the Iron Curtain for perspective, or perhaps under Marxist or socialist governments in South America, Asia or elsewhere. Unfortunately, they never learned how to cope either.

Make no mistake. This quandary, this atmosphere of fear and uncertainty, this administration, this Congress and this White House, and all the policies antithetical to America, capitalism and a free people emanating from all three, represent the very real and most important reason that the private economy of this country is stagnant.

DAN MCCONNELL

Riverview

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