Home Depot founder, Bernie Marcus, writes at RealClearPolitics.com that he is ready to help Donald Trump undo the damage caused by Barack Obama.
Like many, I am deeply concerned about the US Supreme Court. When Trump recently released his list of potential appointees, I grew confident in his resolve to keep our court balanced. Even more important: Clinton will push the court leftward for generations. She must be stopped.
But I draw even more from lessons learned when we founded The Home Depot in 1978 rather than from the contentious GOP primary of 2016. I genuinely believe that if we to started The Home Depot today, we would fail because of the hurdles government, especially the current administration, places in front of small business owners. I never forget The Home Depot’s small business roots – we started as a small business with four stores in Atlanta, Georgia.
I think of the banker who nearly lost his job by taking a risk and giving us a line of credit when we started. He didn’t just look at our balance sheet; he believed in our character and determination. Government regulators don’t allow this under Dodd-Frank – a law Hillary Clinton wants to make far worse.
And going public under Sarbanes-Oxley, a Clinton favorite? Not the company we built, nor thousands of other businesses like ours the nation will never know because they died at birth, strangled by faceless bureaucrats and politicians who erroneously believe that government “can do it better.”
Yet the risks we took in the 1970s have resulted in millions of jobs – not just at The Home Depot, but at our suppliers, our vendors, and even our customers’ businesses. Investors believed in us, and the government did not stop us.
We could not do this today, for the same reason why so many Americans have dropped out of the workforce, why their wages have been stagnant, why their health care is a mess, and why our economy has stalled. It’s Obama/Clinton-style government that’s getting in the way.
