Ron Johnson Slams Obama, Puts Forward Own Economic Plan

By Sophie Quinton, National Journal

President Obama’s “job-killing” policies have “taken America 180 degrees in the wrong direction,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., opined in the Washington Times on Tuesday. Johnson, a former CEO of a mid-sized manufacturing business, slammed the Obama administration’s efforts to revive the economy and outlined his proposals to restore consumer confidence.

“I’m confident the president’s umpteenth attempt at a jobs program will be nothing more than a slight variation on already-tried-and-failed themes. Why would we expect anything different or think he has any personal knowledge on how to create jobs?” Johnson wrote.

Johnson blamed economic stimulus, health care reform, the Dodd-Frank bill, and an “explosion” of regulations for unsettling markets, businesses, and consumers. He accused the president of being “blinded by ideology” and noted that few in the administration have private-sector experience.

Johnson’s proposals include: repealing Dodd-Frank and the Affordable Care Act, streamlining the tax code, creating a “credible” plan to control spending, increasing domestic energy production and imposing a moratorium on new regulations and civil-service hiring. Both the House and Senate should have permanent ‘sunset’ committees focused on eliminating laws and regulations, Johnson wrote.

Johnson also said he would work with the House to improve the budgeting process. He recommended a shift to ‘zero-based’ budgeting and a biennial budget process that authorizes spending in the first year and conducts spending oversight in the second. He also recommended that all spending be authorized “regularly” by Congress, and that Congress and the administration should be required to make entitlement programs structurally solvent “for 75 years by fiscal 2014.”

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Washington Times Op-Ed: Obama at a loss

Applying business sense to government can get U.S. back on track

When stock prices were plunging earlier this month, President Obama strode to the teleprompter and utterly failed to calm the markets or the American people. Sadly, they saw what I saw – and have come to exactly the same conclusion: Mr. Obama does not know what to do. He never did.

Since taking office in admittedly tough economic conditions, the president has taken America 180 degrees in the wrong direction. His failed $825-billion stimulus, Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and the explosion of his administration’s other job-killing regulations have combined to put a stranglehold on our economy. Until these policies are reversed, the lack of confidence that dampens consumption, business investment and job creation will be the order of the day. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama is blinded by ideology and refuses to acknowledge the harm his agenda has wreaked on America and our economic future.

Fortunately, some in Congress understand the harm his agenda is causing and are working hard to reverse course.

As a thought experiment, imagine how much uncertainty would be removed and the level of confidence that would return if the entire Obama agenda were repealed tomorrow. A pretty pleasant thought, isn’t it?

We can’t repeal the additional $4 trillion that has been added to our nation’s debt during his tenure, but we can repeal his agenda – the sooner the better. I can’t think of a more effective first step in any “jobs program,” and I challenge anyone to come up with a better one. I’m confident the president’s umpteenth attempt at a jobs program will be nothing more than a slight variation on already-tried-and-failed themes. Why would we expect anything different or think he has any personal knowledge on how to create jobs?

Few on Mr. Obama’s team have ever built a company, manufactured or marketed a product or balanced the company books. They have no clue how to get our economy reignited and no clue how to create an atmosphere in which the private sector can create the jobs we need. To them, the private sector is little more than a cash cow to fund bigger, more expensive government in Washington.

As the former chief executive officer of a midsized manufacturing business, I do understand the value of the real job producers in America. I also understand how Mr. Obama’s policies affect their ability to expand their businesses and create new jobs. What we need to do to get our economy moving again is pretty obvious. Here’s a short outline of the necessary components of a solution:

• Repeal Obamacare and Dodd-Frank: Neither of these laws fixed the problems they were designed to solve, and instead, they do far more harm than good.
• Regulation moratorium: The $1.75-trillion-per-year regulatory burden is making the United States a very unattractive place for global business investment. Imposing a moratorium on new regulations is a necessary first step in reversing the damage. A bill I introduced last month would do just that.
• Credible plan to control spending: The elements of the “Cut, Cap and Balance” plan had the support of 66 percent to 74 percent of the American people. Once consumers and investors are convinced we have spending under control, confidence will return to our economy.
• Tax reform: Our 70,000-page tax code costs taxpayers more than $300 billion in annual compliance costs to raise $2.2 trillion in revenue. It is riddled with special treatments that result in less efficient economic behavior. Reforms should make the system more streamlined in a way that promotes rather than harms economic growth.
• Budget reform: I will work with House members to pass legislation that will:

1. Replace “base-line” budgeting with “zero-based” budgeting.
2. Require Congress and the administration to make all entitlements structurally solvent for 75 years by fiscal 2014.
3. Require all spending to be authorized regularly by Congress. (Currently, 70 percent of the budget is on automatic pilot.)
4. Replace the annual budget process with a biennial budget process that authorizes spending in Year 1 and conducts spending oversight in Year 2.

• Civil service hiring freeze: Controlling the size of the federal work force would be a powerful tool in limiting the size, scope and cost of government.
• Energy security: The United States should protect our national security and help ensure price competition by fully utilizing our own natural energy resources.
• Congressional “sunset” committees: Both the House and Senate should have permanent committees whose only focus would be on the elimination of unneeded laws and regulations. More often than not, government has become part of the problem instead of the solution.

I am willing and eager to work with anyone who is serious about addressing the long-term fiscal crisis facing our nation. Hopefully, Mr. Obama will begin to realize the harm his agenda has caused and work with Congress to reverse course quickly.

Sen. Ron Johnson is a Republican from Wisconsin and former chief executive officer of Pacur LLC.

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The Hill: Johnson promotes federal hiring freeze

By Josiah Ryan

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) on Thursday promoted his plan to shrink the federal government by putting a hold on new hiring.

“I think we need to do a federal hiring freeze, through attrition,” Johnson told Channel 12 News, an ABC affiliate station.”You don’t have to fire anybody, just don’t hire as people retire.”

“The way to limit the growth of government is don’t add new employees,” added Johnson who said he plans to actively pursue the idea when returns to Washington after the August recess.

Johnson, who is among the most conservative members of the Senate, also defended his decision to vote against the debt-ceiling deal earlier this month on grounds that it did not slash enough in spending.

“What I object to about this debt-ceiling agreement, it gave Americans a false sense that Washington was actually fixing the problem,” Johnson said. “They’re not.”

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More Regulation Is the Last Thing Economy Needs: Ramesh Ponnuru

At least one sector of the economy is booming, and President Barack Obama can legitimately take credit for it. Since he took office, employment has surged 13 percent at federal regulatory agencies. The regulators’ budgets are up 16 percent. (These numbers are derived from a May report published by Washington University and George Washington University.) And that’s before some of the major regulatory initiatives of the administration — the financial-reform bill and the health-care overhaul — are fully implemented.

Obama understands that a reputation for regulatory hyperactivity in the midst of a weak economy wouldn’t help his re-election prospects. In January, he promised “a government- wide review of the rules already on the books to remove outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive.” That review led to some modest improvements: The Environmental Protection Agency pulled back a rule that would have treated dairy spills on farms as though they were oil spills.

Overall, though, the regulatory burden on the economy is still growing.

Calories, Ozone, Boilers

The new health-care law will force major fast-food chains to re-do their signs to include calorie information — a change that one chief executive officer said would cost his company as much as building 1 1/2 new (job-providing) restaurants.

The EPA is moving ahead with plans to tighten restrictions on ozone. Hundreds of counties don’t meet the standards at the moment; companies investing in them will face new obstacles. The EPA estimates the annual cost of the new rules will be at least $19 billion. The agency is also planning to put in place new directives on boilers, which manufacturers say would impose $14 billion in capital costs. The CEO of Southern Co. warns that the boiler regulations will make electricity service more prone to interruptions as well as more expensive.

Reviewing data from the Government Accountability Office, two analysts for the conservative Heritage Foundation concluded, “No other president has burdened businesses and individuals with a higher number and larger cost of regulations in a comparable time period.” President George W. Bush, they note, was in his third year before new compliance costs hit $4 billion. “President Obama achieved the same in 12 months.”

Going Too Far

Regulations already on the books provide some benefits, such as improved health and a cleaner environment, and many proposed rules would presumably also yield positives. But there is good reason to think that federal government has a tendency to go too far.

For one thing, most of the costs of regulation — the Small Business Administration estimates that compliance costs in 2008 were $1.75 trillion — don’t appear in the budget. If legislators are lax when it comes to on-budget spending, how much freer are they likely to be with outlays that don’t show up in the deficit figures? Nor can we assume that industry will reliably check the growth of regulation, since large companies sometimes welcome regulations that hobble their smaller competitors.

Republicans on Capitol Hill are promoting two pieces of legislation to turn back the regulatory tide. One is the “REINS Act,” which would require Congress to approve any new rule with major economic effects. The bill is motivated by the view that regulation harms the economy, and that Congress has handed over too much of its legislative power to regulatory agencies.

Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, has introduced legislation to declare a moratorium on major new regulations until the unemployment rate drops to 7.7 percent — that is, until it goes lower than it was when Obama took office. (The president would have the power to waive the rule to address national emergencies.)

‘Ball and Chain’

“I’m not anti-government,” Johnson told me. “We do need some regulation. The purpose of my piece of legislation is to call a halt to the issuance of new regulations until we get our economy back on its feet.” The amount of regulation, he adds, “is a ball and chain on the necks of job creators.”

Johnson is, of course, making a partisan point by choosing an unemployment target tied to Obama’s inauguration. His 20 co- sponsors are all Republicans. But the underlying concept is attractive. A permanent ban on new regulation wouldn’t make sense. Ultimately, we need a rational structure where some rules go and others stay. Existing executive orders that require agencies to undertake cost-benefit analyses before issuing regulations should be codified in legislation, and strengthened to require that the analysis be published before the regulation takes effect.

But why not sidestep the debate over the merits of particular rules and the shape of a new system for now, and just agree that this isn’t the time to pile new burdens on the economy? If we have gotten by this long without whatever safety and health benefits these regulations may bring, surely we can go a few more years without them. Congress would, of course, retain the power to enact new laws should new needs arise that don’t qualify as emergencies. But regulatory creep would halt.
Obama has challenged Congress to put country before politics. Perhaps Congress and the president should try putting recovery before regulation.

(Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg View columnist and a senior editor at National Review. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Full article.

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Johnson: Economy, less government solution to deficit

By: Shelley Nelson

Superior Telegram

Washington D.C. doesn’t have an ideology problem; it has a math problem.

That’s according to Sen. Ron Johnson, the Oshkosh Republican who defeated former Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold in November.

Johnson stopped at the Superior Telegram a week ago to discuss the state of the economy, his a proposal he put forth a moratorium on new regulations until jobs are created and unemployment drops, and what it’s going to take to balance the federal budget.

“I’ve always thought this was going to be a two step process,” Johnson said of balancing the budget. “I don’t think you’re going to find the political will to actually do the spending controls — prioritize spending, reform the entitlement programs — first of all, until we have a statutory requirement to do so, and in the end, I think you need a constitutional amendment.”

While the house and senate were debating how to come to an agreement that would allow both legislative bodies to come to an agreement on spending limits to raise the nation’s debt ceiling, Johnson made a plea to fellow senators to consider adopting Cut, Cap and Balance — a legislative proposal that went nowhere in the debate.

“Until you cut spending — actually cut, like real cuts from the previous year, like $100 billion, I think that’s the only way you cut close to $1 trillion over 10 years, because you can actually lower the baseline,” Johnson said. “Then you’ve locked in structural spending reductions.”

Johnson said the recent debate in Washington D.C. wasn’t about cutting federal spending; it was about reducing the rate of growth. The only actual cuts that were made were to discretionary accounts, about $10 billion in total over the next two years, he said.

“Our total budget is not declining,” Johnson said. “It’s continuing to grow … we’re not actually talking about cutting. I think that’s an important distinction … we’re trying to limit its growth.”

Johnson said bona fide cuts are just the first step. A cap on federal spending would have limited growth based on the nation’s gross domestic product. And finally, he said, the goal was for the House of Representatives and Senate to raise the debt ceiling only after passing a constitutional amendment and send it out to the states to consider, but no one was willing to risk default he said. “We weren’t going to let that happen,” Johnson said.

“The fact is most states operate with a balance budget amendment; certainly Wisconsin does,” Johnson said. He said while the deficit was difficult to fix in Wisconsin, he said the federal deficit is ten times worse to deal with and there are no spending controls in place.

Regulation control

The root cause of out-of-control government spending is it has gotten so large, Johnson said. He said over the last 50 years federal expenditures have averaged a little more than 20 percent of the gross domestic product. In 2009, that spiked up to 25 percent; it’s a little below that now, but the cost of federal government is on a path up to 40 percent of the GDP.

Because of that, Johnson introduced the Regulation Moratorium and Job Preservation Act. The act is designed to put the brakes on regulations that drive up costs for employers.

“President Obama had the SBA (Small Business Administration) commission a study that looked at what it cost for businesses to comply with regulations,” Johnson said. “The study came back saying it cost $1.75 trillion a year just to comply with all the federal rules and regulations and tax code. That’s about 12.5 percent of our total economy. That’s above and beyond what taxes we pay.”

As a manufacturer, a partner in PACUR LLC in Oshkosh, which manufactures custom plastic sheets through extrusion, Johnson said he knows what it takes to comply with regulations.

“As opposed to creating products, creating jobs, they’re creating paperwork,” Johnson said. “They’re complying with regulations. That has an economic cost. It costs jobs. It costs sales. It costs economic activity.”

Johnson said he hears from Wisconsin business owners regularly who come in to discuss new regulations that keep coming into play.

The senator said while the nation does need regulation, the problem is those regulations keep growing more stringent with little benefit.

“I just think it’s prudent right now — when we have unemployment at 9.1 percent — to say stop the madness,” Johnson said. “Stop issuing new regulations; give employers a chance to breathe so we can actually start creating jobs … Hopefully, at that point in time, people will realize this is working. Maybe we should start taking a look at our regulatory environment … they can’t be so onerous and so large and having such a large cost on our economy.”

And it’s an issue the city of Superior is facing right now. Three years after the city introduced a storm water utility to address infrastructure needs to manage storm water, the council is faced again with a decision to raise wastewater fees to meet more stringent environmental regulations. The increases are likely to add more than 50 percent over the next few years to the current cost to treat wastewater.

When the issue was debated last year, Mayor Dave Ross said the returns on the investment were diminishing; the costly projects driving the rates rapidly upward were targeting just a small amount of pollution.

And the city has little choice but to meet the regulations or risk another moratorium that would limit construction and economic growth — an issue the city faced in the early 1990s.

Johnson called it the law of diminishing returns.

“If we don’t do it now, when our debt is the equal size to our economy, when our unemployment rate is 9.1 percent and it’s just stuck, we have to do this now,” Johnson said of getting the regulatory environment under control. “We have to start dialing it back. The problem is our federal bureaucracy has just metastasized.”

Johnson said the regulatory environment is out of control.

“The problem is they regulate one thing, they go ‘OK, I’m done with that; now what else can I regulate?’” Johnson said. Ozone, for example, was dropped to 75 parts per million in 2008, and now regulators want to drop it to 60 ppm, he said, adding that manufacturers estimate the cost for that to be about $1 trillion.

“It’s just out of control,” Johnson said. And it is having an impact on economic decisions made by manufacturers who must compete in a global economy.

“We need to dramatically reverse course … the first step in reversing course is let’s stop the growth,” Johnson said.

Growing the economy

According to Johnson, the best way to improve the government’s balance sheets is to improve the economy and reduce government spending and growth.

After all, while the nation spends about 20.4 percent of the gross domestic product annually, that’s more than the 18 percent the federal government takes in — a consistent figure irrespective of the tax rate, Johnson said.

And the corporate tax rate — among the highest in the world — inhibits economic growth when global companies not committed to the success of the United States decide to site their manufacturing facilities in other countries.

Johnson said he wouldn’t dream of moving his company because 80 percent of his customers are in the U.S. and he’s committed to excellent customer service. However, he said, there are some companies willing to make that choice to be accountable to their shareholders who expect a return on their investment.

Anytime someone talks about a balanced approach and increasing taxes, the American people should ask how many jobs that will produce, Johnson said.

“How much will that tax increase grow our economy?” Johnson asked. “I know it will grow government but how does that grow our economy. The private sector is the only thing that produces long-term sustaining jobs. It pays for government. We’ve got to grow the economy … We need a healthy, strong economy.”

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The Hill: Obama doesn’t know what to do, says GOP senator

President Obama seems baffled by the numerous problems facing the country, suggested freshman Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) on Wednesday.

“I realize, very sadly, he doesn’t know what to do,” said Johnson of Obama, as reported by The Sheboygan Press. “He never did.”

Johnson added it “would be a disaster” to reelect President Obama based on his mishandling of the debt crisis, healthcare reform and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street regulatory reform legislation.

Johnson, who was speaking to a group of Rotary Clubs at the Oshkosh Convention Center, said he fears the U.S. is losing its gift and called for good people to join politics to fight to save the country.

“We have got to demand that we start making changes in this country, that we actually seriously address the problems facing this nation,” said Johnson. “[T]hat’s going to take people stepping up to run for office. Good people, not people … that want the title, but people who recognize America is something precious. … We’ve been given a gift here, and we’re blowing it.”

By Josiah Ryan

Article here.

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