Rich People DON'T Create Jobs: 6 Myths That Have to Be Killed for Our Economy to Live

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Are American businesses paralyzed by fear of a tidal wave of new regulations? When McClatchy reporter Kevin Hall went out and asked small-business owners about this, he got a clear answer. "Absolutely, positively not," said one. "Government regulations are not choking our business," said another. In its  most recent quarterly survey (PDF) of small-business trends, the National Federation of Independent Business reports that sales—i.e., lack of demand—is the No. 1 concern, beating out taxes, regulations, inflation, and everything else.

In any case, regardless of what the  Wall Street Journal editorial page says, the Obama administration has hardly been a whirlwind of regulatory activity. Its health care reform will have very little effect on either small businesses (which are exempt) or large businesses (which mostly offer health plans already) and only a modest effect on medium-size businesses ( PDF). Its financial reform bill affects only the financial sector. Its proposed new air-quality regulations will mostly affect old coal-fired electrical plants that would have shut down anyway ( PDF).

Dumb and outdated regulations are no friends to the economy—and the Obama administration has undertaken a regulatory review that's projected to save an  estimated $10 billion during the next five years. But as welcome as that is, our economy's biggest problem right now isn't regulatory uncertainty. It's economic uncertainty.

MYTH #5: OBAMA IS DEBASING THE DOLLAR

In one of the most infamous moments of his young candidacy, Republican presidential hopeful  Rick Perry decided to tee off on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke last summer. "If this guy prints more money between now and the election," he told an enthusiastic audience in Cedar Rapids, "I don't know what y'all would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas."

Bernanke's sin?  Pumping money into the banking system after the collapse of 2008. Although this is widely credited with helping prevent a second Great Depression, tea partiers and  gold bugs are convinced that Bernanke's actions have debased the dollar. There are two problems with that claim. First, it's not true. Second, we'd be better off if it were.

First things first: Has the dollar lost value under Bernanke and Obama? No. The usual measure for the strength of the dollar is called "trade-weighted value." In July 2008, just before the financial crisis erupted in earnest, the  greenback's value stood at 95.4. As I'm writing this in mid-September, it has gone up, then down, and is currently sitting at 96.1. Taking a longer view, the dollar lost value under Reagan and Bush I, gained value under Clinton, lost value under Bush II, and has mostly stayed steady under Obama. There's just no basis to the claim that Obama and Bernanke have debased the currency.

And that's unfortunate. As  economist Dean Baker is fond of pointing out, if we want to get our national savings rate up and our long-term budget deficit down, there's only one way to do it: by fixing our massive trade deficit. We have to import less and export more, and one way to make that happen is with a weaker dollar. A weaker dollar makes foreign goods more expensive, so we'll buy less of them, and makes American goods cheaper, so others will buy more of them.

The truth is that we'd be better off if we ditched the loaded "strong/weak" terminology and just talked about an "export dollar" (weak) and an "import dollar" (strong). Sometimes one is good, and sometimes the other is. The  Chinese, for example, have done well for decades with an export yuan. Likewise, an export dollar  would be our friend right now.