Harvey Golub, Miller Buckfire chairman and executive committee member of the American Enterprise Institute, says the "animal spirits" so necessary for a true recovery have been trampled by the Obama administration's policies and rhetoric.

"This administration has been overtly hostile to business across the economy except for progressive favorites like electric cars or wind and solar power," Golub writes in The Wall Street Journal.

"It has tightened regulatory screws on the coal industry and all other fossil-fuel providers, enacted health-care 'reform' based on false estimates of its likely costs and effects, unleashed a hostile National Labor Relations Board on businesses, and passed financial regulations in the form of Dodd-Frank along with hundreds of other regulatory actions that put increased burdens on the private sector.

Editor's Note: You Deserve to Know What Obama and Bernanke Are Hiding From Americans

Meanwhile, notes Golub, the president has yet to pass a budget or announce a plan to rein in government expenditures but has said over and over again that he wants to increase taxes on businesses—small and large—and on financially successful individuals.

"He doesn't quite articulate the point that way, but that is the effect,” says Golub. After all, he says millionaires and billionaires aren't paying their fair share.”

"He forgets, or simply does not know, that the top 1 percent of earners actually pay as much as the bottom 90 percent, and the bottom half pay no income taxes at all."

In this negative environment, businesses are less willing to invest in the future, and individuals are less willing to spend what they can, observes Golub.

“Meanwhile, savers and retirees have seen much of their income decline because of low interest rates,” he says. “The massive costs of all the stimulus have been wasted because of the heavy counterweight put on the economy by the administration's anti-business and pro-redistribution policies.”

According to loansafe.org, interest rates and debt are on the minds of many recent and future college graduates. Student debt is growing and unless Congress acts by July 1, the interest rate on federally subsidized Stafford loans will double.

Editor's Note: You Deserve to Know What Obama and Bernanke Are Hiding From Americans