Henry R. Nothhaft

Recent Articles by

Dear Mr. President, Are You Listening?

The president says that’s the fault of recalcitrant Republicans in Congress. Republicans in Congress say it’s the fault of a president who is hostile to business. But the real reason we are not putting people back to work three long years into the recession is that Washington is afflicted with a totally-bipartisan cluelessness about how to create jobs.

Eating Our Seed Corn for Job Creation

Everywhere I go, I meet entrepreneurs whose ventures either failed or are slowly dying on the vine because of the outrageous delays they suffered in getting patents. Who would invest the huge sums needed to develop a new medical treatment, for example, without at least the promise of exclusivity and a return on their investment that a patent provides? But because of delays stretching up to seven or more years in getting a patent, these startups lost crucial funding opportunities—or in some cases, even went bankrupt—as a result of the backlog of 1.2 million applications now throttling America’s overburdened and underfunded “innovation agency.”