From a Bloomberg News article on business reaction to the primary election results:
Some of the June 8 results make business leaders nervous, raising concerns that both parties are moving toward more rigid ideological positions. Angle, for example, wants the federal Education Department eliminated and has called for the current tax code to be scrapped -- views shared by many Tea Party activists.
"This kind of extremism makes it much harder to plan from a business perspective," said John Castellani, chief executive officer of the Business Roundtable, which represents chief executives.
This is ridiculous. The winner of the Republican primary in Nevada to challenge Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Sharron Angle, managed two small businesses for more than 20 years, according to her campaign Web site. The current tax code, with its sprawling complexity and yearly changes, doesn't exactly enable easy business planning. Replacing it with a simpler code might. Ms. Angle was supported by the Club for Growth, whose members include plenty of business executives whose firms' fate don't depend on the existence of the federal Education Department. What's more "extreme"? Defending the current 71,684-page federal tax code, which both President George W. Bush and President Obama have expressed support for simplifying (Mr. Obama called it "monstrous")? Or scrapping it?
It looks like the Business Roundtable is just trying to curry favor with Mr. Reid (who can still affect their interests between now and November) by calling his opponent extremist. The Bloomberg dispatch, by Lisa Lerer and John McCormick, includes no response by Ms. Angle, nor any indication that one was sought. It's also worth noting that what Bloomberg calls "rigid," some people might call "principled."
