Instead, when employers listen to the president's grand ideas for health-care reform, they must quietly cringe at increased costs per worker. When they hear soaring rhetoric about cap-and-trade energy policy, they must silently fear higher power costs.
Worse still has been the promiscuous talk this past year about all sorts of higher taxes.
During the 2008 campaign and the president's first year, we heard Obama promise new income taxes that would revert to the higher rates of the Clinton administration. But that would now come on top of recent new tax hikes by the states that have often upped their own income and sales taxes by considerable margins since 2000.
During the health-care debate, there were also promises of a special surcharge on "Cadillac health plans," as well as making the upper brackets pay a surcharge to fund the care of others.
And don't forget Obama's inheritance-tax proposals that would have reversed the scheduled one-year repeal (with what many expected would become permanent) of the inheritance tax to a 45 percent tax rate on anything that an individual leaves to his heirs beyond $3.5 million in value -- capital that was already taxed during its acquisition.
As a result of all this tax-talking frenzy, business owners have no idea what their new aggregate tax obligations will be or when they will kick in. They can only sense that the Obama administration wants to go after successful entrepreneurs to fund more federal entitlement for others -- as if the 5 percent of Americans who fork over 55 percent of the aggregate income tax revenue don't pay enough already.
If President Obama really wants to foster job growth, he needs to get specific. Stop the borrowing and instead tell the business community exactly what income, payroll and surcharge taxes he proposes, when they will begin -- and how much he appreciates those who will pay them.
When it comes to creating a psychological climate to encourage employers to start hiring again, a little certainty and a little praise are lot better than uncertainty and talk of taxing even more those who now already pay the most.