Home Depot Founder Joins the Anti-Administration Chorus

On Tuesday it was casino mogul Steve Wynn blaming the Obama administration for being a wet blanket on job growth and business expansion, and today it's the founder of Home Depot:

Bernie Marcus co-founded Home Depot (HD) in 1978 and brought it public in 1981 as the U.S. was suffering from the worst recession and unemployment in 40 years. The company thrived, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs and redefining home improvement retailing.

But Marcus says Home Depot "would never have succeeded" if it launched today due to onerous regulation. He recently helped launch the Job Creators Alliance, a Dallas-based nonprofit of CEOs and entrepreneurs dedicated to preserving the free enterprise system. IBD recently spoke to him about jobs and the economy.

IBD: What's the single biggest impediment to job growth today?


Bernie Marcus: Red over rules. View Enlarged Image

Marcus: The U.S. government. Having built a small business into a big one, I can tell you that today the impediments that the government imposes are impossible to deal with. Home Depot would never have succeeded if we'd tried to start it today. Every day you see rules and regulations from a group of Washington bureaucrats who know nothing about running a business. And I mean every day. It's become stifling.

If you're a small businessman, the only way to deal with it is to work harder, put in more hours, and let people go. When you consider that something like 70% of the American people work for small businesses, you are talking about a big economic impact.

IBD: President Obama has promised to streamline and eliminate regulations. What's your take?

Marcus: His speeches are wonderful. His output is absolutely, incredibly bad. As he speaks about cutting out regulations, they are now producing thousands of pages of new ones. With just ObamaCare by itself, you have a 2,000 page bill that's probably going end up being 150,000 pages of regulations.

Read the rest of it here.

Last October one of Marcus' partners in the original Home Depot said basically the same thing - blaming the administration for stopping job creation with stifling regulation.

And who do you think knows more about creating jobs, people who have actually done it or some yahoo who sat around the professor's lounge praising socialism with his lefty buddies?