Mayor Bloomberg offered some red meat for free-market types like me in his big economic policy speech this morning:
Despite what ideologues on the left believe, government cannot tax and spend its way back to prosperity, especially when that spending is driven by pork barrel politics....
Building confidence is a big part of getting the private sector to invest. There is much pessimism in the system because there is much uncertainty about what Washington might or might not do - on taxes, regulations, and policies. And that uncertainty breeds economic paralysis. Banks have money but are reluctant to loan. Businesses have money but are reluctant to invest in new equipment or new hires. Families, fearing a double-dip recession, are reluctant to spend. The potential for progress is there but nothing is happening. Why? Because government solutions ooze ambiguity.
Right now bureaucrats in Washington - at the direction of lobbyists - are writing thousands of regulations over the health care and financial services industries - the 'fill in the blank' sections in the bills that Congress passed this session. Writing these regulations will probably create more jobs for lawyers and accountants to interpret, explain, and evade than the number of real jobs created by the legislation itself. With billions of dollars at stake, this process has chilled economic activity. We need certainty, rationality, consistency and predictability in the rules of the game. Improving individual business confidence is the most powerful way to stimulate the economy - and best of all, it's free....
Second: Promote trade....Protecting domestic industries from foreign competition is a sure way to stifle innovation and job creation....
Four: Cut business taxes....High federal business taxes can lead companies to move operations overseas .... Similarly, high local taxes can lead businesses, and business leaders, to move out of state.....
Sixth and final step: Fix immigration....There is nothing we could do to unleash innovation and job growth that would be more powerful than fixing our broken immigration system. Right now, our immigration policy is a form of national suicide. We educate the best and brightest from around the world, and then we tell our companies that they can't hire them. We ship them home where they can take what they learned here and use it to create companies and products that compete with ours.
I've got mixed feelings about certain elements of Mr. Bloomberg's leadership in New York, and I certainly don't agree with him, much less the news service he owns, on everything. But taken as a whole that was a constructive speech he gave this morning from the standpoint of promoting freedom and economic growth. It may not make him particularly popular with the lawyers and accountants, but so it goes.
