Regulation: You can't have jobs and eat them, too

Otis heads the parent company of Olive Garden, Red Lobster, and LongHorn Steakhouse, so his experience creating jobs in the private sector is extensive. Unfortunately for Darden Restaurants and other businesses around the country, Otis notes that mounting regulations at the federal, state, and local levels are a serious impediment to business growth and investment. To make matters worse, industries where “low profit margins are a fact of life,” like the restaurant industry, have much greater difficulty adapting to a “plate piled high” with regulations.

Otis strikes an equally relevant chord when he highlights the dim prospect for job creation in today’s regulatory environment:

“[W]e need policymakers to understand the snowball effect of too many regulations. Their collective effect is to threaten job creation and prevent us in the restaurant industry from doing our part to put our economy back on its feet.”