It is time that chief executive officers stand up and speak out about policy issues that impact their bottom line. Most CEOs seem to be supporting Vice President Kamala Harris because that is the safe way to go. A Yahoo Finance analysis of federal campaign filings through early June found that CEOs of 98 of the nation’s 100 largest companies had yet to financially support either President Joe Biden or former President Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
The choices at that time seemed perfectly clear. It was between an incumbent who delivered a smothering regulatory state with exploding inflation and one who – prior to the historic pandemic – presided over a nation with low inflation, low unemployment and a growing economy driven by the 2017 Trump tax cuts and a more favorable regulatory agenda. (RELATED: DENNIS E. NIXON: The Border Is Going To Be Worse Under Kamala Harris)
By September, after the party conventions, 88 current and former business leaders came off the sidelines and endorsed Harris, a candidate even farther to the left and with less experience than Biden and with no apparent foreign policy experience to manage a world on fire. According to their statement of support, “With Kamala Harris in the White House, the business community can be confident that it will have a president who wants American industries to thrive.”
This month, American businessman Mark Cuban, former American Express Chairman and CEO Ken Chenault and other current and former corporate chiefs launched Business Leaders for Harris. “Her economic agenda is pro-growth, committed to supporting small and medium-sized business and reducing red tape and other barriers to innovation,” their website states. This statement simply cannot be validated by examining the Harris platform.
You have to wonder what alternate universe these business leaders inhabit. This is the same Kamala Harris who accused businesses of gouging consumers and has endorsed price controls as the solution to the high-inflationary forces that the Biden-Harris administration created because of excessive government spending. To make matters worse, Harris announced support for trillions of dollars in new taxes. Far from being pro-growth, price controls – coupled with excessive taxation – perversely skew markets, harming businesses and exacerbating supply shortages.
There’s nothing pro-growth about these policies.
At the national level, we’ve been down this path before. President Richard Nixon’s freeze on prices and wages in 1971 provided some temporary inflation relief, but at the cost of a decade of slow growth and a resumption of high inflation. They’re a top-down, socialist policy prescription that has consistently failed.
Another destructive policy Harris has endorsed is taxing unrealized gains, requiring some taxpayers to pay capital gains each year whether or not an asset has been sold. The consequences of such a policy are entirely predictable and will lead to capital flight from the United States to more tax-friendly countries and draining America of its innovators.
To understand the global implications of this policy, we only need to look at the tax- and regulatory-driven migration of people, businesses and capital from states like California, New York and Illinois to Texas, Florida and North Carolina.
But it’s not just major policy initiatives like price controls and taxation that strangle businesses and kill the economy. It’s also the destructive growth of regulations that increase costs for everything from food to furnaces. Research by the American Action Forum found that Biden administration regulations have added nearly $1.4 trillion in costs to American businesses. By comparison, Trump era regulations had an impact of approximately $30 billion.
Some business leaders may favor Harris’ positions on social issues, but no business leader can say with a straight face that she is pro-growth and a champion of American business. There is an irony in venture socialist CEOs, whose multinational corporations can afford the compliance costs of the Biden-Harris regulatory state and may actually benefit from the elimination of competition, pretending to advance the interests of small- and medium-sized businesses that will continue to wither under a Harris administration consolidating more economic and political power in the hands of the privileged.
Elections are about choices, and the 2024 presidential election is no different. Clearly, there are many business leaders who have shown support for Kamala Harris. But I doubt any of them would hire her to lead their company.
Dennis. E. Nixon is chairman and CEO of IBC Bank.
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