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Kevin O'Leary on CNBC's Closing Bell


2m read
·Nov 7, 2024

You speak to a lot of companies and really see businesses investing in all sorts of companies. What would you, how would you characterize the business environment right now when it comes to hiring, when it comes to expanding, adding jobs?

I think there's a lot of concern that Washington is not in sync with the American Dream anymore from the business point of view. I'm not saying it can't be repaired, but if you think about the pendulum, how far it's swung to the left, when we actually call business leaders that build the infrastructure of our country "fat cats," that just doesn't sit well with me.

I can speak for many, many other entrepreneurs and say, listen, what makes this country great is the private sector creating private sector jobs, funding the government that provides us all the services. One of the things we have, we don't vilify it; we solve for it, and we try and endorse it, and help more people become entrepreneurs in this country.

We have buried them in regulation, we have scared the pants off them with all of the volatility in the markets, and now we have dysfunctional government. That's not good. I make the assumption, Murray, and I hope I'm wrong, that one third of what government spends is completely wasted, and I think people intuitively feel that.

It's not market-tested; investing in bridges to nowhere, solicitations by various politicians for their own interests, I mean, it's all unhealthy. Yeah, and I think we're at a place now we got to fix it all.

So, how do you fix it? The first thing is you overhaul the tax Act. It's a messy one; the tax code is complicated. We've been talking about this for a lot of years. Why haven't we done it?

Well, I think because we've gone in new agenda items. For example, Obamacare was clearly something that the Democrats wanted done during their tenure. In this last session, we didn't care about taxation. Yet, if you want to create more jobs in this country, the number-one thing to do would have not been to focus on health care; it would have been to focus on job creation, which meant lower taxation and simplifying the tax code and focusing on making the path easier for entrepreneurs.

I meet them every day, and they want to be successful, and the government seems to be in their way now, not on the sidelines cheering them on anymore.

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