Business leaders air growing unhappiness with Obama

“This administration is the greatest wet blanket to business and progress and job-creation in my lifetime,” said Mr. Wynn, whose second-quarter earnings at Resorts were nevertheless up $300 million from the same period in 2010.

“And I could prove it and I could spend the next three hours giving you examples of all of us in this marketplace that are frightened to death about all the new regulations, our health care costs escalate, regulations coming from left and right, a president that seems — that keeps using that word ‘redistribution’ ” he said.

His comments mirror criticisms of the administration from 3M’s George Buckley, Boeing’s Jim McNerney, Intel’s Paul Otellini.

The White House press office didn’t respond to a request for comment about business leaders’ criticisms, but Mr. Immelt recently told business leaders at a gathering of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that it’s time for them to step up to the plate and begin hiring again.

“The people who are part of the business sector, the people in this room, have got to stop complaining about government and get some action underway,” Mr. Immelt said. “There’s no excuse today for lack of leadership. The truth is we all need to be part of the solution.”

Mr. Immelt said he expects the administration to put forward proposals by the end of the year that should help to create up to 1 million jobs.

GE said this week it is moving the headquarters of its x-ray business from Wisconsin to Beijing, part of a move to invest $2 billion in China.

White House press secretary Jay Carney said the economy is “vastly improved” since Mr. Obama took office, but that view isn’t reflected in recent public opinion polls.

A Gallup poll released Tuesday showed 73 percent of Americans say the economy is getting worse, up a whopping 11 percentage points from the three-day period ending July 6.

The latest Quinnipiac University poll showed a “decisive majority” of 56 percent disapprove of the way the president is handling the economy. A Washington Post/ABC news poll found 57 percent of respondents disapprove of Mr. Obama’s performance on the economy. The percentage of African-Americans who think the president is doing a good job on the economy has dropped from 77 percent last year to slightly more than 50 percent today.

The Standard & Poors research arm has found that S&P 500 companies saw a nearly 20-percent increase in earnings growth in the first quarter of this year. Those companies have more than $1 trillion on their balance sheets but aren’t expanding much for reasons ranging from a lack of consumer demand to uncertainties regarding health care costs and new regulations.

Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus said the empire he started in 1978 “would never have succeeded” in today’s climate of costly government regulations.

The impediments that the government imposes are impossible to deal with,” Mr. Marcus said in an interview with Investors’ Business Daily. “I’m not sure Obama would understand anything that I’d say, because he’s never really worked a day outside the political or legal area. He doesn’t know how to make a payroll, he doesn’t understand the problems businesses face.”

Rosario Palmieri, vice president of regulatory policy at the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), said the Obama administration has made “significant shifts” toward easing regulations.

“We have certainly seen some progress and enhanced sensitivity on rule-making,” Mr. Palmieri said. But he added that a “good test” will be whether the EPA moves forward next month with anticipated costlier rules on ozone standards, which NAM has estimated could cost 7.3 million jobs and trillions in extra regulatory expenses from 2020 to 2030.

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