The Homa Files

This will the the buzz on the talk shows today.

Ken Langone was one of the 3 founders of Home Depot.

His Punch Line: “If we tried to start The Home Depot today, it’s a stone cold certainty that it would never have gotten off the ground.”

Highlights are below.  Worth reading the whole piece.

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Excerpted from WSJ: Stop Bashing Business, Mr. President, Ken Langone, Oct.15, 2010 

Your insistence that your policies are necessary and beneficial to business is utterly at odds with what you and your administration are saying elsewhere. You pick a fight with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, accusing it of using foreign money to influence congressional elections, something the chamber adamantly denies.

Your U.S. attorney in New York, Preet Bahrara, compares investment firms to Mexican drug cartels and says he wants the power to wiretap Wall Street when he sees fit.

And you drew guffaws of approving laughter with your car-wreck metaphor, recently telling a crowd that those who differ with your approach are “standing up on the road, sipping a Slurpee” while you are “shoving” and “sweating” to fix the broken-down jalopy of state.

Your short-sighted wavering—between condescending encouragement one day and hostile disparagement the next — creates uncertainty that, as any investor could tell you, causes economic paralysis. That’s because no one can tell what to expect next.

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If we tried to start Home Depot today, under the kind of onerous regulatory controls that you have advocated, it’s a stone cold certainty that our business would never get off the ground, much less thrive.

Rules against providing stock options would have prevented us from incentivizing worthy employees in the start-up phase—never mind the incredibly high cost of regulatory compliance overall and mandatory health insurance.

Still worse are the ever-rapacious trial lawyers.

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Meantime, you seem obsessed with repealing tax cuts for “millionaires and billionaires.”

I stand behind no one in my enthusiasm and dedication to improving our society and especially our health care.

[I’m willing to pay higher taxes.] Just make sure that money actually reduces federal spending and isn’t simply shifted elsewhere.

I guarantee you that many millionaires and billionaires will gladly forego government benefits — as my wife and I already do when we forward those checks each month to charity.

Full article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704361504575552080488297188.html

This entry was posted on October 15, 2010 at 6:59 am and is filed under Economics, Taxes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.