Greetings from the Left Coast!
This Benghazi thing just gets curiouser and curiouser. CBS is reporting that the office of the Director of National Intelligence ("DNI" - run by James Clapper, who is an Obama appointee) changed the Benghazi talking points before they were given to Susan Rice for use in her circuit of the Sunday news talk shows 5 days after the attack. However, the DNI spokesperson also said: "The intelligence community assessed from the very beginning that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack." And according to the CBS report, "That information was shared at a classified level -- which Rice, as a member of President Obama's cabinet, would have been privy to."
So why did Clapper's office decide to make those changes? And are we to understand that Susan Rice simply took the talking points she was handed and headed out on the talk show circuit without knowing that they had been edited, even though, in the words of CBS, she would have been privy to the unedited version? Or was she, in fact, delivering a message that she knew to be false? Either of these alternatives would be cause for concern, although, obviously, the latter would be worse.
And what about the statements made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on September 14 to the relatives of the slain when the bodies came home? It strains credibility to believe that, if the intelligence community "assessed from the very beginning that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack," the Secretary of State would be ignorant of that four days after the fact. Yet, at that ceremony, she was still maintaining that the violence was due to "an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with."
And, as if that's not enough, a spokesperson for the House Intelligence Committee chairman stated that, "The statement released Monday evening by the DNI's spokesman regarding how the Intelligence Community's talking points were changed gives a new explanation that differs significantly from information provided in testimony to the Committee last week." (Emphasis added) "Chairman Rogers looks forward to discussing this new explanation with Director Clapper as soon as possible to understand how the DNI reached this conclusion and why leaders of the Intelligence Community testified late last week that they were unaware of who changed the talking points."
I'm also looking forward to finding out why the new statement doesn't match testimony given last week to a Congressional committee. There's a word for not giving truthful testimony when you're under oath - it's called perjury.
Thanks for listening.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
And So It Begins
Greetings from the Left Coast!
Social media is ablaze with indignation over announcements by several businesses, many of them in the restaurant industry, who have now announced that they will be either cutting back on the number of employees or cutting back their employees' hours to less than 30 hours per week as a result of the impending employer mandates that are part of the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. ObamaCare). Many are urging boycotts of these businesses, which seems a bit strange, because a successful boycott would necessarily harm the businesses and therefore lead to even fewer people having jobs.
But let's take an objective look at the facts about what businesses are now facing:
As of January 1, 2014, all businesses that have more than 50 full-time employees must provide them with health insurance or pay a fine. And there will be no such thing as "basic" health insurance - all plans must conform to the government mandate in terms of what must be covered, and what the deductible and annual/lifetime limits can be. One of the things that all business owners who do provide coverage will have to do over the coming year is to review that coverage to make sure it measures up to the government requirements.
The cost of a plan that does meet those requirements is estimated to average about $1.79 per hour per full-time employee. As Betsy McCaughey writes in today's New York Post, that's incidental if you're hiring neurosurgeons, but a significant incremental expense if you're hiring bus boys or sales clerks. In most cases, this will double the health care costs of employers in the retail and fast-food industries. Across all industries, for business of 101 - 1,000 employees, health care costs are expected to go up by about 9.5%. For businesses over 1,000, the increase will be roughly 4.5%.
According to a recent study by the McKinsey & Co. management consulting group, as many as a third of all employers are considering canceling their coverage altogether, because it will be less expensive to pay the $2,000 annual fine per employee than it will be to provide coverage that conforms to the government mandate. Those employees would then either go onto Medicaid (if they qualify), or purchase insurance through one of the state-run insurance pools. In the latter case, depending on their income, a portion of their premium would be subsidized by the government, paid for, in part, by those $2,000/employee fines. And, regardless of what you may have heard, part of the funding will also come from reducing payments to Medicare Advantage plans, and from slowing the growth in payments to Medicare providers such as hospitals, hospices, home health care agencies, and skilled nursing facilities - which is likely to make some of these providers less inclined to accept Medicare patients.
For some employers, hiring that 51st employee may turn out to be cost-prohibitive. Consider a restaurant with 50 employees, that currently pays minimum wage (not uncommon for employees that get a large portion of their income from tips) with few or no benefits. In fact, let's say this restaurant was paying more than Washington's minimum wage of $8.55/hour - let's say our restaurant is paying $10/hour, just to make the math simple. Today, hiring that 51st employee costs roughly $20,000 (2,000 hours x $10). But as of January 1, 2014, hiring that 51st employee would mean paying the $2,000 annual fine for employees 31 - 51: that's an additional $42,000. So hiring that 51st employee will actually cost the business $62,000, not $20,000. In all likelihood, that employer simply will not hire that 51st employee.
The other alternative, of course, is to reduce employee hours to less than 30 hours per week, which is the threshold under the ACA that defines a "full-time" employee. However, fines under the employer mandate also are imposed on workers who are not full-time, because a combination of employees working an aggregate of 120 hours per month will count as one full-time employee. This provision will be particularly painful for seasonal businesses, where it is often not cost-effective to provide insurance benefits to employees who will only be with the business for a short period of time.
Businesses have to make a profit or they don't survive, which means that all of their employees lose their jobs - which, by the way, is also the logical outcome of a successful boycott. When the government takes action that drives up the cost of doing business, something has to give, and not all businesses have the ability to simply raise prices to pass those costs on to their customers. The retail and fast-food industries in particular are extremely competitive. There is nothing in the ACA that requires a business to simply eat those increased costs, even if they are able to do so.
The most surprising thing to me is that anyone is actually surprised by this. Thanks for listening.
Social media is ablaze with indignation over announcements by several businesses, many of them in the restaurant industry, who have now announced that they will be either cutting back on the number of employees or cutting back their employees' hours to less than 30 hours per week as a result of the impending employer mandates that are part of the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. ObamaCare). Many are urging boycotts of these businesses, which seems a bit strange, because a successful boycott would necessarily harm the businesses and therefore lead to even fewer people having jobs.
But let's take an objective look at the facts about what businesses are now facing:
As of January 1, 2014, all businesses that have more than 50 full-time employees must provide them with health insurance or pay a fine. And there will be no such thing as "basic" health insurance - all plans must conform to the government mandate in terms of what must be covered, and what the deductible and annual/lifetime limits can be. One of the things that all business owners who do provide coverage will have to do over the coming year is to review that coverage to make sure it measures up to the government requirements.
The cost of a plan that does meet those requirements is estimated to average about $1.79 per hour per full-time employee. As Betsy McCaughey writes in today's New York Post, that's incidental if you're hiring neurosurgeons, but a significant incremental expense if you're hiring bus boys or sales clerks. In most cases, this will double the health care costs of employers in the retail and fast-food industries. Across all industries, for business of 101 - 1,000 employees, health care costs are expected to go up by about 9.5%. For businesses over 1,000, the increase will be roughly 4.5%.
According to a recent study by the McKinsey & Co. management consulting group, as many as a third of all employers are considering canceling their coverage altogether, because it will be less expensive to pay the $2,000 annual fine per employee than it will be to provide coverage that conforms to the government mandate. Those employees would then either go onto Medicaid (if they qualify), or purchase insurance through one of the state-run insurance pools. In the latter case, depending on their income, a portion of their premium would be subsidized by the government, paid for, in part, by those $2,000/employee fines. And, regardless of what you may have heard, part of the funding will also come from reducing payments to Medicare Advantage plans, and from slowing the growth in payments to Medicare providers such as hospitals, hospices, home health care agencies, and skilled nursing facilities - which is likely to make some of these providers less inclined to accept Medicare patients.
For some employers, hiring that 51st employee may turn out to be cost-prohibitive. Consider a restaurant with 50 employees, that currently pays minimum wage (not uncommon for employees that get a large portion of their income from tips) with few or no benefits. In fact, let's say this restaurant was paying more than Washington's minimum wage of $8.55/hour - let's say our restaurant is paying $10/hour, just to make the math simple. Today, hiring that 51st employee costs roughly $20,000 (2,000 hours x $10). But as of January 1, 2014, hiring that 51st employee would mean paying the $2,000 annual fine for employees 31 - 51: that's an additional $42,000. So hiring that 51st employee will actually cost the business $62,000, not $20,000. In all likelihood, that employer simply will not hire that 51st employee.
The other alternative, of course, is to reduce employee hours to less than 30 hours per week, which is the threshold under the ACA that defines a "full-time" employee. However, fines under the employer mandate also are imposed on workers who are not full-time, because a combination of employees working an aggregate of 120 hours per month will count as one full-time employee. This provision will be particularly painful for seasonal businesses, where it is often not cost-effective to provide insurance benefits to employees who will only be with the business for a short period of time.
Businesses have to make a profit or they don't survive, which means that all of their employees lose their jobs - which, by the way, is also the logical outcome of a successful boycott. When the government takes action that drives up the cost of doing business, something has to give, and not all businesses have the ability to simply raise prices to pass those costs on to their customers. The retail and fast-food industries in particular are extremely competitive. There is nothing in the ACA that requires a business to simply eat those increased costs, even if they are able to do so.
The most surprising thing to me is that anyone is actually surprised by this. Thanks for listening.
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Four More Years? Some Predictions
Greetings from the Left Coast, which, once again, has lived up to its nickname by remaining solidly "blue."
Well, the people have spoken. And, incredibly, they have decided to give Barack Obama four more years. The second-guessing and what-went-wrong analyses will go on for at least that long. Certainly the media had a lot to do with it. If they had done their job in the first place, he wouldn't have been elected in 2008, let alone re-elected with the economy in the dismal shape it's in today. All you need to do is go back and review what the media said about the state of the economy in the run-up to the 2004 election, when, in fact, it was in much better shape than it is today, and compare it to their reporting this campaign season. Add to that their deliberate inattention to the Benghazi story, making it easy for their man to run out the clock, and Barack Obama becomes the first president in modern times to be re-elected with a smaller percentage of the vote than he got the first time around, despite having run the most despicable campaign I can remember in my 60 years on this planet.
In four years, we went from "hope and change" to seniors threatening to "burn this motherf***er down" and c**k-punch Romney if he won. We saw Obama follow precisely the path he accused others of in the last campaign: "When you don't have a record to run on, you paint the other guy as someone people should run away from." We saw the phoney "war on women," which was given legitimacy by a compliant media. We saw Romney falsely accused of indirectly killing a man's wife by being responsible for taking away her health insurance. We saw him falsely accused of wanting to take away women's access to contraceptives. Elect Romney, we were told, and he would overturn Roe v. Wade and completely eliminate "a woman's right to choose," which was patently ridiculous, because it is not possible for any president to simply overturn a Supreme Court decision. Republicans, we were told, were for dirty air and dirty water, and for letting autistic children fend for themselves.
But apparently enough voters believed all of that to put Obama over the top - a realization that saddens me. It isn't pleasant to realize that so many of my fellow citizens are that susceptible to lies and manipulation. We may have had an excuse in 2008 in that the media didn't do its job in telling us who Obama was and what he believed. But we've seen him govern for four years now, and we've seen that he is, as some of us tried to say in the beginning, an extreme left-wing ideologue who wants to reshape the nation to fit his ideology and has no desire to compromise. We've seen the results of his four years: continuing high unemployment, anemic economic growth, disdain for the separation of powers, and a willingness to simply ignore laws that he finds inconvenient to the pursuit of his goals. There is no excuse this time for not knowing who Barack Obama is. But we re-elected him anyway.
It's possible that we've finally reached the tipping point in the electorate that we've been warned about. When nearly 50% of the population pays no federal income tax, and 10% of the population pays 70% of all the federal income tax collected, we are in a dangerous place as a nation. Why shouldn't a large portion of the population vote for bigger government and more entitlements if they're not the ones who have to pay for it? If you add in those who simply can't be bothered to educate themselves on the issues beyond the 5-second sound bites on the six o'clock news, those people may now be in the majority. Only time will tell. And if you think I'm overstating the case, consider that the top Google search trend in the few days before election day was "who is running for president." Most of those searches came out of North Carolina, with Ohio and Pennsylvania coming in second and third, respectively. All three, of course, being "swing states" that were enormously important in the election, and that had been saturated by ads for months.
But, nevertheless, today's reality is that Barack Obama will be our President for four more years. So what should we expect? Here are some predictions that I really hope are wrong. We'll circle back in a few years and see how many I got right:
Well, the people have spoken. And, incredibly, they have decided to give Barack Obama four more years. The second-guessing and what-went-wrong analyses will go on for at least that long. Certainly the media had a lot to do with it. If they had done their job in the first place, he wouldn't have been elected in 2008, let alone re-elected with the economy in the dismal shape it's in today. All you need to do is go back and review what the media said about the state of the economy in the run-up to the 2004 election, when, in fact, it was in much better shape than it is today, and compare it to their reporting this campaign season. Add to that their deliberate inattention to the Benghazi story, making it easy for their man to run out the clock, and Barack Obama becomes the first president in modern times to be re-elected with a smaller percentage of the vote than he got the first time around, despite having run the most despicable campaign I can remember in my 60 years on this planet.
In four years, we went from "hope and change" to seniors threatening to "burn this motherf***er down" and c**k-punch Romney if he won. We saw Obama follow precisely the path he accused others of in the last campaign: "When you don't have a record to run on, you paint the other guy as someone people should run away from." We saw the phoney "war on women," which was given legitimacy by a compliant media. We saw Romney falsely accused of indirectly killing a man's wife by being responsible for taking away her health insurance. We saw him falsely accused of wanting to take away women's access to contraceptives. Elect Romney, we were told, and he would overturn Roe v. Wade and completely eliminate "a woman's right to choose," which was patently ridiculous, because it is not possible for any president to simply overturn a Supreme Court decision. Republicans, we were told, were for dirty air and dirty water, and for letting autistic children fend for themselves.
But apparently enough voters believed all of that to put Obama over the top - a realization that saddens me. It isn't pleasant to realize that so many of my fellow citizens are that susceptible to lies and manipulation. We may have had an excuse in 2008 in that the media didn't do its job in telling us who Obama was and what he believed. But we've seen him govern for four years now, and we've seen that he is, as some of us tried to say in the beginning, an extreme left-wing ideologue who wants to reshape the nation to fit his ideology and has no desire to compromise. We've seen the results of his four years: continuing high unemployment, anemic economic growth, disdain for the separation of powers, and a willingness to simply ignore laws that he finds inconvenient to the pursuit of his goals. There is no excuse this time for not knowing who Barack Obama is. But we re-elected him anyway.
It's possible that we've finally reached the tipping point in the electorate that we've been warned about. When nearly 50% of the population pays no federal income tax, and 10% of the population pays 70% of all the federal income tax collected, we are in a dangerous place as a nation. Why shouldn't a large portion of the population vote for bigger government and more entitlements if they're not the ones who have to pay for it? If you add in those who simply can't be bothered to educate themselves on the issues beyond the 5-second sound bites on the six o'clock news, those people may now be in the majority. Only time will tell. And if you think I'm overstating the case, consider that the top Google search trend in the few days before election day was "who is running for president." Most of those searches came out of North Carolina, with Ohio and Pennsylvania coming in second and third, respectively. All three, of course, being "swing states" that were enormously important in the election, and that had been saturated by ads for months.
But, nevertheless, today's reality is that Barack Obama will be our President for four more years. So what should we expect? Here are some predictions that I really hope are wrong. We'll circle back in a few years and see how many I got right:
- The Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. ObamaCare) is here to stay. (This statement really isn't a prediction, it's now a fact of life.) Four years from now, we will be much too far down that road to unwind things, or to do more than implement some minor tweaks. As Obama knew all along, by the time the majority of Americans find out they've been lied to about the cost of the program, their ability to keep their own insurance if they like it, etc., it will be too late. It only remains to be seen how much damage will be done to the economy from companies deciding not to hire new employees because of the cost of providing them with health care, or cutting them back to fewer than 30 hours per week so they aren't required to do so, or dumping their health plans altogether and pushing their employees to the health insurance exchanges because it's less expensive for the employers to pay the annual fine than it is to pay the premiums.
- Sometime in the next four years, unless stopped by an Israeli attack, Iran will obtain nuclear weapons.
- The Muslim Brotherhood will turn Egypt into an Islamist state and renounce Egypt's peace treaty with Israel.
- At some point in the next four years, possibly as a result of increasing instability in the Middle East, the average price of a gallon of gas will top $5.00.
- Unemployment will not drop below 6% in the next four years, unless the number is manipulated by more and more people giving up on finding a job and dropping out of the labor force. We will be told that this is the "new normal."
- Economic growth will continue at its current anemic level of roughly 2% per year, which will not be enough to return us to pre-recession employment levels by the end of Obama's second term.
- Federal deficits will continue to average $1 trillion per year.
- Sometime in the next four years, America's credit rating will be downgraded again.
- President Obama will continue to blame Republicans in general, and former President Bush in particular, for our ongoing economic problems.
Sunday, November 4, 2012
Another Teachable Moment
Bill O'Reilly was widely criticized for his comments about Hurricane Katrina being a "teachable moment." But now, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, we find that many of the points he made after Katrina are still applicable, even though the other party is in power in Washington, and even though the disaster hit relatively affluent areas of New York and New Jersey rather than poor neighborhoods in New Orleans. He reiterates these points in a column yesterday on townhall.com:
If you've ever flown, you've heard the pre-flight briefing that says that, in a depressurization event, you should put your own oxygen mask on first, before trying to assist those around you. That's so you'll be conscious so you can assist those around you! The same thing applies to emergency preparedness, whether you're in a hurricane corridor, or in earthquake country, or "Tornado Alley," or a low-lying area that's vulnerable to a tsunami, etc., etc. Do everything you can to be personally prepared for an emergency - you'll then be better able to help other people while you wait for other assistance to arrive.
There are some great planning resources at http://www.ready.gov, and at http://www.redcross.org/prepare. Businesses can find some great tips at http://www.readyrating.org on how to make sure their business, and their employees, are prepared for emergencies. And if you're just too busy to put together a personal survival kit, you can order them ready-made at http://lifegear.com/survival-kits.html. A couple of years ago, I saw one of their kits in my local Costco for only $79.99.
There was a great article in this morning's Everett Herald about how ordinary volunteers in New York are making a big difference in helping storm victims. A key point to remember is that those people couldn't be doing what they're doing to help if they were victims themselves.
Here's the big lesson from mega-storm Sandy: Mother Nature sneers at high tech, mocks modern convenience and couldn't care less about what kind of person you are. She will smack you if she wants to.Is the government helping storm victims? Yes, to the best of its ability - but anyone who reviews the myriad of stories coming out of New York in general,and Staten Island in particular, has to agree that the government aid has been, in O'Reilly's words, "after the fact and painstakingly slow."
As we have become addicted to machines, many of us have forgotten about nature. We must have gizmos. Sandy laughed and took them away. Power, gone. Internet, dark. Cellphones, not happening. Even your landline phone, not available, because "all circuits are busy."
Suddenly, it's 1850 with one exception: battery-operated flashlights and radios.
So what is the lesson here?...
First: No government agency can help you when disaster strikes. Any assistance will be after the fact and painstakingly slow.
Second: In order to ride out any storm effectively, you should be self-reliant and resiliant. That means you have to anticipate problems and have some solutions at the ready.
If you've ever flown, you've heard the pre-flight briefing that says that, in a depressurization event, you should put your own oxygen mask on first, before trying to assist those around you. That's so you'll be conscious so you can assist those around you! The same thing applies to emergency preparedness, whether you're in a hurricane corridor, or in earthquake country, or "Tornado Alley," or a low-lying area that's vulnerable to a tsunami, etc., etc. Do everything you can to be personally prepared for an emergency - you'll then be better able to help other people while you wait for other assistance to arrive.
There are some great planning resources at http://www.ready.gov, and at http://www.redcross.org/prepare. Businesses can find some great tips at http://www.readyrating.org on how to make sure their business, and their employees, are prepared for emergencies. And if you're just too busy to put together a personal survival kit, you can order them ready-made at http://lifegear.com/survival-kits.html. A couple of years ago, I saw one of their kits in my local Costco for only $79.99.
There was a great article in this morning's Everett Herald about how ordinary volunteers in New York are making a big difference in helping storm victims. A key point to remember is that those people couldn't be doing what they're doing to help if they were victims themselves.
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