Free Republic

Home Depot Co-Founder Bernie Marcus on the current business climate and Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton's potential impact on business.

Possibly the defining business trend coming out of the financial crisis has been a "startup boom." Everyone is building an app or starting their own business it seems. This image, however, may be just an illusion, according to Michelle Meyer, US economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Both the formation of firms (for example, McDonald's as a whole) and establishments (an individual McDonald's restaurant), have dropped off precipitously since the financial crisis and remained low. This is important, according to Meyer, because new businesses typically hire faster and produce higher levels of productivity than firms that have been around...

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has disclosed that his record property tax hike plan entails significant cuts for nearly 300,000 homeowners, leaving Chicago businesses predicting they will face hikes of up to 50 percent. The second-term mayor last week proposed a $544 million property tax increase, the city's biggest ever, to help fix one of the worst-funded city pension systems in America ... Emanuel's office, which has said one in four dollars of the tax hike would come from the city's central business district, did not contest the 50-percent figure. But a mayoral aide insisted Emanuel's plan is his best effort...

A federal judge on Friday declined to halt the Obama administration's controversial water rule nationwide, rebuffing the request of 13 states that are battling with the Environmental Protection Agency.Judge Ralph Erickson of the North Dakota U.S. District Court ruled that there are “significant prudential reasons to limit the scope” of the injunction he already gave the 13 states last week. Other courts have denied injunctions, he said, and some states want to implement the “Waters of the United States” rule. “On the one hand, there is a desirability for uniformity regarding a national rule with national application,” Erickson wrote. “On...

More taxpaying residents left New York than any other state in the nation, IRS migration data from 2013 shows. During that year, around 115,000 New Yorkers left the state and packed up $5.65 billion in adjusted gross income (AGI) as well. Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) notes, “This new data shows that New York will remain America’s ‘Biggest Loser,’ having lost nearly 1.6 million taxpayers between 1985 and 2013. Those residents took with them more than $80.8 billion in annual AGI.” “The phenomenal failure of New York to retain taxpayers and businesses is directly related to its uncompetitive tax and...

Companies in the United States are now facing more than twice as much litigation as companies in other countries. That’s the disturbing finding of a survey recently conducted by the third-largest law firm in the world. The firm, Norton Rose Fulbright, which happens to be the largest law firm in the world based outside the US, conducted a poll of more than 800 corporate counsel representing companies across 26 countries, and the results are not good for American companies or the job seekers who would like to work for them. While the survey is performed to identify litigation trends across...

Sell Stocks, facebook and twitter your friends. Cancel vacations in these states and reschedule to Indiana, Arkansas or any of the other 30 States that aren't boycotting Indiana that have RFRA laws.

OAKLAND - Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf made a pitch Wednesday morning for the 82 percent of Oakland voters who passed a minimum wage hike in November to support local businesses struggling to adjust to higher costs. "It's time for Oaklanders to put their money where their votes were," Schaaf said at a news conference outside of Farley's East coffee shop on Grand Avenue.

DENVER — Colorado already is being sued by two neighboring states for legalizing marijuana. Now, the state faces groundbreaking lawsuits from its own residents, who are asking a federal judge to order the new recreational industry to close. The owners of a mountain hotel and a southern Colorado horse farm argue in a pair of lawsuits filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Denver that the 2012 marijuana-legalization measure has hurt their property and that the marijuana industry is stinky and attracts unsavory visitors.

Two measures of manufacturing sentiment in January matched their worst performance in a year, a sign that sputtering overseas growth as well as the rapid deterioration in commodity prices is hurting U.S. businesses. The Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing index slowed to a reading of 53.5% from 55.1% in December, a reading that was below the MarketWatch-compiled consensus for a reading of 55%. U.S. stocks SPX, -0.41% moved lower in the immediate aftermath of the report. What has been good news for the U.S. consumer — tumbling gas prices — isn’t proving to be as good for U.S. business. That’s...

When small and medium-sized businesses are dying faster than they’re being born, so is free enterprise,” writes Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup. “And when free enterprise dies, America dies with it.” For six years, the number of small businesses closing has exceeded the number of businesses starting. The number of business deaths exceeded births in 2008 for the first time in US history and has gotten worse in the ensuing years. Since 2010, the rate of small business closures has increased. In the 1980s, the number of new businesses exceeded those closing by more than 100,000 every year....

Religious Liberty | An update on five small businesses that refused to participate in same-sex weddings and paid a heavy price

“for the first time in 35 years, American business deaths now outnumber business births.” Clifton says for the past six years since 2008, employer business startups have fallen below the business failure rate, spurring what he calls “an underground earthquake” that only stands to worsen as lagging U.S. Census data becomes available. “Let’s get one thing clear: This economy is never truly coming back unless we reverse the birth and death trends of American businesses. ... the numbers paint an ominous portrait of America in a dire state of decline. “I don’t want to sound like a doomsayer, but when...

ATHENS, Greece — In these disastrous economic times, opening a store on tony Voukourestiou Street next to global luxury brands such as Dior and Prada is a goal many Greek fashion designers can only dream about. But despite the crippling financial crisis that has been plaguing Greece for the past six years, 35-year-old Penny Vomva opened a storefront for her designer clothing and accessories company, RIEN, on the boutique-lined thoroughfare last month. Ms. Vomva is delighted, but she also is concerned about the shifting fortunes of the Greek economy. “My line of handmade leather bags costs 180 euros to 450...

This is how deranged and filled with lunatics the Democrat Party base is. She's saying that, and the fact that she said that tells me how afraid of Elizabeth Warren she is. Elizabeth Warren's been running around. You know her pet phrase (imitating Warren), "You didn't build that, Mr. Factory Owner. You didn't build that, Mr. Business Owner. You didn't do that. You couldn't have done that without all of us. We paid the taxes to build the roads. We paid the taxes to build the bridges. We made your business possible. You didn't build that." And Obama echoed it....

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s recent comment about trickledown economics has launched a war of spin. First, here’s what the likely 2016 presidential candidate said at a campaign event last Friday for Martha Coakley, the Massachusetts Democratic gubernatorial candidate: “Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs,” former Secretary of State Clinton said in Boston. “You know that old theory, trickledown economics. That has been tried, that has failed. It has failed rather spectacularly. One of the things my husband says when people say, ‘What did you bring to Washington?’ He says, ‘I brought arithmetic.’

Hillary Clinton recently said at a campaign rally, “Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.” Today Clinton spoke at another rally today, this one for Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney, and she used the opportunity to clarify what she meant. According to BuzzFeed, Clinton again argued that “trickle-down economics has failed” and went on to say, “I short-handed this point the other day, so let me be absolutely clear about what I’ve been saying for a couple of decades.” And this is how Clinton explained that earlier remark: “Our economy grows when businesses and entrepreneurs...

....Gay Nuptials, a gay-friendly wedding expo, held its inaugural event at the Hagen Park Community Center in Wilton Manors....

A new Brookings Institution report indicates that businesses are shuttering their doors more quickly than new ones are popping up. From the Washington Post: The American economy is less entrepreneurial now than at any point in the last three decades. That's the conclusion of a new study out from the Brookings Institution, which looks at the rates of new business creation and destruction since 1978. Not only that, but during the most recent three years of the study -- 2009, 2010 and 2011 -- businesses were collapsing faster than they were being formed, a first. Overall, new businesses creation (measured...

I believe I have developed a simple, yet effective workaround to the new powers our government has handed homosexuals - specifically, the ability to force people to do labor against their religious beliefs (I never in a million years thought I would write such a sentence in America). The solution is to identify the specific kind of issues over which homosexuals are likely to invoke their involuntary servitude powers, and separate those issues into a private Christian club. An example: Christian bakeries would now put up a sign stating that they no longer make wedding cakes. Any wedding cakes, for...