The primary cause of unemployment, says a survey a business owners, is poor sales. Concerns about regulations are a distant third.
It’s not surprising that regulatory uncertainty seems to have such marginal economic effects. Regulations do impose burdens on businesses, but the numbers are relatively small compared to everything else that affects a business, from wages to sales trends. You wouldn’t expect uncertainty about a secondary factory like regulation to have significant economic impact. The Obama Administration’s regulatory efforts may be good or bad, and the same can be said about Republican efforts to roll them back. But either way, the impact of the resulting uncertainty on the economy is simply not a big deal.