"What do economic trends and employer decisions indicate? The demand-side explanation
Instead of uncertainty about regulations, there is strong evidence that the absence of job creation reflects the continued unwinding of the financial collapse and the corresponding lack of demand. Firm investments and hiring are lower because they have ample capacity to produce the goods and services they are selling to a shrunken market, while firms are deleveraging at the same time. One can easily document (using NIPA Table 1.4.6 and mixing with population from NIPA 2.1) that the final per person demand for domestically produced goods and service in the spring of 2011 (2011:2) was still 0.7 percent lower than it was before the recession (last quarter of 2007). Assuming that demand per person would have grown, absent the downturn, at a 1.5 percent rate for three-and-a-half years (a rate 20 percent lower than that of the 1979-2007 period), we find ourselves with demand 8.5 percent lower than we would expect."
http://www.epi.org/publication/regulatory-uncertainty-phony-explanation/
The uncertainty theme is the usual Republican mumbo-jumbo designed to preserve a philosophy that failed.
Set it alongside the others created by Republican politicians which have no basis in reality: "it was Fannie and Freddie what did it" (er - no, this claim was clearly debunked by the Fed using statistics available to everyone); wealth trickles down from the wealthy so we MUST preserve tax rates on millionaires (er - the kind of entrepreneurialism which needs government support occurs in garages rather than penthouses); the whole economic recovery is being strangled by regulation (er - we understand the Republican Party wants to let Wall Street off the hook, but we all know the real reason for the financial collapse was lax rules for commercial lenders and that deleveraging and risk-reduction in the banking sector is critical for the health of the economy).
The trouble with the Republican Party for me is that it stopped being intellectually honest. It has a current set of principles. They don't work. Indeed, they failed spectacularly. So instead of facing this fact, it invents scary, misleading and downright false explanations that they use to fool people who don't have the time, energy or capacity to think about them.
Personally, I think Reagan believed in entrepreneurs. Middle Class entrepreneurs. He tried to help them using the philosophy he believed in. This lot of Republicans is owned outright by incumbent wealth. Different thing. Different party. It's important for it to fail in this election in order to crack its cynicism and make room for something new - and by that I don't mean the Tea Party.
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