The president is making a show of sitting down with small business owners and trying to convince them that a tax hike is good for the economy, as if fleecing the wealthy to enforce his vision for shared responsibility will do anything to benefit their companies. The Obama small business record speaks for itself.
Hilda Solis shifts her attention from protecting illegal workers to small business.
One of the few things more offensive than our big labor president trying to ingratiate himself with small businesses is our Secretary of Labor beating him to the punch. Venerating post-Black Friday “Small Business Saturday,” Hilda Solis called on Americans to:
… show our appreciation to America’s most resilient job creators by “shopping small” tomorrow.”¹
Did Solis think we forgot her inflammatory, anti-business rhetoric about unscrupulous employers taking advantage of illegal workers, the group with which she seems to be the most concerned?
Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate is about coercion, not fairness.
A small business can create jobs for as many as 500 employees, 450 more than are necessary for a company to fall under the Obamacare radar and become eligible for the Obama employer mandate, the “Employer Responsibility Requirement.”
In a sea of government regulation, it would still be difficult to find a better example of the duplicity that typifies White House policy than this statement from Health and Human Services on the employer mandate in the Affordable Care Act:
The Affordable Care Act does not include an employer mandate. In 2014, as a matter of fairness, the Affordable Care Act requires large employers to pay a shared responsibility fee only if they don’t provide affordable coverage and taxpayers are supporting the cost of health insurance for their workers through premium tax credits for middle to low income families.²
That’s a relief. Successful small business owners running companies that employ more than a handful of Americans were worried that they might be forced to buy health insurance. Instead, they only need to worry about that shared responsibility fee, Obamaesque phrasing for a coercive non-cooperation tax. Americans don’t have to buy health insurance, either, as long as they don’t mind paying for a little shared responsibility of their own. Call it shared responsibility, an employer mandate, or fairness, coercion is coercion and a tax is a tax.
Small businesses dodged new government regulations, barely.
Uncertainty over the future of health care means that companies too small to be punished by the Obama employer mandate are worrying anyway because they have not worked their way through the Affordable Care Act’s provisions any more than the federal legislators who approved it.
The health care bill was sold as a win, but a big part of Obama style government regulation is intimidation, even when proposed legislation fails to become law. The Paycheck Fairness Act is destined to join the wage insurance provisions and punishment for companies opting not to hire the long-term unemployed in the American Jobs Act (see: Jobless Older Workers Are Worthless in the Obama Economy). Had these measures passed, someone would have paid, and who better than business owners blamed for discrimination and taking advantage of unemployed workers during a recession? Think of paycheck fairness and forced hiring as shots over the bow, reminders of what can happen if government regulation runs amuck in pursuit of coerced fairness and the same twisted notion of shared responsibility that lurks behind administration demands to fleece the wealthy.
A new threat? Will DACA work permits be the excuse for new discrimination laws?
When the time comes to hire, reviewing that I-9 can be a problem. How do you know whether a driver’s license or a Social Security number is real or fake? Should you err on the side of caution to keep from being sued for discrimination, or to prevent being raided for hiring illegal workers?
With deferred action picking up steam, just think of the opportunities DACA work permits offer for new government regulation for everything from immigration status to wage discrimination. What do you do when two job applicants show up at the door of your small business, one an American citizen who has been out of work and the other a DACA Dreamer, ready to compete with unemployed Americans with a work permit still warm from Uncle Sam’s printer? Who should you discriminate against first?
Given the potential for responsible business owners to refuse to choose illegals over citizens, DACA work permit or not, lobbyists and lawyers should be drooling over the opportunities handed them by our president. Ethnic quotas for small businesses? Government subsidized wages for hiring newly legitimized illegals? Think the GOP House can protect us? Republicans couldn’t prevent the White House order that led to DACA.
If the Obama New Year’s tax hike doesn’t pass, the president’s spending money is going to come from someone else’s hide. Revenue and job creating business owners tempted to think that the president has turned a new leaf should consider that.
When one thinks about just who is running our government it becomes scary because with Lawyers, Economists and Politicians in charge, not one of them is a producer meaning that they do not make a product. All of these people are takers, whereas an Engineer, Scientist, Chemist ,Miners and Farmers, etc., are creative in making things or products. This is how to make a profit that grows the economy, but when regulations are invoked that strangles the producers their economy will die. So we have a Leader and His Agents taking from the haves and giving it to the have nots, which is like killing the GOOSE that lays the golden egg.
America I hope you read this and take heed.