Barack Obama made an unexpected appearance at the White House Press Briefing this morning.

A reporter told Obama that small businesses can’t anticipate the future, they can’t anticipate future costs and taxes, and because of that uncertainty, they are not hiring.

O-man said that the problem is with loans…

Check out the exchange and my analysis after the jump…

Q    Just to play devil’s advocate on that — a small business, let’s say, not somebody who’s going to be affected by the regulatory reform, small business — you have proposed, you would acknowledge, a bold agenda.  And a small business might wonder, I don’t know how the energy bill is going to affect me, I don’t know how the health care reform bill is going to affect me — I’d better hold off on hiring.

THE PRESIDENT:  The small businesses I talk to — and I’ve been talking to a lot of them as I’ve been traveling around the country over the last several months — their biggest problem is right now they can’t get credit out of their banks so they’re uncertain about that.  And they’re still uncertain about orders — do they just have enough customers to justify them doing more.

It’s looking better at this point.  But that’s not the rationale for people saying, I’m not hiring.  Let me put it this way.  Most small businesses right now, if they’ve got enough customers to make a profit and they can get the bank loans required to boost their payroll, boost their inventory, and sell to those customers, they will do so.  Okay?

He is unwilling or unable to understand how small businesses work.  If a business can’t anticipate future taxes/costs/fees, how can they plan for the future?

It’s astonishing what little he knows about business.

This is almost as bad…well…actually, probably worse than when Obama referred to the “profits to earnings ratio.”

Obama may talk a good game when he’s on the campaign trail, but when we get down to how business is run, he’s a blithering idiot.