Here’s an exploration of the impact of government regulation on small businesses. (H/T Foxfier)
Fewer businesses means fewer new jobs.
It also means that consumers have fewer options to get better quality products and services for less money. Boo!
Tag Archives: Small Business
How hard work and business ownership makes people conservative
Well, here’s the story of one from the Washington Times.
Excerpt:
High school freshman Tim Scott could not afford Chick-fil-A sandwiches back in 1981, but the French fries were good and inexpensive. Eating those fries made him a success, a conservative and an odds-on favorite to be the next congressman from Charleston, S.C.
Mr. Scott has been garnering attention because he is a black Republican who won a primary over the son of the late one-time segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond. South Carolina acquaintances, though, are coming out of the woodwork to say Mr. Scott bears watching not because he is black but because he’s the real deal: industrious, principled, consistent, thoughtful. In a word, authentic.
But to hear him tell it, it all began with the fries.
Mr. Scott’s parents were split – his father was in the Air Force in Colorado – and his mother, he said, worked two eight-hour shifts daily. “She was a nurse’s assistant cleaning up other people’s feces,” he said. “That’s nobody’s definition of fun.” Despite her example of hard work, though, his own schoolwork showed no signs of similar dedication. “I literally failed four subjects at once: world geography, civics, Spanish and English. Those last two subjects showed I wasn’t bilingual, I was bi-ignorant.”
Young Mr. Scott did, however, hold down a part-time job taking tickets at a movie theater. The Chick-fil-A was next door. He bought fries there regularly. The restaurant’s proprietor, a guy named John Moniz – a “Christian conservative white Republican, although I didn’t know it at the time,” Mr. Scott said – “just started recognizing me, and one day he came up and sat down next to me and started talking.”
I love this story. I’m a colored evangelical Protestant man. I was the only evangelical Christian and the only political conservative in my entire family. My Dad used to bring me to work ALL the time, even on weekends – and I would meet all his co-workers, drink coffee and play with his office supplies. My conversion started when I got my first paying job – programming UNIX shell scripts for a high-tech corporation while I was still a teenager – and that was my lowest paying job ever. One look at my pay check and I was through with the government and their lousy payroll taxes. I didn’t see them in my office helping me to debug and test – so why did they deserve any of my money? I let my grades slide to keep working right through college (until grad school). I always valued working and saving and investing more than education. It’s the pattern you learn from watching your father work – the dignity of labor – the joy of independence – the ability to share with those in need. Work makes you a conservative.
You can friend Tim here on Facebook.
BONUS:
Marco Rubio responds to Democrat Harry Reid’s comments that no Hispanic person can be a Republican.
Marco Rubio is a Hispanic Republican who is about to win a federal Senate seat. I have been following him since his election announcement.
Obamacare’s impact on ER wait times and low-wage workers
First, ER wait times. (H/T ECM)
Excerpt:
As the number of insured people goes up while health care reform takes place, the long waits and crowded lobbies at emergency rooms are anticipated to increase as well.
“We’re starting out with crowded conditions and anticipating things will only get worse,” American College of Emergency Physicians president Dr. Angela Gardner told the Associated Press.
Nearly 32 million more people will have health insurance as a result of changing health-care laws, and about 16 million are to be added to the Medicaid system, but that apparently won’t keep them out of the ER, the AP reported.
“Just because we’ve insured people [that] doesn’t mean they now have access,” Dr. Elijah Berg from Boston told the AP. “They’re coming to the emergency department because they don’t have access to alternatives.”
[…]Since 2006, when it began offering government-run health care to its residents, Massachusetts has been considered the test model for the federal health changes, requiring health coverage for everyone, but data has shown visits to the ER have continued to rise since the Massachusetts law took place.
ERs are already overly crowded, with the biggest users being those under the federal Medicaid plan. Many doctors limit the number of Medicaid patients that they see because of the low rate of reimbursement from the government.
Here’s what should have happened. Voters should have looked at Massachusetts and Tennessee and seen what government control of health care does to health care. Universal coverage increases demand, but supply stays the same because of onerous certifications, taxes and regulations that block new entrants. Somewhere along the line there will be a shortage. And that means waiting lists, abortion, denial of care, and eventually euthanasia in order to keep costs down.
But there’s more – from the Heartland Institute.
What about Obamacare’s impact on low-wage workers? (H/T Rob)
Excerpt:
The requirements of President Obama’s new health care regime could penalize low-wage workers and cause a further slowdown of hiring for positions at chain restaurants and other small businesses.
White Castle, a national fast food chain, recently announced it would slow planned expansion in the United States and curtail hiring at its numerous restaurant outlets thanks to Obama’s law, which the chain says will cut its earnings in half.
According to a White Castle representative, the requirement that employers pay a $3,000 fine to the federal government for every employee whose out-of-pocket cost of health insurance exceeds 9.5 percent of their income will destroy their business model.
[…]Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a health care analyst at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, says much of this process is out of the employer’s control.
[…]Furchtgott-Roth says this aspect of Obamacare is part of a larger trend toward government pricing low-skilled workers out of the U.S. economy.
“The burden of all these Obamacare provisions is going to fall more on America’s low-skilled workers—the workers at White Castle, Burger King, and so on. Because their labor will become more expensive for companies to use, we’re going to see more mechanized solutions, a trend that is already happening in Europe,” Furchtgott-Roth said.
Well, some of these people who don’t pay income taxes are certainly going to be getting a wake-up call. Larger companies like John Deere, Verizon, Valero, Caterpillar, etc. already announced that they were going to be taking huge hits to their bottom line as a result of Obamacare. All these good intentions and high-minded blabberings don’t amount to any benefits for American working families. Happy-talk wins elections, but it doesn’t pay the bills or feed the children.
Next time, we need to be more diligent at looking at what actually happens in other countries and even in our own states when people try to nationalize health care in order to provide universal coverage. We can have universal coverage – we just need to let people choose what level of coverage they want and we need to make market reforms to the health care industry. Choice and competition works better for consumers. That’s real health care reform.
WINTERY KNIGHT 