U.S. rank in World Bank "ease of doing business" falls under Obama

See Doomed to Stagnate? by Bret Stephens of the WSJ. Excerpts:

"Want to better understand the mess Greece is in? In 2006 it took an average of 151 days to enforce a contract in the Hellenic Republic. Today it takes 1,580. Want to measure Israel’s progress? A decade ago, starting a business in the startup nation took about 34 days. Now it takes 12.

What about the United States? When President Obama took office in 2009, the U.S. ranked third in the overall index, just behind Singapore and New Zealand. It has since fallen to eighth place. Eight years ago, 40 days were needed to get a construction permit. Now it’s 81. When President Bush left office, it took 300 days to enforce a contract. Today: 420. As for registering property, the cost has nearly quintupled since 2009, to 2.4% of property value from 0.5%."

"There’s nothing “secular” about our low rate of growth, goes the argument: It’s just the result of the never-ending accretion of ever more costly and time-consuming regulations, all of which could, in theory, be overturned at a stroke. These regulations go largely unnoticed by coastal elites because we’re mostly in the business of producing and manipulating words—as politicians, lawyers, bureaucrats, academics, consultants, pundits and so on."

"In recent months I’ve tried to get a better sense of the things-making world by asking executives in different industries to share their sense of what it’s like to do business in America today. They talk about Sarbanes-Oxley—its punishing auditing requirements. Or Dodd-Frank—the Compliance Blob it has created within banks. Or the Affordable Care Act—the employer mandate, the increased age of dependent “children,” the obscure little taxes for things like the “Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute.”"

"Did you know that a company that is a contractor or subcontractor with the government must, according to recent Labor Department regulations, establish a goal of having 7% of its workforce be disabled?"

"Did you know that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration recently banned blanket policies on post-accident drug testing because they may be discriminatory?"

"Did you know that a driver who makes a delivery within Seattle’s city limits must earn a minimum of $15 an hour, irrespective of whether his company has a branch in the city?"