Posted by Tina
The President spoke this morning to a gathering of folks at the Center for American Progress, a group the AP referred to as a “nonprofit community center” in their reporting. Obama couldn’t have picked a more liberal friendly group now that the college kids have soured on hope and change.
It’s hard to imagine a thought more audacious than, “The basic bargain at the heart of our economy has frayed,” after four years of policies specifically implemented to create “a new beginning” for the American people. The President said it nonetheless. Judge for yourselves…video of the speech is posted at Yahoo.com.
A rebuttal given by Senator Jeff Sessions today was more interesting and unfortunately for the American people, right on the money:
It is shocking for the President to give a speech about income disparity and falling wages while pushing an immigration plan that will hammer American workers and widen the disparity. The Congressional Budget Office confirms the White House-backed plan would reduce wages, reduce per capita GNP, and increase unemployment. The President says people are worried that “the system is rigged,” and yet it is the President who has teamed up with a small cadre of CEOs to double the flow of immigrant workers when these exact same companies are laying off American workers in droves.
Wages for American workers are lower today than they were more than a decade ago, and take-home pay has fallen each year since the President came into office. A recent study demonstrated that all net job growth since 2000 has gone to immigrant workers while the number of U.S.-born Americans working has declined by 1.3 million.
The President’s policies also threaten college students who are about to enter a difficult economy. His plan would more than double the number of temporary foreign workers for wealthy tech companies. As Professor Ron Hira, a leading expert on H-1B visas, has noted, the visas are being used for “facilitating offshoring and providing employers with cheap, temporary labor—while reducing job opportunities for American high-tech workers in the process.”
Harvard professor Dr. George Borjas found that high levels of immigration between 1980 and 2000 caused the wages of lower-skilled American workers to drop nearly 8 percent. He also found current immigration levels have resulted in a $402 billion annual wage loss for workers but a $437 billion increase in profits for business owners.
It is time to have an open and honest conversation about our shrinking middle class and the consequences of our immigration policies on American workers and their wages. Unfortunately, that is not what we got from the President today.
The truth is that the policy formula favored by President Obama—more regulation, hostility to American energy, anti-growth taxation, surging debt, bigger government, more federal interference, government-run healthcare, and mindless immigration policies—are the cause, not the cure, for growing middle class distress.
Sessions source: John Hinderakker, Powerline.
Low informed voters need to wake up before it’s to late.
ObamaCare was never about providing health care for 30 million when 30 million will still be with out in 2022. Gov’t take over of individual’s health, student loans and now minimum wage for private companies.
Everyone’s mind, body and soul will be owned by the “company store.”
“Furthermore, 70% of respondents said student debt is in the middle or at the top of their personal list of pressing election issues.”
We Bet You Haven’t Heard This About Obamacare:
“Another push is underway to raise the minimum wage. But what you probably haven’t heard is that Obamacare has already done that.
The plan on the table in Congress would raise the federal minimum wage above $10 an hour (which is higher than all existing state rates). Obamacare’s mandate on employers, however, is already scheduled to raise the hourly cost of hiring a full-time worker past $10 an hour.”
http://blog.heritage.org/2013/12/05/obamacare-already-raises-the-minimum-wage/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social
Dude, Where’s My Student Loan Bailout?:
“Those who haven’t paid off their student loans overwhelmingly want those loans forgiven by their lenders, according to a new survey released by online research firm, Instant.ly, a uSamp company. This should come as no huge surprise — irony alert — given how diligent graduates have been about paying off their student loans.
The current student loan default rate is 8.8%, the highest on record. The current student loan delinquency rate (defined as at least 90 days late on payments) is 8.92%. However, the actual delinquency rate is estimated to be closer to 18%, according to the New York Fed, since “about half of these loans are currently in deferment, in grace period, or in forbearance and therefore temporarily not in the repayment cycle.”
While a refreshing 65% of those surveyed by Instant.ly opposed bankruptcy as a way out of student loan debt, a full 81% of those surveyed with student debt said the government should participate in student loan forgiveness. Students and graduates without debt also overwhelmingly favored forgiveness of the debt for others (with 61% in favor).
In order to create the funds necessary for student loan forgiveness, 54% of respondents said the government should erase subsidies to oil and gas companies, the cliche whipping boys of students everywhere. Increasing payroll taxes on owners of private corporations was the second most popular option (20% favoring), while cutting spending from ObamaCare was nearly as popular (18% favoring).
Furthermore, 70% of respondents said student debt is in the middle or at the top of their personal list of pressing election issues.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2012/09/12/education-shocker-81-of-those-with-student-loan-debt-want-it-forgiven/
Peggy quoting: “…a full 81% of those surveyed with student debt said the government should participate in student loan forgiveness.”
I have a better idea. How about those fat cat universities figure a way to subsidize these students in paying off loans they took out to pay for the grossly inflated cost of higher education! They’ve been ripping students off for decades:
Forbes
Barack Obama is not responsible for all of this but the thinking that creates this problem has liberalism painted all over it. Bloated bureaucracies, wages based on tenure rather than value and merit, government subsidies all lead to higher prices for the consumer.
Tina, The career ladder in education begins with classified staff who hold positions like instructional aids. The next step up is faculty and from faculty it’s administration where the big bucks are. Written into every contract is an agreement that management will always earn a certain percentage more than the faculty and classified staff. When staff and faculty negotiate at 5%, for example, pay raise the administration without negotiations with the school board automatically are granted the same pay raise.
Also, written into the contracts are an automatic increase to guarantee a specific range higher for administrators occurring from positions below increases.
By doing simple math one can see how a 5% increase on a salary in the $20-30,000 range doesn’t grow as fast as it will to a $20-300,000 salary. Total that up for that past several decades and you see how the administration gets the big bucks.
Promoting from within is a common practice too in education. Wanting to keep ones peers and the “best of the best” since they’ve been coworkers for years and years is why those vote hungry school board and regents are so easily swayed to add more middle management and supervisors on to the pay roll.
There’s even a career for retired administrators called, “Rent a President/Supervisor/Chancellor.” Retired administrators earn even bigger salaries filling vacant positions all over the state while the hiring process, which will take about a year to fill.
What frost my cookies is that people don’t ask what happens to that forgiven loan money? Student loans held by private banks are not forgiven even by bankruptcy, exception are very rare. If they didn’t collect on those loans their other customers would lose, the shareholders would lose and eventually the bank’s doors would close.
But, now under ObamaCare the feds have taken over a huge percentage of those loans. What’s going to happen when the government forgives those loans that are supposed to be funding ObamaCare? You know what has to happen. It’s another bailout time with more money borrowed from the Federal Reserve and China and the $17 trillion climbs even faster to $20 trillion. And the Merry-go-round goes round and round and down and down.
Bonus reading:
“The Schizophrenia of Barack Obama”
By Steve McCann
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/12/the_schizophrenia_of_barack_obama.html
Jeff Sessions:
“It is shocking for the President to give a speech about income disparity and falling wages”
Oh! So now we care about falling wages, do we? This from the people who believe the current minimum wage is onerously high, even though it’s lower than it was in 1968? Already it is impossible to see Sessions’ argument as intellectually honest, and he hasn’t even finished his first sentence.
“while pushing an immigration plan that will hammer American workers and widen the disparity. The Congressional Budget Office confirms the White House-backed plan would reduce wages, reduce per capita GNP, and increase unemployment.”
Wow. It’s as if Jeff Sessions believes that Americans are incapable of actually looking at what the CBO has said themselves and finding that his claims are the total opposite of the truth. (He doesn’t seem to be alone on the right in making this assumption; earlier Peggy claimed that Obamacare couldn’t possibly have been about reducing the number of the uninsured, and as evidence for this, linked to a CBO report which showed that it reduces the number of the uninsured by 20 million people. Oops.)
Here’s what the CBO actually says:
“The estimated reductions in average wages and per capita GNP for much of the next two decades do not necessarily imply that current U.S. residents would be worse off, on average, under the legislation than they would be under current law. Both of those figures represent differences between the averages for all U.S. residents under the legislation—including both the people who would be residents under current law and the additional people who would come to the country under the legislation—and the averages under current law for people who would be residents in the absence of the legislation. As noted, the additional people who would become residents under the legislation would earn lower wages, on average, than other residents, which would pull down the average wage and per capita GNP; at the same time, the income earned by capital would increase. CBO has not analyzed the full economic effects of the legislation separately for the incomes of people who would be U.S. residents under current law.”
http://www.factcheck.org/2013/06/the-facts-on-cbos-immigration-report/
In other words, the CBO never claimed that the immigration plan will “hammer American workers.” The drop in the average is due to the influx of lower skilled workers in lower skilled jobs, and there is no evidence that the influx will cause a reduction in wages for current or future American-born workers.
The CBO also projected that the immigration bill would cut the deficit by billions of dollars over the next ten years. But Sessions doesn’t care about that any more than he cares about falling wages. He is adopting the rhetoric of progressive populism to appeal to the masses, but he has no record of supporting policies that directly benefit the poor.
“Wages for American workers are lower today than they were more than a decade ago,”
Hilarious. I’ve brought this fact up dozens of times on this blog, Tina; to be frank, you’ve never once indicated that you gave a shit about falling wages.
Sessions goes on to cite two academics whose work on immigration policy is seen as far outside the mainstream:
“The President’s policies also threaten college students who are about to enter a difficult economy. His plan would more than double the number of temporary foreign workers for wealthy tech companies. As Professor Ron Hira, a leading expert on H-1B visas, has noted, the visas are being used for “facilitating offshoring and providing employers with cheap, temporary labor—while reducing job opportunities for American high-tech workers in the process.”
But Hira’s argument that these visas are being abused by corporations doesn’t stand up to the facts:
A Look at the Facts
What are the facts? Data exist that show if Bank of America, Pfizer, IBM and other companies are trying to replace most of their workforce with foreign-born professionals on H-1B visas, then they are not doing a very good job of it.
With worldwide employment of 288,000 people, Bank of America received approval for only 26 new H-1B professionals in 2009, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).
Pfizer had only 25 new H-1Bs in 2009, out of a worldwide workforce of 110,600.
IBM had 170 new H-1B petitions approved in 2009, according to USCIS, and its Indian subsidiary had 696 approved. This is out of a worldwide workforce for IBM of 426,751. (U.S.-only employment data were not available.)
Wachovia, bought out by Wells Fargo, did not appear to hire anyone new on an H-1B visa in 2009 and had only about 26 such hires in 2008, according to USCIS.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services does not publish company-specific data on L-1 visas, but the U.S. embassy recently announced that about 26,000 such visas were approved in India for all employers in fiscal year 2011, representing approximately 0.02 percent of the U.S. labor force. Even then, it is questionable to consider L-1 visas “job-destroying.”
When companies use L-1 visas they are transferring into the United States individuals who already are employed by the companies in another country. Why moving an employee from one location to another means a job loss for a U.S. worker is unclear. (Sometimes a source of controversy is when a consulting company’s contract ends and a new company receives that contract.)
Those most opposed to the movement of personnel internationally and the hiring of foreign nationals often fall into the trap of “lifeboat economics,” the belief that adding someone new to the “boat” or economy risks the livelihood of someone already here. That is not how the world works, as consumer spending, innovation, business startups, etc. all create more jobs.
A second fallacy, this one inherent in the exchange between Vivek Wadhwa and Ron Hira, is the view by some that companies engage in a conspiracy to hire foreign nationals and purposely pay such professionals less. Under U.S. immigration law, an employer must pay an H-1B visa holder either the prevailing wage or the actual wage paid to a comparable U.S. worker, whichever is higher. In addition, employers typically pay $5,000 to $6,000 in various legal and government fees to hire H-1B visa holders, and potentially up to $40,000 to sponsor a professional for a green card (permanent residence).
For a conspiracy to exist to underpay a foreign national rather than hire a U.S. professional, a company would need not just the company’s CEO involved in the conspiracy, but also likely mid-level human resources staff, the head of human resources, the company’s general counsel and any outside legal counsel to cooperate as well. Why all these individuals would risk their careers and potentially serving time in prison (for fraud and conspiracy) to save a relatively small amount of money for their company is unclear? Moreover, even after all these efforts, an H-1B visa holder can simply go work for another employer that files a new petition and offers more money.
Vivek Wadhwa argued the type of rhetoric coming from Ron Hira and others harms the competitiveness of key sectors of the U.S. economy.
IT Business Edge’s Donald Tennant sided with Wadhwa over Hira: “I don’t know whether the rhetoric is scaring the best and brightest away. But I do know that making the wild claim on national TV that Bank of America, IBM, Pfizer and Wachovia have policies in place to bring in foreign workers as a means of displacing American workers is horribly irresponsible.”
http://immigrationvoice.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-2543980.html
“Harvard professor Dr. George Borjas found that high levels of immigration between 1980 and 2000 caused the wages of lower-skilled American workers to drop nearly 8 percent. He also found current immigration levels have resulted in a $402 billion annual wage loss for workers but a $437 billion increase in profits for business owners.”
First of all, I’d like to again point out the irony of Jeff Sessions complaining about a widening gap between corporate profits and worker wages–a gap which Sessions, as well as the conservatives on this site, usually address by vacillating between 1) pretending it doesn’t exist, 2) treating it as a positive indicator of the free market at work, or 3) calling people who point this out socialists who are waging class warfare on the rich, often all in the same blog comment.
Second, Borjas is a notorious anti-immigration advocate who believes in further restricting legal immigration, and supports policies akin to the racial quotas in the past. He worked on the discredited Heritage study by Jason Richwine, which ridiculously claimed that immigration reform would at “minimum” cost over $6 trillion to the U.S. economy. The report was heavily criticized by both liberals and conservatives, including the CATO Institute and Paul Ryan, and is even contradicted by Heritage’s opinion in 2006 that “the argument that immigrants harm the American economy should be dismissed out of hand. ” Richwine was forced to resign after it came out that his graduate thesis was premised on the idea that Hispanics are by nature less intelligent than whites.
http://www.thewire.com/politics/2013/05/heritage-foundation-jason-richwine/65005/
Conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin has written that Borjas is an opponent of “not just illegal immigration but all immigration.” Of course he’s going to oppose this plan and use ridiculous arguments to justify that opposition.
Rubin, who enthusiastically supported Romney in 2012, has more on Borjas here, including an enlightening e-mail exchange between the two of them.
“Make no mistake: This is the argument against all immigration. It’s a school of thought, as the New York Times noted. But it is also highly controversial and not at all conservative. Conservatives believe people are assets and, through their labors, improve themselves and their countrymen. In fact, conservative economists believe, as do the bulk of labor economists — and the Heritage Foundation itself up through 2006 — that immigration is a net benefit.
Opponents of immigration reform should be honest. If they think immigrants (illegal or not), according to the Borjas-Richwine-Heritage 2013 model, are bad for native Americans, we should round up 11 million people, kick them out and not let any more immigrants in, period. Is that the America they are advocating?”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2013/05/09/what-the-anti-immigrant-movement-really-believes/
Long story short, Borjas’ theory that immigrants are a net drain on the economy is highly contested even by conservative economists. For Sessions to use him as an appeal to authority, without mentioning the lack of support for his theories in the academic community, is dishonest.
“It is time to have an open and honest conversation about our shrinking middle class”
See above. Sessions is not interested in having an open and honest conversation about anything. He is pretending to care about falling wages and the widening gap between the rich and the poor, an issue he has never shown any indication of caring about; he is pretending that Dr. Borja and Prof. Hira are respected authorities in their field, which they are not; and he has lied about the results of a CBO report because he doesn’t like the actual results.
Sessions loses this round.
“government-run healthcare”
Oh look, another lie on the way out. Politifact’s 2010 Lie of the Year, at that! I guess if you’re gonna lie, lie big.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2010/dec/16/lie-year-government-takeover-health-care/
Peggy: “Low informed voters need to wake up before it’s to late.”
How can anyone take this seriously from you given that you consistently show yourself to be a low informed voter?
“ObamaCare was never about providing health care for 30 million when 30 million will still be without in 2022.”
As I’ve pointed out, this argument makes no sense. When the ACA was passed, there were 50 million uninsured people. That’s a predicted drop of 20 million people over 10 years. The fact that there will still be 30 million uninsured by 2022 doesn’t change that the ACA will significantly reduce the number of the uninsured. And it’s already started doing that; the number of the uninsured has fallen over the past two years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/us/percentage-of-americans-lacking-health-coverage-falls-again.html
“Gov’t take over of individual’s health,”
The ACA is not a “gov’t takeover of individual’s health.” You’d know that if you were not a low informed voter.
“student loans and now minimum wage for private companies.”
“Now?” What are you talking about? You know that the government has set the minimum wage for private companies since the 1930s. Why would you say that “now” the government is taking over the minimum wage for private companies? Even you can’t possibly be uninformed enough to not know that this has been the case for the entire time you have been alive on this earth.
Maybe you’re not really uninformed–you just reject any information that’s inconvenient to your narrative.
Chris as usual you insert your profound prejudices into the issue!
The concern from the right about minimum wage increase is that it would accomplish almost nothing except for giving a very small, temporary bump in the wages of a few lucky people. The downside is much greater. Raising the minimum wage, especially as drastically as some have proposed, potentially forces wages above minimum wage higher also, causing job losses, less opportunity for teens and young adults, and/or higher prices for goods and services. Do not bother with an academic paper telling me that I am wrong about that. I run a business and I know what would happen in very real world terms. The boss will spend more hours on the job and fewer jobs will be available to others. The price for a hamburger are already up by quite a bit because food prices are way up.
Imagine what will happen if the minimum wage is increased to those companies that package and deliver the food to the hamburger franchise!
The common sense approach recognizes that jobs have a value to the employer within a certain window. If that window is exceeded the margin he must make to survive is diminished or he must raise prices or lower expenses by shrinking the size of quality of the hamburger. Too many quarters with lowered profits and his very survival is at stake.
The union organizers currently protesting fast food are looking at corporate profits and assuming that the local store, which is simply a franchise, has plenty to “share”
(It must be said, however, a cashiers or cooks job is not “sharing” the bosses profits. His job is the work he has a greed to do for agreed upon compensation. Profits are not his business unless he is a share holder. If he’s smart he will be one day)
The local franchise operates on very low profit margins. See here:
This is a very dumb time to be putting more pressure on these small business franchisees. It is even more dumb when you consider that if they get their way the shift manager’s wage would also have to be moved higher since you can’t pay him the same as a guy off the street without experience. Then there are the taxes and insurances that are also higher to pay at a higher wage. These businesses can’t afford higher wages and nobody working these jobs should be counting on them as as anything more than temporary or supplemental.
The reason Democrats can be so damn generous about raising the minimum wage is because they don’t have to generate the sales to cover the cost themselves, have never met a payroll in their lives, or don’t have a clue about the risks and the hard work that go into starting one of these businesses. It’s just a math problem without real world consequence!
The right does NOT want to shove wages down. The right wants every American to make as much as money as they possibly can. But the responsibility for earning more is on the worker. No one should have the goal of having an entry level job as a career or expect it to be enough to feed a family. If they have been given that impression those who told them should be ashamed of themselves for lying to these people!
Small business left to work out their own finances and make their own decisions can offer more people a start in a job where they can learn a few skills and that will give them a chance to move on to a better job. By demanding an across the board raise in the minimum wage the left is damning no/low skills youths to more of what we are experiencing now. The youth unemployment rate is horrendous:
Keep in mind this percentage does not include those who would like a job but have given up looking for work because there are so few jobs available.
Wages cannot be determined by “fairness”. A job is worth what a business can afford and is willing to pay for the work performed. That number varies even in similar companies. One company owner may have a greater debt load than another down the street.
It’s absolutely wrong to describe the concerns of conservatives as you do, Chris, both in terms of their attitudes toward low wage workers and in terms of what is practical and workable.
The intellectual dishonesty comes from the left which mischaracterizes the intentions and motives behind the arguments. It sets out to raise wages through extortion and by force. It lies to the public about what is possible and about what it takes to get ahead in life and to provide for oneself by selling the communal model and by demonizing businesses or bosses.
We are not living in the 1930’s. We are living today in a very competitive world. Every person in America has an opportunity that some kids around the world would kill for…a free education through high school. In the last few years many of them also have the internet available, either at home, in school, at a library, or at a friends house. The ability to learn has never been so great. If these kids were taught to apply themselves, and also had the opportunity to earn a few bucks at a part time job after school, they would be well ahead of the game at graduation. More of those types of jobs would be available if the minimum wage law was eliminated. If the tax laws were structured to encourage investment and expansion then college graduates wouldn’t be working the minimum wage jobs that used to go to teens.
The problem with the left is they have no practical world experience beyond the classroom. They never take into account that when a law is changed it impacts the economy and jobs one way or another.
You can’t make business the enemy and you can’t get blood from a turnip…or you defeat the purpose of creating plenty of opportunity for new workers.
Chris you don’t have a clue…just a bunch of leftist talking points from people who also don’t have a clue.
#5 Chris
You once again are entitled to your opinions, but you are NOT entitled to the facts. When reports state millions of cancelled individual’s policies or cancelled employer’s policies for workers are or will be is not a reflection of the number of individuals who will lose their health insurance. Since most policies cover family members too, each member of the families will also lose their health care coverage. So, using simple math if 5 million policies are cancelled and there’s an estimated average of three members per family that’s 15 million men, women and children, 10 million policies cancelled equals about 30 million people and so on. Right?!!
So, instead of counting policies as individuals I suggest you pull out a calculator and multiply by 3-4 any number you hear for cancelled POLICIES to get a more accurate figure for those INDIVIDUALS who will loose their medical coverage.
Don’t like what I’ve said so far, here’s what others who agree with me have said.
The Biggest Failure of Obamacare: Increasing the Number of Uninsured:
“Some people have been surprised by the failure of the Obamacare web site and more broadly of the federal exchanges generally.
But those of us who have followed this legislation closely weren’t surprised at all. In fact, a year ago I wrote on John Goodman’s blog – “The Republicans may have lost this election, but a year from now millions of people may be begging to be freed from the scourge of ObamaCare’s exchanges.”
I’m not psychic. My conclusion was based on the dismal experience of everything the federal government had already tried and failed to do to implement the law and on the excellent reporting of Robert Pear at the New York Times. He had written months earlier that, while the state exchanges were doing their work in public, the federal effort was entirely behind closed door. The Feds even refused to divulge what was in a “request for proposals” they had released to advertising agencies to help hype up interest in the exchanges.
Doing your work in secret may shield you from the criticism of political opponents, but it also prevents you from getting constructive suggestions from neutral outsiders. And that has been the primary problem with this whole exercise from the beginning. The idea was poorly conceived, the law was poorly written, and it is being poorly implemented, all because they didn’t want to hear from critics. The effort was so fragile that the slightest hint of trouble would have brought it crashing down. But it is far better to crash a poor concept on paper before it becomes law than to pass it and watch it wreck the lives of real people.
Now, not everything about this law has failed. Some things, like covering adult children on their parents’ policies to age 26, paying 100% for preventive services, and eliminating annual and lifetime caps on benefits, have been implemented smoothly. But these are all things that are within the scope of the normal regulatory process – the regulators tell the insurance companies what to do, and the insurance companies do it. Both regulators and insurers have been doing this for decades.
These may or may not be good ideas, but they are easy to implement. In fact, all these provisions would have required only about five pages of legislation.
The problem comes in the other 2,695 pages of legislation. Why so many pages? Because they were creating entirely new functions for the federal government and all the agencies needed to operate them. And this is where the failures have come. The list is extraordinary –
•The CLASS Act. This feeble attempt to create federal long-term care insurance was thrown overboard by the administration itself after it became apparent it would be impossible to do.
•The 1099 provision. This requirement that businesses issue a 1099 to any vendor from whom they purchased $600 of goods and services in a year was repealed after business owners explained what an impossible burden it would impose.
•Federal high risk pools. This program seemed to be well-funded, but they enrolled very few people at much higher cost than projected. They quickly ran out of money.
•Retiree health subsidies. Large corporations and unions were more than happy to accept free money to do what they were doing anyway (provide health benefits to retirees), but all the money ran out in about a third of the time expected.
•CO-OPs. As an alternative to the “public option,” Congress appropriated billions of dollars to create consumer-run, nonprofit insurance companies in each state and even created a whole new section of the Internal Revenue Code for them. It was never explained why mutual insurance companies were not adequate to the job. A few have been created but Congress put so many restrictions on them that even those few are unlikely to make it past the first year.
•Small employer tax credits. The complexity and confusion of these credits deterred all but a handful of companies from applying.
•Medical Loss Ratios. The MLR requirements have had the very predictable effect of discouraging innovation and cost containment. The requirements actually encourage higher premiums — the higher the premiums, the more money insurance companies have for administration and profits. Plus, they discourage fraud prevention efforts.
•Medicaid expansions. The Supreme Court made these expansions voluntary for the states and only about half have done it. But it was an odd idea from the start. One-third of all the uninsured were already eligible for Medicaid but hadn’t bothered to enroll, and a large portion of the people now enrolling seem to be people who were already covered in the private market.
•Limits on FSA funding. It is cruelly ironic, but the families most disadvantaged by the new $2,500 limit on FSA funding are those with special needs children.
•Limits on the Medical Expense Deduction. Beginning in 2013, a taxpayer is able to deduct only those medical expenses that exceed 10% of income, up from the current 7.5%. Once again it is the sickest families that will be hurt.
•Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). These were intended to introduce an entirely new form of health care delivery to reduce costs and improve quality in the Medicare program, and eventually throughout the health care system. But they have been plagued with problems, including that nearly a third of the original participants have already dropped out. CMS is refusing to release information on how the rest are doing, suggesting it isn’t going well.
•Health IT. The HITECH bill was enacted separately from ObamaCare, and many billions have been spent on it, but reports from the field indicate the top-down efforts result in lower quality and less efficiency as physicians spend more time wrestling with computers than taking care of patients.
Essentially, everything the federal government itself has been responsible for doing has failed. None of this should have been a surprise. Any honest reading of available research would have shown the futility of these efforts. For example the United Kingdom was way ahead of us in trying to upgrade its health information technology. It spent $12 billion on the project before concluding it was an abysmal failure and shut it down completely. An effort very similar to ACOs was tried from 2005-2010 in the form of the Physician Group Practice demonstration project. It, too failed. Medical loss ratio limits have been tried without success in several states.
But, like the old Gene Autry song, the true believers in the Obama administration didn’t want to hear a discouraging word, so they locked themselves away and even refused to let the public know what they were doing.
But the biggest failure of all is still a few months away. This is the essence of the law – that it will reduce the numbers of uninsured. It will not. It is far more likely to raise the numbers of people without insurance coverage. Why? Three reasons –
1.The Medicaid expansion will have at best a modest effect on covering new people. As we said above one-third of the uninsured are already eligible for Medicaid but not enrolled. In many cases, they have been on the program before and haven’t bothered re-enrolling. They simply don’t find value in it. They are more likely to see a doctor by going to the hospital ER, and they know if anything big happens they will be instantly signed up. Having a Medicaid card in their wallets just to please some bureaucrat is no enticement.
Now, it is likely that the Medicaid roles will grow, but this will be from people who were already covered by their employers. Medicaid is free while employers expect a premium contribution. It makes sense to switch, but it doesn’t add any uninsured people.
The individual market is gone. This means some 15 million newly uninsured people. Some of them will get coverage on the exchanges, but not many. The exchanges offer benefits that are too rich – things like pediatric dental care that few private insurance plans cover – and all those “enhanced” benefits cost money. Yes, some will be offered some subsidies, but in most cases people will still pay more than they have been used to, and the enrollment process is a nightmare.
Employers will drop coverage in droves. That has been happening slowly for years, but Obamacare will accelerate it dramatically. In 2011 the McKinsey Company did a large survey of the employers and found 30% said they would definitely or probably drop their coverage. This was blithely dismissed by administration supporters, but McKinsey is a rock solid company with no interest in political spin. This means perhaps 50 million people will no longer have coverage on the job. They will find –
•No more automatic enrollment going along with the job. People will have to take the initiative to find out about the Exchange.
•No more pure community rating of the employee share of premiums. The Exchange will vary premiums every year based on a person’s age.
•No more paycheck deductions of the employee share of premiums. People will have to make some kind of payment arrangement for their share of the premium.
•No more convenient and friendly HR Department people to answer questions. People will have to seek out an “Exchange navigator” to get their questions answered
•More importantly, they will find no more employer contribution to the cost of their coverage.
Very few people have significant medical expenses in the course of a year. The cost of insurance coverage far outweighs the cost of their medical expense – especially if they are paying the entire premium themselves. (See Chart)
Source: Taken from “Medicare for All,” a presentation by Paul Y. Song, MD, PNHP 2011, slide #41; data attributed to Thorpe and Reinhardt.
So there might be 20% – 30% of the total, maybe even 50% who find that insurance is a good deal through the Exchanges, but that leaves 25 million people who are newly uninsured.
Taken together, the numbers of uninsured Americans may double after Obamacare is fully implemented. How’s that for a kick in the head?
So the biggest failure of all will take place in the next six to nine months: We will discover the numbers of uninsured has doubled just in time for the 2014 elections.”
http://thefederalist.com/2013/11/04/biggest-failure-obamacare-increasing-number-uninsured/
Want some more information that supports what I said is true? MORE PEOPLE WILL LOSE THEIR HEALTH CARE COVERAGE BECAUSE OF OBAMACARE THAN WERE ADDED TO IT.
Will the Number of Uninsured Rise Under ObamaCare?
By Greg Scandlen Filed under Health Alerts on April 24, 2013
“It is cruelly ironic, but the massive law that was enacted to solve the problem of the uninsured in America is more likely to worsen it. This would be true even if the program is perfectly implemented and all the provisions come online on time and within budget. How could this be? It is a multistep process. Stay with me for a second.
Employment-Based Coverage Next up is the mind-boggling assumption that employers will continue to provide coverage as they have in the past. No one actually believes this. In fact, employers have been dropping coverage for at least the past ten years. There is no reason to think this will not continue and may dramatically accelerate under ObamaCare. The study by the State Health Access Data Assistance Center (SHADAC) cited above finds that the nonelderly population with employer-sponsored coverage decreased from 69.7% of the population in 1999/2000 to 59.2% in 2010/2011. This is because fewer employers offer coverage, and of those that do, fewer employees accept the coverage that is offered. The drop-off is particularly acute for smaller firms with fewer than 50 employees. Only 37.5% of these companies now offer coverage, down from 47.2% ten years earlier. Once ObamaCare kicks in, many more employers will drop coverage. The only dispute is over how many. Two years ago the well-respected McKinsey Company conducted a survey of employers and found that 30% said they will “definitely or probably” drop their coverage. The survey was criticized by Obama’s supporters because it wasn’t an economic analysis. Odd, since the same folks seem to live or die according to survey results that are far less rigorous. Avik Roy noted in Forbes that the actual results were even worse than it seemed at first blush. He wrote that the more respondents knew about the law and the more directly involved they were in decision-making, the more likely they were to want to drop their coverage − …primary decision makers were significantly more likely to drop employee health benefits: 36.5% of primary decision makers said they “definitely or probably” would drop benefits, compared to 22.4% of those who simply had some influence over the decision. More recently, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former CBO Director and currently with the American Action Forum, published a study with the economic features the McKinsey critics apparently prefer. He estimated that 35 million American workers will lose their coverage. He assumes most of these will go to the exchanges for subsidized coverage (more on this below), costing the federal treasury an additional $1.4 trillion over ten years. The Congressional Budget Office is more constrained, but even they have upped their estimate of the number of workers losing coverage from a mere 3 million a few years ago to 7 million just last month. The CBO number is almost certainly a gross under-estimate. CBO’s ability to predict the future has long been constrained by two things: It is required to assume that current law will be in effect in the future. So, for example, its budget predictions always assume that the SGR cuts in physician payments will actually occur. But that never happens, so the predictions are never accurate. It tends to use “static scoring,” which means it assumes that current behavior will be unchanged by new incentives. In this case it issued a 30-page justification for its estimate. As an example, part of that report said − The fact that many firms currently offer health insurance coverage to their workers despite the high cost of premiums and rapid growth in those premiums for many years shows that many firms continue to find health insurance coverage to be a worthwhile element of their compensation packages. If firms could have attracted employees more cheaply by dropping health benefits and adding wages or other benefits that cost less, then they would have done so. Good grief! This is about as shallow as you can get. Firms have been offering coverage despite the high cost because there has been no viable alternative, and they feel an obligation to ensure their workers can get coverage. The whole point of ObamaCare is to provide an alternative! Companies will now feel free to drop coverage in the belief that workers will now be able to get good coverage through the exchanges. On top of actually dropping coverage, no one is estimating the effects of employers who convert full-time workers to part time, reduce the size of the workforce to stay under the mandate, out-source jobs to other companies or even other countries, or enter employee-sharing arrangements with other companies. There is no data for these developments (so they are invisible to policy researchers) but local daily newspapers are awash in stories about companies doing exactly this. Whether it is McKinsey’s 50 million or so, Holtz-Eakin’s 35 million, or CBO’s 7 million, there is no denying that some large number of workers will no longer have employer-based coverage and will be left to their own devices.
So what are we left with? Medicaid expansion that will enroll few people and most of those will be people who were previously covered (crowd-out). Of the 50 million currently uninsured, possibly 15 million will get new coverage. But these will be offset by the 23 million who lose their employer coverage and don’t bother signing up for exchange coverage. Net result — 8 million more uninsured than before ObamaCare was enacted.”
See more at: http://healthblog.ncpa.org/will-the-number-of-uninsured-rise-under-obamacare/#sthash.fsrouSb7.dpuf
Last one and then I’m done wasting my time with you. I’ll bet you didn’t read past the first sentence of the first article.
Obamacare leaves millions uninsured. Here’s who they are:
By Sarah Kliff on June 7, 2013
“When we talk about the Affordable Care Act, we mostly focus on the millions of Americans who will gain health insurance coverage. We talk less about the millions who will remain uninsured.
And there are a lot of them: 30 million Americans will not have coverage under Obamacare, according to a new analysis in the journal Health Affairs.
“Even if the law were fully implemented, there would have been 26 million uninsured people,” co-author Steffie Woolhandler said in an interview Thursday. “This isn’t just about the Medicaid expansion. This is the system as originally designed.”
Thirty million is a lot smaller than the 48.6 million Americans who lack insurance coverage right now. It’s also, as Woolhandler points out, not exactly breaking news: The Congressional Budget Office estimated over a year ago that between 26 million and 27 million Americans would not have insurance under the expansion.
Woolhandler and her colleagues have done one of the most in-depth analyses of the uninsured under Obamacare that I’ve seen. They look at who will be uninsured in 2016, a few years after the health law’s insurance expansion takes place. You can expect these numbers to change (likely to shrink) in later years, as budget forecasters expect enrollment in health law programs to grow gradually.
One of the most surprising findings, perhaps, is that the vast majority of the uninsured under Obamacare — 80 percent — will be U.S. citizens. This is true in the two scenarios that the researchers looked at, one in which states on the fence about the Medicaid expansion opt-in and one in which those states opt out. As you can see, there’s not much of a difference.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/07/obamacare-leaves-millions-uninsured-heres-who-they-are/
So, use your usual progressive style of attack to discredit those who disagree with your point of view. That’s fine, because I can take it. I just have to look at the LONG list of others who agree with what I’ve presented and support it with FACTS and laugh at you for still carrying Obama’s bucket.
Geez, Chris an eleven year old gets it and you don’t? What a waste….
Why some of us Baby Boomer generation members care what’s happening to the generations after us.
There Needs to be a Redistribution of Wealth, Just Not How Liberals Would Have You Think:
By John Linder
“Young people are struggling today to pay off college debts, buy a home, and raise a family. In addition, I am costing three of them more than 15 percent of their earnings just to pay for my retirement and health care benefits. We ought to be ashamed!”
Continued:
http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/linder-letter-there-needs-to-be-a-redistribution-of-wealth-just-not-how-liberals-would-have-you-think/
Excellent Chris.
I am amazed at how the Koch brothers kool-Aide has brainwashed this small infraction of people.
Actually the speech was well written. Is everyone here on medi care and social security? Where were you the last decade?
Insurance premiums went through the roof the last decade. Many people went bankrupt because after years of paying premiums once they got sick they were cancelled!
LOL They are pissed because the site is working. Covered CA always worked, crashed from overload the first day but it was overloaded.
Furthermore the heritage foundation wrote the basis for the plan. Then when it looked like it was finally going through the GOP negotiated some clauses for the insurance industry, all agreed and it became law. No body wanted those clauses but it became law
So Tea party exactly which section is of concern, there are some things to iron out but all in all it is a good start.
So name the section and concern, We all can read the Koch bro and ALEC think tank propaganda anywhere on the net.
Let’s have a discussion, maybe we can find something real to talk about instead of the same old hate obama crap. I personally as you know am fighting him on what will be the biggest mistake of his Presidency the TPP>
But ya wanna talk ACA bring up the section and concern
Or have ya even read any of it? LOL
Tina: “Chris as usual you insert your profound prejudices into the issue!”
Of course; I’m the one with “profound prejudices,” not the guy who wants to re-institute racial quotas for immigration.
“The concern from the right about minimum wage increase is that it would accomplish almost nothing except for giving a very small, temporary bump in the wages of a few lucky people. The downside is much greater. Raising the minimum wage, especially as drastically as some have proposed, potentially forces wages above minimum wage higher also, causing job losses, less opportunity for teens and young adults, and/or higher prices for goods and services.”
That’s a highly contested position; obviously, I disagree.
“Do not bother with an academic paper telling me that I am wrong about that.”
Hilarious. You cited a quote from Sessions in which he mostly relies on appeals to academics in order to make his point, and called it “right on the money.” You are always willing to point to academics who agree with you, even if those academics are outside the mainstream of their fields (scratch that; *especially* if those academics are outside the mainstream of their fields, because you believe every academic field has been taken over by socialists). But when I cite academics, you dismiss them by arguing that academics do not study the “real world.” (What are they looking at then? The effects of minimum wage on the economy of sea turtles?) It’s a total double standard.
What’s worse is that you never even attempt to explain why the academics you cite are right and those I cite are wrong. You don’t have any ability to evaluate competing methodologies, nor are you interested in learning. Back when Sessions was pushing a ridiculously high number as the average amount the average welfare recipient gets in a year, I tried to explain to you why his calculations were incorrect, and your eyes glazed over. Your response was essentially “Numbers are hard, and I like Sessions’ numbers better, so there.”
http://www.norcalblogs.com/postscripts/2013/08/07/obamas-legacy-2/
“I run a business and I know what would happen in very real world terms.”
Well, I guess that ends the debate! A business owner is telling me that she can’t possibly afford to pay her workers more, and she’s not willing to divulge any details about her business at all. Sounds legit!
Forgive me if I’d rather trust academic studies than anecdotal evidence from someone who is not even willing to share an anecdote.
“Profits are not his business unless he is a share holder.”
Classist and elitist. Those profits are the fruit of workers’ labors as well as the business owners’. Those profits would not exist without the efforts of workers in addition to those at the top of the company. I don’t know how you treat workers in real life, Tina, but for you to make this statement really paints an unpleasant picture of the way you view employees. Acting as if there is no connection between profits and the work that your employees do for you shows a shocking lack of appreciation and understanding of where your money comes from.
“These businesses can’t afford higher wages”
Then honestly, they shouldn’t be in business. If you can’t afford to pay your workers a decent wage, you have failed.
“and nobody working these jobs should be counting on them as as anything more than temporary or supplemental.”
I really wish you’d stop telling people making minimum wage what they “should” do from your perch as a business owner. I am sure your job isn’t easy and I don’t think you’re a millionaire, and I am sure you’ve worked very, very hard to get where you are. I don’t want there to be any doubt about that. But the fact is that currently, you enjoy a certain level of financial security that the people you’re lecturing simply do not have. Telling people not to count on minimum wage jobs as anything more than temporary is simply not helpful, especially in an economy with such high unemployment. Min. wage workers already know they can be dropped like that. Your words and policies are not helpful.
“The reason Democrats can be so damn generous about raising the minimum wage is because they don’t have to generate the sales to cover the cost themselves, have never met a payroll in their lives, or don’t have a clue about the risks and the hard work that go into starting one of these businesses.”
You’re right. There is no such things as a Democrat business owner. In order to get a business license in this country, one must officially register for the Republican party. Do you have any idea how you sound right now? These gross generalizations have to stop. They are not the words of an informed person.
“The right wants every American to make as much as money as they possibly can. But the responsibility for earning more is on the worker.”
What you fail to understand is that the worker has very limited power with which to achieve this in relation to the power that their employers have. And your party has worked tirelessly to chip away at whatever power they do have. You’ve been pretty successful, too; unionization is at an all-time low. What have the results of the decline in unionization been? It correlates directly with the decline in the middle class. When we had strong unions and a higher minimum wage, our entire economy did better. Yet you constantly warn us of the near-apocalyptic threats that both of these pose.
If you really wanted workers to take advantage of their “responsibility” to negotiate higher wages for themselves, you’d at least support their right to unionize. Unionization is a natural component of the free market. But you don’t actually want workers to have that power.
“No one should have the goal of having an entry level job as a career or expect it to be enough to feed a family.”
I agree with the first part of that sentence, but the second is highly immoral. There is no reason why any working person should not be able to feed their family in this country, whether it’s a minimum wage job or not. Every job has dignity. Everyone who punches the clock and stands on their feet for eight hours dealing with impatient customers should have a reasonable expectation of being able to provide for themselves and their family with the money they earn.
You talk here about the dignity of working, yet you support policies that rob working people of their dignity. Wouldn’t you rather live in a country where people can support themselves through work? Where they don’t need the government to help take care of them? You say that this is what you want–and I believe that in your heart, it is–but your approach to getting there is all wrong. How could it not be, when you believe that the main problem in this country is that the welfare system is just too generous? Why can’t you consider the idea that working just doesn’t pay off anymore for a large number of citizens?
If you want to encourage people to work more, than you have to incentivize it. Instead of constantly trying to chip away at the welfare system, which most people only turn to out of desperation, why not support policies that would remove the need?
“Wages cannot be determined by “fairness”.”
But that’s not the only argument, and if that’s the only one you’re willing to address, then you’re not interested in a serious discussion of the issues.
“The problem with the left is they have no practical world experience beyond the classroom.”
Again, where do you get this idea that “the left,” as a group, has any less real world experience than you do? Do you realize how isolated this makes you sound? Do you KNOW any Democrats in real life?
“They never take into account that when a law is changed it impacts the economy and jobs one way or another.”
Ridiculous, since we’re talking about differences in how the right believes the min. wage will impact the economy and jobs v. how the left believes it will impact the economy and jobs. Liberals don’t believe the min. wage will have NO effect on the economy; we believe it will have a positive effect, and we believe we have a higher quality of evidence to support our position.
Disagreeing with you on what the impact will be =/= believing there will be no impact. Mischaracterizing our arguments in such an obvious way really makes you look like you don’t understand what you are responding to.
Income inequality took it’s biggest turn when Reagan put in the same policies you guys want to go back to. I though you just tried all this stuff with GW again and when he left we were loosing 750,000 jobs a month and had the fastest rush of sending our jobs to our communist enemy china.
Wake up The policies failed. All Presidents trade agreements failed and we gave our economy away.
free markets? LOL Reaganomics has destroyed this economy and we will not stand for another run that is why you guys have to try to steal elections and Bully the media
BTW GW did not win that election, after his brothers vote flipping machines were an issue the RW SCOTUS appointed him and we got the planned before he was elected Iraq war on a credit card while cutting taxes..fiscally responsible yep you guys left us a deficit and a world that hates us because the war killed people all on a lie for oil
Peggy: “You once again are entitled to your opinions, but you are NOT entitled to the facts. When reports state millions of cancelled individual’s policies or cancelled employer’s policies for workers are or will be is not a reflection of the number of individuals who will lose their health insurance. Since most policies cover family members too, each member of the families will also lose their health care coverage. So, using simple math if 5 million policies are cancelled and there’s an estimated average of three members per family that’s 15 million men, women and children, 10 million policies cancelled equals about 30 million people and so on. Right?!!”
Um…right. But this has no relation to your previous argument. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m impressed by your newfound mathematical skills, given that yesterday you told me there were more voters than workers, and that we were in danger of having more government jobs than private sector jobs, even though a cursory look at the numbers proves neither of those things are even close to being true.)
I read your articles (well, skimmed); neither of them contradict the fact that by 2023, there will be 20 million less uninsured people then there are now as a result of Obamacare. This was a fact that you brought to the table even as you argued that Obamacare couldn’t possibly have been intended to bring down the number of the uninsured.
You then argued that “MORE PEOPLE WILL LOSE THEIR HEALTH CARE COVERAGE BECAUSE OF OBAMACARE THAN WERE ADDED TO IT.” This totally contradicts your earlier approving link to the CBO, and your (accurate) claim that 30 million people will be left without health insurance by 2023. So which do you believe? Does the CAPS LOCK override your earlier statement?
Chris: “Hilarious. You cited a quote from Sessions in which he mostly relies on appeals to academics…”
I backed up the opinion (we all have them) with my own personal experience owning and working in small businesses for over 35 years! I sited the article because it reflects the reality which I personally experience.
Can you say the same?
My experience makes this statement by you, “you never even attempt to explain why the academics you cite are right and those I cite are wrong,” absolute clap trap!
“You don’t have any ability to evaluate competing methodologies”
I’m in a much better position than you are and yet you choose to attempt to smear me as ignorant adopting a very prideful arrogant attitude that simply does not sell.
“What you fail to understand is that the worker has very limited power with which to achieve this in relation to the power that their employers have.”
What you fail to understand is that you are simply wrong. As I have written elsewhere every kid in America gets a free education through the 12th grade. Steve Jobs created Apple from nothing! Its a damn shame your professors haven’t shared what it takes to duplicate his success instead of how to community organize and whine to squeeze a few more dimes from the pockets of others through the force of government.
It isn’t really your fault since all you have is a very left leaning education and very limited experience in an era when leftist policies have absolutely screwed your generation in terms of opportunity and future debt. I do hope that one day (soon) you will have an opportunity to experience a dynamic growing economy. When that day comes I hope you will also have learned something about standing on your own two feet and building your own future.
“And your party has worked tirelessly to chip away at whatever power they do have.”
The exact opposite is true. You are a slave to the leftist ideology so you can’t even experience that you are free! You have no sense of the opportunity that is out there to tap into. You look to the state for relief when you could build something for yourself…or at least support those who know how so that there are more choices for you. SAD!!!
“Forgive me if I’d rather trust academic studies than anecdotal evidence from someone who is not even willing to share an anecdote. ”
You are as free as a bird to be as closed minded and glued to the very ideals that are causing your generation to drown in economic failure and loss. No one is stopping you. You are free to trust whomever you choose. You are stupid not to consider (With the intention of getting it) the experience of someone like me but see there you are also free to be stupid and act against your own self interest.
In fact you just reminded me that conversing with you is a complete waste of my time.
GW Bush’s recovery worked better. Reagan’s did too. So did Kennedy’s!
One of you lefties please explain to me how government spending and greater regulation and control can create jobs and a vibrant economy. Explain how it works, please. What are the mechanisms? draw me a picture!
Chris made a feeble attempt by claiming that a couple of bucks more in a minimum wage earners pocket would do the trick. Obama raised the minimum wage in 2009…we’re still waiting for the jobs!
Obama has pumped a couple of trillion in government stimulus to boost the economy since 2008 and we are still waiting for that vibrant economy! excuses abound and prosperity is just around the corner. The complete failure is somebody else’s fault.
Unless you can tell show us that these things work and tell us what makes them work you really need to shut up and listen, really listen for a change!
Clinton wants his hands on the wheel again with Hillary in office next so he’s saying government didn’t spend enough. Yeah…we all know the one about what it means to do the same thing over and over again expecting a different result!
Peggy quoting: “Young people are struggling today to pay off college debts, buy a home, and raise a family. In addition, I am costing three of them more than 15 percent of their earnings just to pay for my retirement and health care benefits. We ought to be ashamed!”
As a group I suppose so. But I’m not ashamed. I’ve been arguing for policies that would save the SS program for the boomers and allow the younger generations a shot at growing real personal wealth while securing the meager pittance that the SS program would offer them as a back up…FOR MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS! Likewise other reforms that would benefit not only them but everyone else!
I know you probably have too Peggy.
Tina: “I backed up the opinion (we all have them) with my own personal experience owning and working in small businesses for over 35 years!”
You did? Where?
You’ve claimed that your experience backs up the idea that minimum wage increases cause job losses and higher prices. But you certainly haven’t “backed up” that claim with any kind of evidence. Even my high school students know that just making a claim is not the same as providing evidence. Since you are totally unwilling to reveal any details on your business, what you’re asking for is for people to take you at your word. Given your history of flagrant dishonesty (for instance, you still haven’t addressed the fact that the chart you posted in an attempt to discredit the Great Society contained a lie), that’s not a reasonable expectation.
“I sited the article because it reflects the reality which I personally experience.
Can you say the same?”
Business owner says raising the minimum wage will hurt her business-exclusive at 11!
The problem is that not all small business owners agree with you, Tina:
Small businesses may be more likely than big ones to cut back on hiring if wages go up, one of the most common arguments against raising the minimum wage. But even small-business owners seem skeptical of that. In a recent Gallup-Wells Fargo poll, 50% of small-business owners said they disapprove of raising the minimum wage to $9.50, but a surprising 47% said they support the idea. Only 28% said it would force them to reduce hiring, while 64% said it wouldn’t.
In fact, opposition to raising the minimum wage is much softer than opposition to, say, Obamacare or certain regulatory measures that raise the compliance costs and paperwork burdens on businesses. In another Gallup poll, 76% of respondents—including 58% of Republicans—said they favor raising the minimum wage to $9 per hour.
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/how-raising-the-minimum-wage-would-benefit-mcdonald-s-and-walmart-142746772.html
“I’m in a much better position than you are”
To analyze competing methodologies in academic studies? You most certainly are not.
“and yet you choose to attempt to smear me as ignorant”
Tina, that is how you present yourself.
“What you fail to understand is that you are simply wrong.”
Are you seriously going to argue that workers and their employers have an equivalent level of power in negotiating wages? That is absurd. How can you make such a claim?
“As I have written elsewhere every kid in America gets a free education through the 12th grade. Steve Jobs created Apple from nothing!”
Steve Jobs did it, therefore everyone can! Also, Oprah! Your arguments are a parody of themselves.
“When that day comes I hope you will also have learned something about standing on your own two feet and building your own future.”
You are such a condescending classist sometimes. Why do you think it’s OK to make assumptions about people like this? You have some nerve constantly saying things like this about the working poor.
I know you’ll never realize the immorality of this privileged attitude, but at the very least I’d think you’d eventually realize it’s not a winning political attitude. Romney campaigned on the idea that poor people are lazy and irresponsible. How did that work out for him?
“The exact opposite is true.”
Really? So crippling unions doesn’t chip away at the power of workers? Fighting the min. wage doesn’t chip away at the power of workers? Do explain. While you’re at it, explain why we had a thriving middle class when unionization and the min. wage were both much higher, and why our economy is at the tank now when those are both at record lows.
“GW Bush’s recovery worked better.”
And his recession worked better too!
“Reagan’s did too.”
The recession Reagan inherited was nothing compared to the global financial crisis Obama inherited.
“One of you lefties please explain to me how government spending and greater regulation and control can create jobs and a vibrant economy. Explain how it works, please. What are the mechanisms? draw me a picture!”
It’s profoundly rude and disrespectful to keep asking the same question over and over again and ignoring when people answer you.
To sum up: It’s the demand, stupid. Government transfers of wealth from the rich to the poor stimulates the economy because the poor are more likely to spend that money, while the rich are more likely to tuck it away for a rainy day. (For the poor, every day is a rainy one.)
“Obama raised the minimum wage in 2009…we’re still waiting for the jobs!”
Job growth has consistently gone up since 2009 after bottoming out that year, so you really picked a bad year to help your case. But the min. wage increase in 2009 was very modest and didn’t come anywhere close to catching up to what the min. wage would be if it had kept pace with inflation. A more substantial increase would do a lot more to stimulate the economy.
“Obama has pumped a couple of trillion in government stimulus to boost the economy since 2008 and we are still waiting for that vibrant economy!”
Tina, the consensus view among economists is that the economy would be even worse off without that stimulus, and that it averted a second Great Depression! If anything, the stimulus should have been much larger.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/economy/2010-08-30-stimulus30_CV_N.htm
#15 Tina: “I know you probably have too Peggy.”
I don’t want to be a financial burden to my own son, let alone three complete strangers. I’d gladly do without if it meant they could keep more of what they earned to support their own families, as I’m sure you would too.
Mr. Linden pointing out three individuals are now carrying the load of what was carried by 42 when SS was originally set up should be a red flag that corrective steps need to be taken and taken soon.
“That safety net originally had 42 people paying for each retiree. Today there are fewer than three workers paying for Grandma and Grandpa to winter in Arizona. Social Security covers over half of the living costs for most couples and 75 percent for singles.
In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson introduced Medicare to reduce the burdens on seniors from the increasing cost of health care. New innovations in medicine and life-saving technologies were extending their lives.
In 1996 Medicare cost $3 billion. The Ways and Means Committee of the U.S. House, using easily quantifiable health care consumption statistics, predicted that by 1990, Medicare would cost $12 billion. That was their conservative estimate, which took inflation into consideration. They missed their number by $97 billion. In 1990 Medicare cost $109 billion.
There is a reason for that. Nobody ever spends someone else’s money as carefully as they spend their own. Seniors began to not only enjoy better medicine, but also to abuse its availability. And they passed the costs on to their children and grandchildren.”
I remember when GWB tried to get Congress to fix the SS problem during his first term, but the Democrats just attacked him instead of coming up with a recommendation of their own. So, here we are 10 years later the problem isn’t solved, younger people won’t receive any benefits because the ratio will soon drop from 3-1, to a very expensive 1-1.
Peggy you are right on all counts. I would also give up benefits if my kids/grandkids burdens could be lifted. I prefer a means tested reform because too many of us have not prepared for retirement properly and many of the boomers still will really need SS. But a means tested reform giving young people the option to invest a portion of their contributions into a personal 401K would be the smart way to get this under control without hurting anyone.
The young people have apparently become quite discouraged with the President. I hope that opens at least some of them to the ideas that Republicans have been attempting to enact to save these programs for the elderly (us now!) and allow young people to have the same type of retirement plan that Congress gets in the form of a personal retirement account.
Millennials aren’t the only group that’s disgruntled either:
Downtrend:
According to America’s Wire young blacks won’t go for the Dems in such large numbers in the next election either:
This was written before the election…it has to be worse now. But who knows…Democrats are fond of pandering to specific groups and if they are minority all the better.
This year has gone by quick. I keep thinking I’ll wake up one morning and it will be election day again…price of getting older!
Now I’m going to drag myself off to the land of nod…night all.