Dear Mr. President,...Hold Your Fire!

Open letter to the President:

From NRO- Priority #1: Call off your administration’s war on business.

Recently I have written several columns dealing with what ails our economy. I have afterwards been astounded at the number of comments I receive informing me that wrecking the economy is part of your administration’s plan to drive the nation into the ground so that it can be rebuilt as a socialist utopia where government pied pipers will lead us all to nirvana.

I, for one, do not for an instant believe you purposely want to harm the economy. In fact, with the 2012 election looming, I am certain you are second to no one in your desire to claim credit for a booming economy. Therefore I am wondering why you appear to be desperately avoiding doing anything that could get the economy moving again.

The only answer I can come up with is that you don’t know what to do, and you are surrounded by advisers who are just as clueless. Seven quarters of lousy growth numbers since the official end of the recession, last week’s stock plunge, Friday’s downgrade of the nation’s debt rating, and stubbornly high unemployment are all screaming the same message: What you have been doing is not working. One wonders, then, why all the proposals coming from your administration appear to call for more of the same.

Albert Einstein once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over in hopes of a different outcome. Mr. President, you need two things: new ideas, and a willingness to act on them. The White House has become an echo chamber, where the same limited ideas get repeated ad nauseam. Giving a failed policy such as the stimulus program a new name — the infrastructure bank — does not disguise the fact that you are trying to enact Son of Stimulus.

It would help if you (and Republicans also) stopped obsessing about only one side of the economic equation — the debt. It is time to move the debate to the topic of growth. When the nation’s economy is growing, jobs multiply, government revenues increase, and the debt becomes a bit more manageable. You can’t ignore the debt, but you can start putting forward options to get the country past the seemingly endless debates over spending. -----------------Read more