WASHINGTON — The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said President Barack Obama’s administration has “vilified” businesses, pursuing tax and regulatory policies that risk pushing the economy into a double-dip recession.
The chamber, the biggest lobbying group for U.S. business, drew a retort from the White House for its rhetoric. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett said “lax regulation” during the previous administration led to the financial crisis that threw the economy into the worst decline since the 1930s.
Congress and “the administration took their eye off the ball,” Tom Donohue, the chamber’s president, said at a Jobs Summit it held in Washington on Wednesday. “They embarked on a course of rapid government expansion, major tax increases and suffocating regulations — going well beyond what had to be done to keep the economy out of a depression.”
The chamber, which has spent more than $30 million lobbying this year, believes the prospect of pending health, financial, environmental and other regulations is stifling business spending and curtailing the economic recovery, Donohue said.
The administration and the Democrat-led Congress worked with business on stimulus legislation in early 2009 that averted an economic collapse, the chamber said in a letter Wednesday to Obama.
“Instead of continuing their partnership with the business community and embracing proven ideas for job creation, they vilified industries while embarking on an ill-advised course of government expansion, major tax increases, massive deficits and job-destroying regulations,” the group said.
Emanuel and Jarrett responded in a letter to the chamber that they were “surprised and disappointed” by the group’s rhetoric. The administration has focused “every single day” on creating jobs and wants to work with businesses to do so, the aides said.
“We will not, however, accept the lax regulation of the financial industry that led to the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression,” they said in the letter. “And we will not stand by while oil and gas companies continue to fight needed changes to outdated regulations that are partially responsible for one of the worst environmental crises in American history” — a reference to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Efforts by the administration to overhaul health care, Wall Street and oil regulations have led to companies being “demonized,” Donohue said.
