Steve Wynn: Obama is the “Greatest Wet Blanket to Business and Progress and Job Creation in My Lifetime”

Even Democratic businessmen are getting disenchanted with the Obama administration and its knee-jerk hostility to anything that creates jobs or wealth. Las Vegas mogul Steve Wynn, a “Harry Reid-supporting Democrat,” lambasted the Obama administration “for destroying the U.S. business climate despite all of his talk about creating jobs,” noting that:

the business community in this country is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he’s gone, everybody’s going to be sitting on their thumbs.

Wynn said he could very quickly create 10,000 new jobs himself and with the multiplier effect help create another 20,000 hires in Las Vegas. But like many other business people in both parties, he’s holding back under the current Democratic Obama administration:

I’m afraid to do anything in the current political environment in the United States. You watch television and see what’s going on, on this debt ceiling issue. And what I consider to be a total lack of leadership from the President and nothing’s going to get fixed until the President himself steps up and wrangles both parties in Congress…I’m saying it bluntly, that this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business and progress and job creation in my lifetime…

Those of us who have business opportunities and the capital to do it are going to sit in fear of the President. And a lot of people don’t want to say that. They’ll say, “Oh God, don’t be attacking Obama.” Well, this is Obama’s deal, and it’s Obama that’s responsible for this fear in America.

The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution, and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don’t invest or holding too much money. We haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody’s afraid of the government, and there’s no need to soft peddling it, it’s the truth.”

And things are just getting worse. Peter Kirsanow has a piece entitled “Business Under Assault” describing how Obama appointees to the National Labor Relations Board are radically altering the ground rules for labor unions and employers by administrative fiat. As he points out, the NLRB’s proposed rules have “at least 17 readily identifiable, substantially deleterious effects” on employers and employees who wish to avoid being forced to join a union and pay union dues. Some of the proposed rules are predicated on the assumption that workers are too stupid to know what’s good for them.

The $800 billion stimulus package also harmed the economy. Its wasteful green-jobs spending backfired, effectively outsourcing thousands of American jobs at taxpayer expense. The stimulus package also wiped out jobs in America’s export sector. Economists Timothy Conley and Bill Dupor say that the stimulus wiped out 550,000 jobs.

New EPA rules dealing with global warming are expected to wipe out more than 800,000 jobs, while proposed EPA ozone rules could wipe out millions more. (Spain’s “green jobs” program, which Obama cited 8 times as a model for his own green jobs and global-warming programs, completely failed, destroying jobs and driving up Spain’s skyrocketing government deficit. Each new green job “created” in Spain wiped out 2.2 existing jobs and cost $800,000.) Obamacare is expected to reduce employment levels by about 800,000 people.