Obama Says: Take Your Medicine
Dan Danner on ObamaCare’s un(?)intended consequences:
Recent news media coverage has highlighted larger businesses reducing employee hours below 30 hours per week in order to avoid the employer-mandate requirements or penalties. Smaller businesses, too, might be forced to reduce employment below the 50 full-time equivalent employee threshold, or resist growing above the threshold, to avoid the mandate. None of these options is productive, and they ultimately harm employees and the economy. Replacing one full-time position with two part-time positions is not job creation.
Don’t be silly — of course it’s job creation. Soviet hospitals didn’t use wheelchairs, because a stretcher requires two employees to operate. We’re just following the Soviet path to prosperity.
More seriously, big business is going to love this stuff. Small business now has a very good reason to stay small, or face the increased costs (and hence increased risks) imposed by ObamaCare. Our entrenched interests are becoming ever more entrenched.
Progressivism is an essentially feudal system, and we’re the serfs.
Remember how Obama said that ATMs were costing the jobs of bank tellers? If they want to create jobs, just outlaw automation. No more industrial robots in car factories. Instead of one skilled guy using a backhoe, make construction companies hire dozens of manual laborers. No more ATMs. No more tax preparation and accounting software. Hell, outlaw computers altogether.
Do all that and we can soon be the third world nation Obama wants America to become.
Actually, this will be a fascinating experiment.
Of course we won’t replace one full-time employee with two part-time employees. It’ll be closer to five-to-four or a similar ratio. The interesting thing about part-time workers is that they tend to have a little more flexibility in their work schedule if need be. They also tend to have multiple jobs, in order to get the hours they need.
Another important data point: in a typical 40-hour week, how much of that time is “wasted” (for business purposes) in meetings, socializing, birthday celebrations, “working” lunches, etc.?
What Obamacare is doing is to discourage “employment” and encourage free-lancing. It is also, as Chief Justice Roberts made explicit, a head tax, which will serve to keep our noses to the grindstone–and I’m not sure the full effect of Obamacare on the 47% has been tallied up yet. Given our cultural tendency toward hard work, this could be an enormous productivity-booster in the end.
Also feudal, but you knew that already.
“Replacing one full-time position with two part-time positions is not job creation.” It’s job sharing. Sharing is nice. My kindergarten teachers told me.
Americans were known to work too much, have too little free time. With Obamacare, more Americans will have more free time. More young Americans will stay in mommy’s basement, sharing quality time with their parents.
There’s a famous story that while Milton Friedman was in China, he was brought to see a vast public-works project, where he saw countless men excavating with shovels. When he asked why more efficient earth-moving equipment wasn’t being used, he was told that the state’s priority was maximizing employment. Prof. Friedman then looked his guide in the eye and asked, “Then why not use spoons?”
The unspoken truth of humanity;
You were made to be ruled