Talking Up Unemployment

Are you as angry as I am about all the rhetoric being spouted by politicians who seem to be saying that taking “corporate junkets” to cities such as Las Vegas is somehow the wrong thing to do right now. And if you take a corporate jet anywhere you are wasting taxpayer or stockholder money.

Even President Obama weighed in last week during a speech in Elkhart, Indiana when he said that companies “can’t go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayer’s dime”. He’s certainly right that companies taking taxpayer money to survive must adhere to a higher standard of accountability. But the problem is in using Las Vegas as an example; he tarnishes a city that is already reeling from recession.

The New York Times reports that in just the last month 30,000 hotel room nights booked for conferences have been cancelled at an estimated loss of $20 million to the city, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. That on top of recession related cancellations that have already resulted in an 11 percent December drop in visitors from a year ago.

When President Obama talks about the stimulus package creating jobs, I hope he includes the thousands of hotel, bar and restaurant employees losing their jobs because business trips are apparently “persona non grata” in his Administration. And if you want to know what political “bad-mouthing” of private aviation is doing to that industry, just pull up any of the aviation-oriented web-sites and count the thousands of layoffs in that industry.

President Roosevelt rallied the nation during the depths of the depression when he said…“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. This time around it seems the fear of retribution is what businesses fear the most.

(Brian Banmiller is a national Business Correspondent for CBS News Radio, free lance writer and public speaker. The former television business news anchor in San Francisco can be reached at brian@banmilleronbusiness.com .)