Tag Archives: Poverty

News

Unionized UPS to drop health insurance for 15,000 spouses because of Obamacare

1 Comment

The Washington Times reports. (H/T Letitia)

Excerpt:

Citing Obamacare, the United Parcel Service plans to remove 15,000 spouses from its health care plan because they are eligible for coverage elsewhere.

Rising medical costs, “combined with the costs associated with the Affordable Care Act, have made it increasingly difficult to continue providing the same level of health care benefits to our employees at an affordable cost,” UPS said in a memo to employees, Kaiser Health News reported.

UPS expects the move will save about $60 million a year, company spokesman Andy McGowan said.

The health law requires large employers to cover employees and dependent children, but not spouses or domestic partners, Kaiserreported.

On Tuesday, Forever 21 Inc. became the latest national company to cut employee hours to counter the impact of Obamacare, the Atlanta Business Chronicle reported.

The Heritage Foundation has more on that Forever 21 story.

Excerpt:

A leaked memo shared last week on social media with the hashtag #Never21 proves the company capped some full-time workers at 29.5 hours a week as of August 18, resulting in a loss of the health coverage and other benefits offered to full-time workers.

Conservatives have warned that the provision under Obamacare defining a full-time worker as one who works 30 hours a week or more incentivizes businesses to drastically cut workers’ hours to avoid the heavy financial burden of mandatory insurance requirements under the bill.

Forever 21 joins several fast food chains that have cut workers’ hours to less than 30 in the past few months, ahead of the provision taking effect.

I’ve blogged about several of these companies who are having to adjust to Obamacare, but actually, this is not happening to a company here and a company there.

Reuters explains:

U.S. businesses are hiring at a robust rate. The only problem is that three out of four of the nearly 1 million hires this year are part-time and many of the jobs are low-paid.

Faltering economic growth at home and abroad and concern that President Barack Obama’s signature health care law will drive up business costs are behind the wariness about taking on full-time staff, executives at staffing and payroll firms say.

Employers say part-timers offer them flexibility. If the economy picks up, they can quickly offer full-time work. If orders dry up, they know costs are under control. It also helps them to curb costs they might face under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

Now on first glance, it would seem that conservatives should be happy because the leftists who voted for Obama are finally getting what they deserve.

However, my conservative deist friend ECM says “not so fast”:

This would be entertaining, but this is a feature, not a bug.

Remember: they passed the present Ocare on the premise that 44-million were uninsured (never mind how bogus that stat was/is)–now that the ranks are being swelled by the self-same act, there will be tens of millions more which, as the left is wont to do, will be used as ‘proof’ that we need single-payer, not that Ocare wrecked a working market for healthcare.

(No, it doesn’t matter that everyone against this law said *exactly* this would happen, because, to the left, cause and effect and accurate predictions–despite their pretensions at being scientifically-minded–are never valid unless it confirms their biases, so they’ll just blame ‘big business’ and the bogeyman for why it’s going in exactly the direction the sane said it would. The media will reinforce this and, pow, single-payer.)

So laugh while you can–it won’t be funny for long.

I think that this could go either way. If the media covers up for Obama because they want single payer, and the conservatives pick someone like Mitt Romney instead of Bobby Jindal or Paul Ryan or Ted Cruz, then we are going to lose. We are going to lose because people will blame the decisions of private businesses instead of the Obamacare that forced them to make those decisions.

We still have the 2014 elections coming up. The public needs to have a good taste of what Obamacare does in order to understand what they’re getting. If they still choose to elect Democrats after seeing the effects of socialism, then they’ll have to live with socialism. I’m fine with it. I don’t plan to be working when the bill comes due, and I’m not going to be paying for big houses and college tuition, either.

News

Why did Detroit go bankrupt? Who is to blame? Whose fault was it?

1 Comment

This article from Front Page magazine traces the history of the city of Detroit.

Excerpt:

Beginning in 1962, Detroit has endured a steady diet of Democratic mayors and their social welfare agenda. Beginning in 1962, Mayor Jerome Cavanagh ushered in a “Model City” program to a nine-square-mile section of the city. It was based on a Soviet Union-style approach, aimed at rebuilding entire urban areas all at once. The effort was funded by a commuter tax and a new income tax that Cavanagh told residents would be paid by “the rich.” Yet the same central planning that that formed the heart of the Model City program was extended to the people themselves, who eventually resented being told by government how to run their businesses and their lives in exchange for government goodies. Unsurprisingly, the program was a monumental failure.

Then there were the riots. In 1967, police broke up a celebration at a “blind pig.” Blind pigs were after-hours clubs that featured gambling and prostitution and had been part of the traditional black culture in Detroit since Prohibition. The political leadership considered them antithetical to the Model City program. An enraged neighborhood did not. People took to the streets, igniting the worst race riot of the decade. Black-owned business were looted and burned to the ground. Forty people were killed and 5,000 were left homeless. Thus began the “white flight” out of the city center, totaling 140,000 people over an eighteen month period, ensued. The city never recovered.

None of this stopped the progressive agenda from continuing to be implemented. Public employees were given precisely the exorbitant wage and benefits packages that are coming back to haunt the city now. This Democrat-fostered attitude extended to private sector unions, whose equally exorbitant packages, along with efficiency-strangling work rules, made the cost of doing business in the Motor City prohibitive. As a result, much of the car industry that formed the city’s employment backbone left for right-to-work states that provided a far less hostile — and far more affordable — business climate.

As chronicled here, the same progressive-inspired insanity destroyed the Detroit public school system (DPS), which itself stands on the brink of bankruptcy. This tragedy is highlighted by several sad realities. In 2009, DPS students turned in the lowest scores ever recorded in the national math proficiency test over its then-21-year history. The state of Michigan, led by Detroit, has one of the highest black-white achievement gaps in the nation. As of June 12, only 1.8 percent of the system’s students were capable of doing college level work.

Yet by far the most telling indictment of the system is this mind-bending reality: a full 47 percent of city residents are functionally illiterate.

The governor of Michigan Rick Snyder has just come out and said that he will not ask for a bailout from the federal government of Detroit.

Excerpt:

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and the bankruptcy specialist he appointed to fix Detroit’s unprecedented financial problems put the blame Sunday squarely on the city and defended their decision to file for Chapter 9.

The Republican governor said Detroit created the problems and stood steadfast behind his decision to file Thursday for bankruptcy, with the city roughly $19 billion in debt.

“This is a tragic, difficult decision, but a right one,” he said. “It’s not about just more money, it’s about accountable government.”

He said corruption and city leaders ignoring warning signs for 60 years contributed to the problems. Among his biggest concerns, Snyder said, is the decline of municipal services for Detroit’s remaining 700,000 residents, including police response times of nearly one hour.

Thank God. Maybe now they will start to elect Republicans for the first time in over 50 years.

News

New study: private religious schools outperform public schools and public charter schools

2 Comments

Reported by The Public Discourse.

Excerpt:

I recently conducted a meta-analysis of more than ninety studies on education, and the results suggest that perhaps it is time for America’s leadership and the general public to take a second look at religious private schools. At the risk of immodesty, let me be frank. The study is hugely important because it is the first published meta-analysis to compare the three primary types of American schools: religious private schools, traditional public schools, and charter schools.

A meta-analysis statistically combines all the relevant existing studies on a given subject in order to determine the aggregated results of the research. This meta-analysis yielded results that surprised many by indicating that students from public charter schools did no better than their peers in traditional public schools. In contrast, youth from religious private schools performed better academically than their counterparts in both public charter schools and traditional public schools, even when the results were adjusted to account for socioeconomic status, selectivity, race, and various other factors.

[…]Examining results from all ninety studies, I found that the average academic outcome for religious school students was .28 of a standard deviation unit higher than for traditional public school (TPS) students, while the average for charter school students was only .01 of a standard deviation unit higher. If one converts these numbers to percentiles, the average academic outcome was 11 percentage points higher than that of TPS pupils, while charter school attendees scored about the same as their TPS counterparts.

Translated into more tangible numbers, students who attend private religious schools attain educational levels that average about twelve months ahead of those attending regular public schools. Even when the meta-analysis employed sophisticated controls, which included measures for socioeconomic status, selectivity, gender, and race, youth who attended faith-based schools achieved at levels seven months ahead of both TPS and public charter school students.

One of the most intriguing results of the study is that the racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps are roughly 25 percent narrower in religious private schools than in public schools. This finding is particularly interesting when one considers that over the years the government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to bridge the gaps, with only limited success. Higher expectations for students, and school leaders’ insistence that pupils take demanding courses, could help to explain these circumstances in faith-based schools.

The meta-analysis focused primarily on scholastic performance, but it also examined student behavior. The results indicated that youth from faith-based schools maintained even a larger edge in behavior than they did in school academics. That is, pupils from religious private schools exhibited fewer behavioral problems, even when socioeconomic status, selectivity, race, and gender were also controlled for. This translates into fewer gangs, lower levels of drug abuse, and greater racial harmony than one typically finds in public schools.

Many people, even this researcher, expected public charter school students to perform somewhere in between the levels achieved by students attending faith-based schools and those attending traditional public schools, given that they were trying to mimic certain aspects of private religious schools.

To the extent that neither traditional public schools nor charter schools are succeeding on a broad scale, it appears that the best hope for American education is religious private schools. Not only are they considerably more economically efficient, but their students also achieve better academic and behavioral results.

I think that it is noteworthy that Democrats opposes allowing parents – especially poor parents – to have a choice of what school their children will attend. The Obama administration even de-funded a voucher program that served poor-minority students. Teacher unions are one of the strongest pro-Democrat special interests. If the Democrat Party has to choose between poor, minority students and their powerful allies in the teach unions, the choice is not a hard one. They choose the teacher unions.