Don't know nor care what product you design, make, sell or service but you don't think that more people working will have a positive effect for your firm? Or do you think higher employment will have a positive impact on your firm.
First I think we all see the world through the lenses of our political beliefs. So if you're a business owner and you launch a product that fails to gain traction in the marketplace, and you don't like Obama, it's naturally much easier to blame "regulation" than your own failure to market, sell, design a good product, or do good research on market needs, for example. Since probably 50% of the business owning world leans right, what they report on surveys is going to be colored by those underlying beliefs. I've started and run two businesses in relatively regulated areas, we move a lot of money between a lot of individuals every month and run marketplaces and auctions. I can tell you that "regulation" takes up an average of about 5 minutes of my time and effort a week, if that. I've certainly never decided not to launch a product or expand based on a regulation. If anything, state and local level regulation are far more burdensome than anything at the federal level. For example we have a personal property tax report in our state that I expend about $400 in labor each year to complete in order to pay about $80 in tax, but my Republican governor and Republican local legislators completely ignored my request to meet with them to talk about how we could make it less burdensome while staying revenue neutral. But even that was 5 minutes of my day to have someone spend 3 or 4 hours compiling the data, nothing that actually impacted the big picture of my business just annoying when the guys crying about regulation killing business refuse to actually even talk about something that could be an easy bipartisan fix. On the contrary, Obamacare is a huge benefit to startups like mine in their initial phases. In the past both the founder and the initial employees had a huge disincentive to jump to a startup because of difficulty getting their own healthcare and the pre-existing condition clauses. Now you're able to attract top talent because they're not worried about pre-existing conditions and can get reasonable care on their own from the state level exchanges until you have enough scale (5-10 people) to get a company plan. So that bit of "regulation" is actually very helpful to at least the startup ecosystem where I live. Obviously I have rose colored glasses of the opposite tint as my right leaning business owner brethren, so I very well could be ignoring some huge regulatory hurdle that takes up most of every day and stops me from being successful (or I guess more successful). On the other hand, if half my potential competitors give up before they start because they "just can't get anything done with all this regulation", then life's actually much easier for me!
Higher employment will probably create more demand for my products. However, the link that's unclear (to me at least) is that the current set of deregulations will create higher employment. Dropping my tax rate won't cause me to work harder. I'm still going to work hard to fill my machines whether my marginal rate is 40% or 15%. I have to. It's a fixed cost that I have to cover. Same with environmental regulations. I pump solvents into the air. If they remove some of those standards, I will probably not make some repairs to my oxidizer but I won't hire more people to run the machine. My margins go up and the neighborhood near my plant has dirtier air. So if every business executive is rational like me, they will increase their margins rather than pump the money into hiring. Just like over the last 8 years where companies did more stock buybacks than hiring.
As an owner of an established business, Obamacare is not a good thing. My premiums are higher and (almost as important) I don't have people who HAVE to work for me for health insurance. So I actually have to compete on wages and work environment. I'm being tongue-in-cheek, but I have only 1 employee whose working for me because they need health insurance.
Certainly varies depending what part of the business ecosystem you're in, appreciate your point of view on that. Also tongue-in-cheek, but now it's easier for people like me to poach your best employees! Just out of curiosity, what made your premiums go up? Was it an increase in the coverage you had to provide/decrease in deductables or caps? Or did you just pay more for exactly the same thing (and at a higher rate then the already atrocious healthcare inflation rate)
Honestly I'm not sure. My insurance premiums went up pretty much double digits every year and the brokers blamed Obamacare. Some of it had to do with what was small goup and what wasn't. Some of it had to do with a volatile market place and insurers left and entered the mid-group size. Our healthplan was already Obamacare compliant as we were under the original Republican version of the plan .
You may not hire any more workers but if I am now able to enter your field with a significantly lower cost, maybe I go for it and I would hire people. Just thinking out loud here.