Tag Archives: Debt

Ten things Obama did to discourage companies from hiring

This article was written a week ago on Investors Business Daily, and it is still in the top five!

Below is my favorite of the ten.

Excerpt:

Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act of 2010 (ObamaCare).

According to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, ObamaCare will hike taxes an estimated $15.2 billion, and the middle class will get whacked. We’ve already seen health insurance premiums go up because of costly ObamaCare mandates, which means less money available for spending on other things.

Moreover, employer mandates, taxes and penalties will reduce funds available for private-sector hiring. The mandates, taxes and penalties kick in when an employer has more than 50 employees, and they apply to all employees, so one effect of the law is to discourage small businesses — which create most American jobs — from hiring more than 50 people.

If a business has 45 employees and it needs to hire eight more people for a total of 53 employees, but it doesn’t offer health insurance or its insurance plan doesn’t satisfy the latest ObamaCare regulations, hiring those eight additional people would entail a $2,000 penalty for each of the 53 employees — a total of $106,000!

Many other provisions are likely to have unintended consequences, as well. The 2.5% excise tax on high-tech companies that produce pacemakers, heart valves, stents, defibrillators and other medical devices that help improve the quality of life or save lives is an estimated $20 billion hit. Anything that increases the cost of doing business is bad for jobs.

A mandate, by the way, is when the government forces all insurance company plans to cover elective things like abortions. When insurance companies have to cover more politically correct lifestlye choices, the premiums that normal people pay go up to cover the weird stuff. Are you a normal person? Did your medical premiums go up, or did you lose medical coverage through your employer? If so, then thank Obama – he needed to make sure that all his favorite special interest groups (e.g. – Planned Parenthood) got their money.

Read the remaining nine here.

Are the Obamas out of touch with the American taxpayer?

This is what the UK Telegraph is saying across the pond, because of Michelle Obama’s lavish taxpayer-funded vacation to Spain. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

It is the kind of impunity that has been highlighted on the world stage this week by Michelle Obama’s hugely costly trip to Spain, which has prompted a New York Post columnist Andrea Tantaros to dub the First Lady a contemporary Marie Antoinette. As The Telegraph reports, while the Obamas are covering their own vacation expenses such as accommodation, the trip may cost US taxpayers as much as $375,000 in terms of secret service security and flight costs on Air Force Two.

[…]While the liberal-dominated US mainstream media have largely ignored the story, it is all over the blogosphere and talk radio, and will undoubtedly add to the President’s free falling poll ratings. As much as the media establishment turn a blind eye to stories like this, which are major news in the international media, the American public is increasingly turning to alternative news sources, including the British press, which has a far less deferential approach towards the White House.

The First Lady’s ill-conceived trip to Marbella and the complete disregard for public opinion and concerns over excessive government spending is symbolic of a far wider problem with the Obama presidency – the overarching disdain for the principles of limited government, individual liberty and free enterprise that have built the United States over the course of nearly two and a half centuries into the most powerful and free nation on earth.

These British news sources understand what America is supposed to be better than we understand it ourselves, apparently. They know something is wrong.

First, the billion-dollar bailouts for all of Obama’s suporters, and now this extravagance. Your children will be paying for this, eventually. Every dollar has to be paid back.

Paul Ryan discusses economics at the liberal Brookings Institute

The video, including slides and audio, is here.

He outlines our economic crisis and two ways to deal with it – prosperity or austerity.

The Brookings Institute is a respected left-of-center think tank. I cite them occasionally, because they do quality research.