Our employees just found out "what's in the bill"

Joy.  Bliss. 

About 500 employees at my workplace, Jukt Micronics, recently found out "what's in the bill" (to quote Nancy Pelosi).
 


This questionnaire went out to each shop, just to kinda get a feel for how the employees felt about things. 

Here's how the thing was worded:

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Starting in 2014, the US government is enacting a law which requires every person to have health insurance or be charged an additional tax.  As a requirement of this law, Jukt Micronics will be providing a plan that you may join.  We need to get an idea of how many employees might be interested in this coverage.  there will be a cost to us as employees with these options. 

* Option 1:  Pay approximately $1,800.00 per year (this breaks down to $150.00 per month or $34.00 per week) for company-provided health care coverage with an estimated deductible of $3,000.00 per individual.

* Option 2: Pay a government fine or tax of $95.00 for the first year or 1% of your annual income, whichever is greater.  (If you made $18,000.00 in box 2 of your W-2 last year, 1% of $180 - just move the decimal point over two places.) 

*Option 3: Obtain insurance coverage through the individual market, i.e. Blue Cross, Aetna, or some other "family plan". 

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Work kinda ground to a halt as everyone digested this. 

But let's say you're a low-income worker, making $8.50 per hour.  You're going to pay the fine.  Every time.  They can't turn away pre-existing conditions.  If you get cancer or if you accidentally saw your leg off, you can sign up for insurance in the ambulance (or in my case, the helicopter) on the way to the hospital.  The damn fools wrote it where insurance companies can't turn away anyone with a pre-existing condition. 

Ok, how about high-income workers? 

Same thing.  The only people who will pay $1,800.00 per year with a $3,000.00 deductible are those with incomes higher than $180,000.00
Otherwise, they're better off paying the fine.  (Yeah, the fines go up each year after 2014, but there's no penalty for getting a good deal the first year!!)
They can't turn anyone away from insurance coverage, so signing up for it after you've gotten sick seems to be the only rational response to the law.
As I wrote multiple times during the debates about this madness, no one will stay in the business of insuring the houses that have already caught on fire, but that's what The Teleprompter Jesus has asked insurance companies to do.

As our cleaning guy said, "This thing kinda sounds like slavery." 

I'll be writing more (with some input from our H.R. department) as the questionnaires come in. 

Think of this when you hear how many jobs a government project is going to create

Here's something I've been pondering for the last few weeks. 

My employer, Jukt Micronics, is about to lease a new mega-warehouse.  My boss and I have been working on the deal for a couple of months. 
We already have several warehouses and had to justify the deal to the company owners, and to our president, Marvel Variants. 

(On one of our tours of the facility, Mr. Variants took this pic of me lounging at the spot where I hope to take my lunch breaks.  I consider it to be one of the greatest Libertarian portraits ever produced, and I hope the jury will remember this deed when Variants is put on trial for ripping off comic book geeks.)

Anyway, to justify the new warehouse, my boss and I had to determine how many forklifts we could eliminate.  The lease at this space is less per square foot than one of our other locations, so that helped.  We figured out how much time we could save by consolidating some locations.  The calculations for how much we would save on fuel took up a couple of days. 

Here's the big one, the one that probably closed the deal for us....
We won't have to hire as many people. 

I repeat - we won't have to hire as many people. 

I think my employers have a good relationship with their employees.  In years past, they've actually gone to the bank to borrow money so they could give Christmas bonuses!!  But the process of purchasing labor from people is only a means to an end, and that end is to provide display fixtures to grocery stores in exchange for money.  We do not have a goal of saving and creating jobs. 

(Otherwise, we would lobby for the government to outlaw forklifts and trucks.  Think of all the jobs that would save or create.) 

Now, think of the yammering you hear when Congressman Felcher is trying to justify a new project in his district. 

This new Perpetual Motion Facility will bring 1,397 new jobs to North Texas ! 
Our investment in Bottled Fairy Flatulence will employ 257 citizens of the D/FW area ! 
The Porkulus Plan has saved or created 2 million jobs since 2009 ! 

And on and on and on.   The higher the number, the more likely the boondoggle will come into being, right? 

So if you had control of your tax money had an extra $15,000, and wanted to invest it in a place that would use it wisely, where would you put it? 
Would you want to give the money to John Boehlout Boehner and The Teleprompter Jesus so they could hire as many people as possible?  Even if a lot of those people are just standing around or doing busywork?
Or would you want to invest it in a project that was trying to use the money as efficiently as possible? 
How much more would you be willing to pay for a computer that was produced by 6,000 people instead of 4,000 ??

One last question....Since Washington is now infested with Keynesian economists who are trying to stimulate the economy by "creating jobs", is there any doubt in your mind why our economy is in the tank? 

Leave employers alone to fight it out and compete.  Stop using tax money to fund insanity.  The entrepreneurs, not the Community Organizers, will come up with the best use for it.  The jobs and the prosperity will follow. 

Paul Krugman is pumped ! ! ! !

New York Times economist, Barackagandist, and all-around Statist lapdog Paul Krugman is pumped.  I mean PUMPED ! ! 
This is the chart that did it for him.  I gotta admit, my chair is getting a little moist because I'm looking at this chart:

Here's Dr. Krugman:

In other words, the Medicare actuaries believe that the cost-saving provisions in the Obama health reform will make a huge difference to the long-run budget outlook. Yes, it’s just a projection, and debatable like all projections. And it’s still not enough. But anyone who both claims to be worried about the long-run deficit and was opposed to health reform has some explaining to do. All the facts we have suggest that health reform was the biggest move toward fiscal responsibility in a long, long time.

Ok, here's my "explaining", since Krugman is feeling macho and has thrown down the gauntlet....

Things are expensive when they are 1) in demand, and 2) scarce. 
ObamaCare® does nothing to lower demand for medical care.  And it does nothing to reduce the scarcity of doctors, nurses, hospital, drugs, or bedpans. 
All it does is increase the size of the bureaucracy and prevent insurance companies from charging premiums to customers who aren't sick yet. 
Therefore ObamaCare® will raise the cost of healthcare, not lower it. 

I bet that I'm right, and that Paul Krugman turns out to be wrong. 
I repeat....Thirty years from now, it will turn out that a blogger/shipping manager with an Education degree from Delta State University was right about a simple economic concept.  The Nobel Prize winner in Statist Power Grabs Economics will be proven wrong.