Don't Spare the Moose

Rupert Murdoch says needed small businesses won't come on line without leadership from Washington.

Image: File

The United States needs to create thousands and thousands of new businesses if it wants to dig out of its unemployment hole.

And the Obama administration is going about that task the wrong way, said media mogul Rupert Murdoch during a panel discussion at The New York Forum Tuesday evening. Tuesday was the opening of the forum designed to encourage debate over the future of global business, with 60 percent of its 500 attendees coming from the U.S. and 40 percent from elsewhere in the world.

The News Corp. boss attacked the administration for an emphasis on increased regulation, taxation and spending at a time he believes all should be reduced. But most of all, he said, people won’t take the risk on starting new businesses without clear leadership coming from Washington, something President Barack Obama hasn’t provided, Murdoch argued.

“They don’t know the direction this country is going in,” Murdoch said.

He added that Obama seems to stand aloof from the fray, leaving too much to Congress to hammer out. And he specifically singled out healthcare reform as a costly tax on business that won’t solve the long-term problems of the U.S. healthcare system.

U.S. immigration policy, he added, is another disaster. The U.S. needs to close its borders but provide a clear path to citizenship for those undocumented immigrants already here. And it needs to encourage the best and brightest from around the world who attend universities like Harvard and Stanford to stay here and create businesses, rather than sending them back home at the end of their education.

Murdoch also is no fan of the direction Obama is taking when it comes to energy. Sure, we should be investing in solar, wind power and the like, he said. But there’s still going to be a place for coal, oil and natural gas for the foreseeable future.

The U.S., for instance, should be building pipelines to bring some of those fuels from Alaska to the lower 48 sates, Murdoch argued.

“We didn’t buy Alaska to protect the moose,” he said.

It took a Frenchman to remind the panel of business leaders Tuesday night that the United States isn’t exactly in free fall, despite high unemployment and other problems.

“The North American market is doing very well. Much better than we would have expected,” said Phillippe Camus, chairman of Alcatel-Lucent. “Please don’t think that you are weak and losing momentum. You are still very ahead of other countries.”