Elections have consequences — and those consequences have consequences. A consequence of putting a socialist in the White House was the ham-fisted seizure of federal control over the healthcare industry. Among the consequences of ObamaCare:
In an experiment apparently aimed at keeping down the cost of health-care reform, Orlando-based Darden Restaurants has stopped offering full-time schedules to many hourly workers in at least a few Olive Gardens, Red Lobsters and LongHorn Steakhouses.
Darden is one of the top 30 employers in the country.
In an emailed statement, Darden said staffing changes are “just one of the many things we are evaluating to help us address the cost implications health care reform will have on our business.”
They aren’t the only ones scrambling to stay solvent in the aftermath of ObamaCare.
Analysts say many other companies, including the White Castle hamburger chain, are considering employing fewer full-timers because of key features of the Affordable Care Act scheduled to go into effect in 2014. Under that law, large companies must provide affordable health insurance to employees working an average of at least 30 hours per week. …
“I think a lot of those employers, especially restaurants, are just going to ensure nobody gets scheduled more than 30 hours a week,” said Matthew Snook, partner with human-resources consulting company Mercer.
This is because unlike the federal government, private businesses cannot spend more money than they take in.
Darden has been offering health insurance to all of its 185,000 employees. But many have been on a limited-benefit plan.
That type of coverage is being phased out under health-care changes, which will ban annual limits for most plans.
No worries; Obama will give them free unlimited insurance no matter how much it costs — at your expense.
As the now-bankrupt stimulus loan recipient Abound Solar filed for Chapter 7 (liquidation) bankruptcy in early July thanks largely to its defective modules, the Department of Energy still praised the company’s work as “innovative” and cost competitive...Actually, DOE is concerned that releasing the information would reveal DOE's failure to vet the company before giving it money, and to monitor it afterwards. Two key points that have managed to escape DOE's cover-up and find the sunlight.
And now, despite the fact that Abound no longer exists, DOE is still withholding public information about the company because it claims it would harm the inactive business’s competitive edge by disclosing trade secrets.
“Our solar modules worked as long as you didn’t put them in the sun...”The operation was a success but the patient died.
It is now under investigation by Weld County, Colorado (where the firm was located) authorities for fraud. The feds, of course, continue to defend their waste of our taxpayer dollars.We simply cannot afford four more years of this nonsense.
One of the company's major investors is an obama supporter who contributed large amounts to his campaign, and also bundled other contributions.
Ironically, the company went bankrupt on the eve of the second anniversary of President Obama praising the company as proof that his green energy initiative was working.
He's lanky, white-haired, calm. Listen to him for a few minutes and you sense great patience, stunning analytical abilities, and a sustained passion, untainted by malice. His name is Leo Linbeck Jr. His company has built some of America's most striking buildings.Got that? 73,000+ pages of tax code! Who the hell can comprehend that much crap?
But I've come to talk about a different kind of construction, our tax system, which is broadly acknowledged to be one of the most wretched things ever built. I've come to Houston because Linbeck is a prime mover behind the idea of a national sales tax, one that would replace the entire 73,608-page tax code.
While our tax code has been called "an abomination," it is now clear that both political parties intend to do no more than tinker with the abomination, in different ways, to rebuild America to their vision. Neither party sees that our tax code is central to our current economic mess. Linbeck thinks differently. He says that to rebuild America, we need a brand-new tax system.Revising the existing abomination is the fiscal equivalent of arguing about how to rearrange the Titanic's deck chairs. Instead, let's concentrate on keeping the ship afloat.
When I asked how the idea came about, I was surprised by his answer. Nearly two decades ago, he was having lunch with two friends. One, the late Jack Trotter, suggested that the biggest single problem in America was its tax system. Businessmen all, they agreed and decided to do the research and development for a tax system that would work.How about that? A tax code that both businessmen and economists can agree on. And one that even liberals would have a hard time arguing isn't 'fair.'
That's where a lunch conversation ended and the heavy lifting began. Finding little academic work on differing tax systems, they selected 25 top economists and asked if they were interested. All 25 were. They narrowed the group to eight, including Martin Feldstein at the National Bureau of Economic Research, James Poterba at MIT, Laurence Kotlikoff at Boston University and Dale Jorgenson at Harvard.
The result was a bold idea: Replace the current mess with a national sales tax. Tax consumption and only consumption. Eliminate the income tax, the employment tax and the corporate income tax. Just tax consumption.
"It's very progressive, but on a discretionary basis," Linbeck said. "If you buy a Bentley and I buy a Ford, you'll have to pay about 20 times the taxes I pay. People that spend more money will pay more taxes."There's something else to think about. These people spent millions of dollars of their own money to come up with a way to improve our country - to make the tax system simpler and fairer. If that isn't the definition of public service I don't know what is. It damn sure beats the hell out of community organizing (whatever the hell that is).
Then they spent millions to test "the market" for the tax. Result? Not only would it work, but the name FairTax came out of one of the consumer panels as well. "All I want is a fair tax," one of the panelists said.
If the people liked the idea and understand it, I asked Linbeck, why isn't it the law? And that's where I learned, once again, that the problem lies in Washington.Amen to that, brother.
They tried to get the FairTax idea, as a piece of legislation, through the House Ways and Means Committee the usual Washington way.
After six months they gave that up, Linbeck said, and decided to follow a grass-roots path.
"I'm convinced that what we have for government is a contemporary form of feudalism," he told me.
"We have an elected elite, their staff, lobbyists, the academics. Perhaps 100,000 people. It's a relatively small number of people, well-educated, well-intentioned, not bad people. But they believe they ought to decide. They gravitate toward complexity, not simplicity" Linbeck said. "If you accept a simple idea - that complexity creates opportunities for manipulation - then you can immediately see that the largest single tool is our tax system."
Alas, the idea may make too much sense to go far in Washington.
Lara Logan, a correspondent for CBS’ “60 Minutes,” delivered a provocative speech to about 1,100 influentials from government, politics, media, and the legal and corporate arenas...Propagated by none other than barack and his merry band of sycophants.
Her ominous and frightening message was gleaned from years of covering our wars in the Middle East. She arrived in Chicago on the heels of her Sept. 30 report (on 60 Minutes, no less), “The Longest War.” It examined the Afghanistan conflict and exposed the perils that still confront America, 11 years after 9/11.
Eleven years later, “they” still hate us, now more than ever, Logan told the crowd. The Taliban and al-Qaida have not been vanquished, she added. They’re coming back.
“I chose this subject because, one, I can’t stand, that there is a major lie being propagated . . .”
The lie is that America’s military might has tamed the Taliban.It's a sad day indeed when a journalist -- especially one who was born and grew up in South Africa, not this country -- has a clearer grasp on reality and more cojones than the prevaricating weasel currently befouling the White House.
“There is this narrative coming out of Washington for the last two years,” Logan said. It is driven in part by “Taliban apologists,” who claim “they are just the poor moderate, gentler, kinder Taliban,” she added sarcastically. “It’s such nonsense!”
She made a passionate case that our government is downplaying the strength of our enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as a rationale of getting us out of the longest war. We have been lulled into believing that the perils are in the past: “You’re not listening to what the people who are fighting you say about this fight. In your arrogance, you think you write the script.”
Our enemies are writing the story, she suggests, and there’s no happy ending for us.
Logan even called for retribution for the recent terrorist killings of Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other officials. The event is a harbinger of our vulnerability, she said. Logan hopes that America will “exact revenge and let the world know that the United States will not be attacked on its own soil. That its ambassadors will not be murdered, and that the United States will not stand by and do nothing about it.”
... the Obama administration (is) soft-pedaling the dangers (in the Middle East). On the heels of her “60 Minutes” report a week ago Sunday, her remarks amounted to nothing less than a frontal assault on some basic assumptions of Obama’s foreign policy...Talk about must-see TV...
It is almost unimaginable that Bob Schieffer, moderator of the Oct. 22 foreign policy debate, will ignore the blistering words of his colleague, or that he will not raise his network’s report that security in Libya was reduced just before the attacks there that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens.
"Scientists are predicting that in the future evolution will result in men with small brains and even smaller testicles.
That way we can all become members of congress..."
U.S. births fell for the fourth year in a row, the government reported Wednesday, with experts calling it more proof that the weak economy has continued to dampen enthusiasm for having children.There is, however, a silver lining.
Most striking in the new report were steep declines in Hispanic birth rates and a new low in teen births. Hispanics have been disproportionately affected by the flagging economy, experts say, and teen birth rates have been falling for 20 years.
Falling births is a relatively new phenomenon in this country. Births had been on the rise since the late 1990s and hit an all-time high of more than 4.3 million in 2007.
But fewer than 4 million births were counted last year - the lowest number since 1998.
Among the people who study this sort of thing, the flagging economy has been seen as the primary explanation. The theory is that many women or couples who are out of work, underemployed or have other money problems feel they can't afford to start a family or add to it.
Even though ... employment only increased by 114,000 last month (not enough to even keep up with population growth), the official unemployment rate fell from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent. So how did that happen? Well, the unemployment number is not based on the survey of employers that showed that 114,000 jobs were added to the economy last month. Rather it is based on a survey of households. And that survey showed that the total number of Americans employed last month increased by a whopping 873,000 – almost eight times the number that the employer survey showed. That figure for September (873,000) was the biggest one month increase in 29 years. And it just happened to come at the exact perfect time for Barack Obama. So was there a jobs report conspiracy?
Examine the evidence and decide for yourself.
The number of Americans with a job fell by 195,000 in July.
Then it fell by another 119,000 in August.
But somehow in September it miraculously exploded in the other direction and 873,000 jobs were added to the economy?
If you believe that, I have a bridge that I want to sell you.
Somehow, the largest increase in jobs in 29 years happened just when Barack Obama needed it the most.
Nah, that doesn’t sound fishy to me at all.Harper also has a good post deconstructing that nonsense.
