Are Obamacare and Dodd-Frank Making America Less Free?

Is the United States losing its luster as a bastion of economic freedom? The answer is an unqualified yes, according to the Heritage Foundation, which puts out an annual index of such things as tax burden, size of government and regulation.

In the foundation's 2012 Index of Economic Freedom, the U.S. fell from ninth to tenth place. In 2010 the U.S. lost its position as one of the freest countries in the world economically, the right-leaning foundation says.

Terry Miller, who runs the project for the Heritage Foundation, says the biggest reason for the U.S. decline was the “massive increase in government spending,” that took place in the last year. He says Washington’s share of GDP rose to 25 percent from about 20 percent three years ago.

米勒坚持认为，来自恩典的堕落的另一个原因是政府债务的增加，现在达到15.2万亿美元。Miller表示，这是衰退和两场战争的赤字支出的结果，这是对指数无关紧要的是，米勒表示，只计算原始数据。

反对美国的另一次罢工是奥巴马医疗保健法案和多德 - 弗兰克金融监管法案所施加的监管负担，这两者都是美国企业反对的。Dodd-Frank包含2,000页的金融公司法规。

“They have increased the regulatory burden and uncertainty,” Miller says. The bailout of various auto companies and financial firms “undermines investor confidence” in the United States, he adds.

The Heritage Foundation says there is a direct link between economic freedom and the level of unemployment in a country. “People don’t know what labor is going to cost in the future because of uncertainty over the healthcare bill," Miller says. “They also don’t know what credit is going to cost in the future because of uncertainty on the financial side, which makes it very difficult to plan an investment where you are expecting a return several years down the pike.”

Of course, not everyone agrees with the Heritage assessment of the U.S. economy. The cost of credit is now at historic lows. The Obama bailout of Detroit saved thousands of jobs, rather than hurt the economy, critics argue.

“This is just a political axe to grind,” says Dean Baker, co-director of the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. “It’s well known that the smaller the deficit, the higher the unemployment rate would be. There’s a lot of research on that.” Baker says the Obama healthcare bill has not taken effect yet, but when it does “it’s a little hard to see how that’s an infringement on economic freedom.”

The Heritage Foundation maintains that places like Hong Kong, Singapore and Mauritius — a tiny island in the Pacific — are the world’s freest economically and even rose in their top 10 rankings this year.

Miller says he was pleasantly surprised that Hong Kong, still No. 1, has maintained the rule of law despite the handover from British rule to China in 1997. “I was very much the pessimist when the handover took place, but I think they’ve done very well in maintaining a separate system and they have low tax rates and a very high level of business freedom there,” he said.

On Singapore, No. 2, Miller acknowledged that it is a country “where the government controls an awful lot of the capital. They own a lot of property and real estate and there are many aspects of Singapore that I would not characterize as free — I certainly wouldn’t characterize their political system as free.”

He said Singapore moved up in the rankings because it has recently liberalized its banking rules. But Indonesia recently complained that its banks had a hard time opening offices in Singapore while Singaporean banks were free to operate in Indonesia.

The big winner on the list was Mauritius, now No. 8, which the report described as the first sub-Saharan African country to make the top ten list. That will no doubt come as a surprise in the capital of Port Louis, some 600 miles off the African coast. Mauritius is a tourist isle with 1 million in population and a GDP of $10 billion.

米勒说：“我认为有一个非洲国家的象征价值是有益的，这是一个很好地得分的非洲国家。”“博茨瓦纳也做得很好，南非不太好，我担心那个地方。”