In his recent decision to cancel the new EPA smog rule, President Obama is showing how his thinking is more like that of a corporate officer than that of a President of the United States.

There was a tremendous lobbying effort by business and Republican legislators complaining about the billions of dollars of costs that some corporate entities would endure.  Was there a powerful enough lobby on the other side telling him how many jobs would be created in the pollution control industry?

Without waiting for the lobbying efforts from multiple sides, as a United States President, Obama has to be aware that one company’s costs are another company’s sales.  The jobs created by designing, manufacturing, and installing pollution control equipment might have more than offset the jobs lost in the industries paying the costs.

The companies incurring the costs might even have taken the money to pay for this out of their cash reserves.  In other words the money they had sitting idle and not creating jobs could have been used to pay other companies to create jobs.

Who was making this cost/benefit analysis and presenting it to the President for his consideration?  Unless he knows enough to ask for it, there is no constituency that has the interest in doing the analysis for him.

Unless Obama starts thinking like a President and looking at the economy holistically, he will miss opportunities to get the economy moving again.

Here is  an exercise for the reader.

Since I have made no attempt to enumerate all the economic benefits of the new EPA rule, see how many other benefits for the economy as a whole that you can think of that would offset the costs of the new rules on the economy as a whole.