The polls are open and midterm elections are underway. The stakes are high—Republicans (who are already the majority party in the House of Representatives) need to win just six seats to take Senate and win control of both houses. A strong Republican House and Senate may pave the way for presidential elections in 2016.
Kevin O’Leary, chairman of the $1.7 billion O’Leary Funds (an investment fund management firm) and investor and judge on ABC’s hit show ‘Shark Tank’ joined Yahoo Finance to weigh in.
A recent AP poll showed that 91% of likely voters ranked the economy as an important issue in this midterm election.
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But while the economy shows outward signs of improving, “what has not come back is any increase to wages. With jobs we’re still at around a 6% unemployment rate and most American’s feel like I do, that the government is totally dysfunctional,” he says.
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According to the Economic Policy Institute, real hourly wages for people in the middle of wage distribution did not grow at all between 2000 and 2012. According to Gallup, 81% of Americans trust the Federal Government only some of the time or never.
“We need to make our economy competitive again, like it was 20 years ago,” says O’Leary. “We’ve put so much regulatory patina over our economy…we’ve burdened entrepreneurs in every state with so many rules and regulations that they can’t compete.”
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O’Leary believes that democrats focused too much on providing a platform for healthcare and ignored corporate and personal tax reform instead. “If the president was getting any message from the people now, it’s to take the next ‘X’ number of months and focus on corporate tax reform.”
President Obama’s approval rating is currently near an all-time low, hovering at around 42%, but a recent Gallup poll shows that economic confidence is at a one-year high.