Survey Says.......Ugh

This is interesting stuff, although I have no idea who responded to the poll, nor what they actually represent.

...chief executives are so pessimistic that over 66 percent expect that the size of their workforce will either stay the same or decrease over the next year according to Chief Executive magazine’s CEO Confidence Index for August 2011.

OK.  That's not hard to believe.

The reasons for their reluctance are just as interesting.

The ranking of hiring-inducing priorities that were ranked “important to extremely important” were as follows:

1. Backlog of work or increased revenue — 88.2 percent
2. Evidence of economic expansion — 77.2 percent
3. Repeal of Health Care Reform or eliminate uncertainty over its provisions — 71.6 percent
4. Reduction in government regulation of business — 62 percent
5. Government holds line on debt ceiling — 56.3
6. Reduced corporate tax rate to OECD average — 54.3
7. Balanced federal budget — 53.9
8. Gov’t passes all free trade agreements without delay — 48.8
9. Repeal Dodd-Frank or eliminate uncertainty over its provisions — 48.2

Quoted by Jacobson/Legal Insurrection

The most significant issue (outside of pure-business stuff:  orders and expansion signals) is ObamaCare.

This tells us what we always knew:  immediate business considerations are first and second.  Non-immediates such as ObamaCare, regulation, blahblahblah are relegated to "nice to have" but not "need to have."

Another interesting question would have been this one:  "If you choose to expand your workforce, will you use temporary labor or direct-hires?"

That would be very revealing, indeed.