SD Chamber: Trump Killing Biz Confidence and Investment

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce used to holler bloody murder about all the uncertainty über-rational President Barack Obama supposedly introduced into the marketplace. Their far more unpredictable demon child Donald Trump has introduced far more real uncertainty into the domestic and global economy, but the U.S. Chamber seems to have butt-dialed Mute on its remote:

Used to be that you couldn’t open a business article without tripping over a complaint about “uncertainty.” The U.S. Chamber of Commerce never shut upabout it. Economists, especially conservatives, pointed to it as the cause of our economic malaise.

That was during the Obama administration, when labor regulations, consumer protections in healthcare and finance and tax rates all were ramping up.

During the Trump administration, which has brought us a tax bill that has caused confusion and chaos, tariff policies that don’t correspond to trade realities, infrastructure proposals that don’t exist in real life, and random tweet-borne attacks on businesses that tick off the president, one would think that concerns over “uncertainty” would be soaring.

Yet one almost never hears the term anymore. The Chamber has almost entirely stopped grousing. Oh, it still cites “uncertainty” now and then, but with one exception we’ll get to in a moment, its complaints still focus on Obama-era regulations that it wants overturned [Michael Hiltzik, “What Became of the ‘Uncertainty’ Meme? As Trumponomics Get More Unpredictable, U.S. Chamber Stops Complaining,” Los Angeles Times, 2018.06.25].

But one brave Chamber honcho rejects this slimy embrace of uncertainty. David Owen, president of the South Dakota Chamber of Commerce and Industry, says his members are getting all itchy about the uncertainty of the Trump tariffs:

They specifically don’t appreciate, not just the tariffs but the uncertainty that comes from speculation about the tariffs and whether they’ll actually be implemented.

…It’s hard to invest tens of millions of dollars with that uncertainty [David Owen, in “Tariffs Hitting Local Business,” WNAX, 2018.07.09].

I’m usually heckling South Dakota’s Chamber of Commerce from the stands, but now Chamber chief Owen is swinging the right bat at the right pitch at the right time.

Now, like the pro-corporate Farm Bureau, Owen and his Chamber face a hard choice: complain about tariffs and other economic uncertainty wrought by Il Duce, or act on those well-informed, well-founded concerns with the only concrete action that will get Trump to pull America out of his kamikaze dive—specifically, backing Democratic candidates who will curb his power and restabilize the economy?