Any positions I take on issues discussed here in this weekly blog are always from the perspective of business owners. It is business owners I serve and their interests are also my own so, let's take a look at what the new landscape might be like for businesses and the people who run them.
For the record, I support Donald Trump for President because I believe his policies will be better for small business owners and American citizens in general. The last four years were devastating for many owners especially during the covid madness; over 3 million small businesses closed never to open again as a direct result of highly intrusive and mostly ineffective mandates which in some states even had owners jailed for opening their doors.
"Consider the vaccine passports alone. Six cities were locked down to include only the vaccinated in public indoor places. They were New York City, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Seattle. The plan was to enforce this with a vaccine passport. It broke. Once the news leaked that the shot didn’t stop infection or transmission, the planners lost public support and the scheme collapsed."
If there's one aspect of government I could change it would be the permanent bureaucrat class; I have many customers in those cities who were put through hell for nothing. It could have been even worse though:
"Even with all that, worse was planned. On July 26, 2020, with the George Floyd riots having finally settled down, the CDC issued a plan for establishing nationwide quarantine camps. People were to be isolated, given only food and some cleaning supplies. They would be banned from participating in any religious services. The plan included contingencies for preventing suicide. There were no provisions made for any legal appeals or even the right to legal counsel."
Hopefully, a Trump administration will do a deep dive and remove these unnecessary threats residing inside government agencies that unaccountably wield enormous power over regular citizens and their businesses.
"Who wrote it? What kind of deep institutional pathology exists that enabled this to be contemplated? The CDC has 10,600 full-time employees and contractors and a budget of $11.5 billion. In light of this report, and everything else that has gone on there for four years, both numbers should be zero."
Just recently, a FEMA supervisor was fired after it was discovered that she was using her position of authority to further her own personal political preferences.
"Recently, one FEMA employee departed from these values to advise her survivor assistance team to not go to homes with yard signs supporting president-elect Trump," she said. This is a clear violation of FEMA's core values and principles to help people regardless of their political affiliation. This was reprehensible."
Reprehensible but unfortunately very common. This is something all owners have had to deal with: Agency capture by agenda-driven individuals who become permanent fixture bureaucrats working on the inside like parasites constantly degrading the host agency making it a tool for their own use. They behave as if the agency they were appointed to administer is their own and they seem proud whenever they accomplish this.
Business owners need to cater to specific political preferences in order to get critical services to operate like licenses or permits. Government agencies can make or break companies especially if their power is in the hands of these kinds of bureaucrats. For example, the completely discredited ESG ratings which impose heavy burdens making owners incur costs and jump through regulatory hoops in order to implement completely useless policies. Some states even put companies out of business by prohibiting them from using Gas.
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"We've known the ESG grift has been coming to a screeching halt for years now, with major investment banks and companies dropping their initiatives while the GOP goes on a rampage to try root out the faux-virtue signaling. But now with President Trump once again taking the White House, one investment bank is advising ESG fund managers to "keep their lawyers very close", as the full scale death of ESG may very well be on the door step, according to Yahoo Finance."
Most if not all of these "programs" are scams to extract money:
"A new report by Oxfam, “Climate Finance Unchecked,” has determined that the World Bank has $41 billion in unaccounted funds that were destined to fight climate change. This figure represents 40% of all disbursed climate funds by the World Bank. Oxfam’s audit revealed that between 2017 and 2023, between $24 billion and $41 billion simply went unaccounted for and there is absolutely no record of where the money went. No one knows how the money was used as there is no paper trail revealing where the money went."
DEI is on deck for the scrap heap too - in fact, the whole "woke" philosophy is being re-examined under the filter of common sense:
"Regardless of what you might think of the candidates or the election in general, the fact of the matter is this election was a RESOUNDING rejection by Americans of the woke ideology and the political left. Trump won in a landslide, not just in the electoral college but also the popular vote, and Trump ran on an anti-woke and anti-globalist platform. The public has spoken."
As the new incoming administration starts to form it will become clearer which direction certain policies will go since personnel is policy after all. The biggest issues for business owners according to NFIB are Inflation, difficulty finding workers and credit (interest rate costs). As I have said many times, these problems don't have any easy solutions and their ramifications will be felt for a while and could possibly get much worse even if we started correcting all the mistakes right now. Most owners are already thinking and planning their next moves making their own assumptions about what types of policies will unfold after January 20th, 2025. I would advise caution until all of the new administration's personnel have been appointed and confirmed before making any big decisions.