Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney accused President Barack Obama of “killing jobs” on Monday. “This administration has made America a less attractive place to start a business, grow a business,” he said.

Romney, who is a candidate for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, accused the Democratic leader of fostering an anti-business climate in the United States. “You’re not going to create jobs if entrepreneurs decide not to start new businesses,” he said during an appearance on Fox News’ television show On The Record.

Unemployment currently stands at over 8 percent, the same rate when Obama took office in January 2009. In reality, many more Americans are probably out of work because people who have left the labor force aren’t counted by the government as jobless.

Romney, himself a former businessman and a millionaire many times over, observed that small enterprises “just aren’t starting up. Larger businesses are moving operations outside this country,” he pointed out, “because they feel in America, by virtue of our taxation, the highest in the world now, the regulatory environment, our lack of energy policies to take advantage of our energy resources, all of these features are causing businesses to go elsewhere.”

After Japan announced a reduction in its corporate tax rate, the United States’, nominally at 35 percent, is the highest among industrialized nations. The burden is even higher on most businesses because of state and local taxes but large corporations usually avoid paying the full rate.

Romney’s economic plan cuts the federal corporate tax rate to 25 percent and eliminates capital gains taxes altogether for incomes under $200,000. For richer Americans, who are the main source of capital investment, such a cut would be meaningless.

If elected, Romney has also promised to review every single regulation enacted during the Obama Administration and repeal those that “unduly burden job creation.” Moreover, he has vowed to direct government agencies to limit annual increases in regulatory costs to zero.

The incumbent president’s regulatory zeal, according to Romney, is largely to blame for the country’s lackluster economic recovery. “You have to love enterprise, small, large, middle size, encourage it, develop it,” he said Monday night.

Government sees itself as the opponent of business. It’s got to be the ally of enterprises of all kind. What we have right now is a growing government centered society. Government cannot create the jobs that the American people need, to get out of poverty, to have rising standards of living for middle income Americans. That’s what has to happen.

He added, “The right thing for the nation overall is to be competitive on taxes, to have regulations that encourage enterprise as opposed to crush it.”