Say, How About This Recovery, Folks?

Uncertainty over the economy, much of it political, is leading businesses to hold back on hiring and investments in their companies despite increased profits.

A new report issued Monday by S&P Valuation and Risk Strategies estimated companies on the S&P 500 will likely pay essentially the same amount of taxes in 2011 as in 2008, a finding that suggests profits are returning to pre-recession levels. Yet these companies are not hiring.

  The Hill

Talk to any owner of a business and they will tell you one of the major issues that inhibits the company's ability to grow is not only the level of regulations, but the proliferation of ongoing new regulations.

[...]

Reducing the regulatory burden would be one way Congress and the administration in Washington could relieve some of the uncertainty facing companies in the private sector .

  iStockAnalyst

Businesses have had at least 25 to 30 years near complete certainty -- certainty that they will pay lower and lower taxes, that they' will face less and less regulation, that they can outsource to their hearts' content (which when it does produce savings, comes at a loss of control, increased business system rigidity, and loss of critical know how). They have also been certain that unions will be weak to powerless, that states and municipalities will give them huge subsidies to relocate, that boards of directors will put top executives on the up escalator for more and more compensation because director pay benefits from this cozy collusion, that the financial markets will always look to short term earnings no matter how dodgy the accounting, that the accounting firms will provide plenty of cover, that the SEC will never investigate anything more serious than insider trading (Enron being the exception that proved the rule).

So this haranguing about certainty simply reveals how warped big commerce has become in the US. Top management of supposedly capitalist enterprises want a high degree of certainty in their own profits and pay. Rather than earn their returns the old fashioned way, by serving customers well, by innovating, by expanding into new markets, their 'certainty' amounts to being paid handsomely for doing things that carry no risk.

  Salon

In all previous postwar economic recoveries, the lion’s share of the increase in national income went to labor compensation (meaning increases in hiring, wages, and benefits) rather than corporate profits, according to the National Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the current upturn, not only is the proportion going to workers far lower than ever before—it is the first time that the share of GDP growth going to corporate coffers has exceeded the labor share.

  Aurora Advisors

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.