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Obamacare is a Devastating Tax on the Poor and Uninsured

Mises Daily: Thursday, November 12, 2009 by Eric M. Staib

Given the recent announcement that the government’s measure of unemployment has hit 10.2 percent, and given that the official House version of Obama’s healthcare plan, HR 3962, has now passed, a close examination of the effects of “Obamacare” on the labor market is important. It will be no surprise to readers of this site to learn that the Democrats’ bill will seriously harm precisely those poor and uninsured citizens it is ostensibly designed to help. The harm will come by compounding mass unemployment and depriving these citizens of consumption choices.

Obamacare as Labor Tax

According to pages 269–273 of the gargantuan bill,Download PDF employers of full-time workers will be required to cover at least 72.5 percent of the premium of the least expensive health-insurance plan available that fulfills the bill’s minimum criteria of “acceptable coverage.” In cases in which family coverage is provided, 62.5 percent of the premium is to be borne by the employer. Depending on the specific plan and other variables such as location, this amounts to a direct labor tax of approximately $300 per month for an individual, or nearly $700 for family coverage.

The implication of this increased cost is that workers whose revenue productivity is less than $300 per month higher than their wages will be laid off, or have their hours cut to the level that will classify them as part-time. Ignoring established labor law, the bill leaves the definition of part-time and full-time to the discretion of the Commissioner of Obama’s massive new health bureaucracy. The lower the new “Health Choices Commissioner” sets the threshold in an attempt to maximize the number of people receiving the employer contribution, the more hours of production employers will have to shave off to push their employees under the threshold, and the less those workers will take home in wages each week.

Unfortunately, the bill also requires employers to cover a (smaller) percentage of the premium of the same minimum plan for part-time workers. The effects here are even worse than above, because they weaken the ability of an employer to escape the labor tax by employing his workers for fewer hours. Instead, with a labor tax on part-time workers as well, some low-productivity workers who are currently only working a few hours per week will be forced out of work entirely.

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Obama Ordered US Strike on Yemen

by Jason Ditz, December 18, 2009

Just one day after a very public denial that American forces were in the process of attacking sites in Northern Yemen, President Barack Obama ordered multiple cruise missile attacks on sites across the tiny, coastal nation.

The air strikes were coordinated with the government of President Ali Abdallah Saleh and the attacks left 120 killed, many of them civilians according to witnesses. President Obama called Saleh after the attack to “congratulate” him on the killings.

The Yemeni government denied any US role in the attacks, despite American officials’ admissions. This is largely in keeping with the Saleh government’s policy, as they angrily denied reports of Saudi attacks in the north as a myth even as the Saudi government was giving a press conference detailing the attack.

One Yemeni official however claimed that a local al-Qaeda “deputy” named Mohammed Saleh Mohammed Ali Al-Kazemi was slain, and that “scores” of al-Qaeda members were killed in the assorted attacks.

The conflict with al-Qaeda is just one of many conflicts currently going on in Yemen, including an enduring separatist movement in the south and an increasingly violent insurrection in the Shi’ite north. Technically Wednesday’s State Department denials appear to have been accurate, as the missile strikes were in a completely unrelated conflict from the one they were accused of taking part in.

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Ron Paul and Barney Frank on Larry King Live

This is a funny quote by Barney Frank: “I believe 100% with what Ron Paul said.”

The Ron Paul 2008 Video Diary

The Ron Paul Video Diary

Ron Paul Says Ben Bernanke is More Powerful Than Obama

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Lord Monckton Questions Man Made Global Warming Believer

Ron Paul on the recession: ‘None of this is behind us’

The U.S. has moved past none of the core issues that brought the economy to its knees last fall, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) suggested Tuesday.

Paul asserted that while some big financial institutions may be starting to reap large profits again, the bailouts put in place to help those firms last year have only worsened the long-term economic standing in the country.

“None of this is behind us,” the libertarian Republican said during an appearance on CNN. “All we have done is prolong the agony and very soon people are going to realize, in spite of all these huge profits, Wall Street is still a shaky place to be.”

The congressman pinned blame for the stagnant economy on the Federal Reserve, long his bête noire, for having extended too much credit to large banks and similar companies, and called for stricter regulation of the Fed.

Paul said that the system would be unable to recover until the U.S. sets a new basis for the dollar.

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Obama Urged to Fully Comply With Anti-Torture Treaty

The fifteenth anniversary of the U.S. ratification of the United Nations Convention Against Torture passed last week with little fanfare and virtually no press attention from the mainstream media.

But according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), “U.S. policy continues to fall short of ensuring full compliance with the treaty.”

For example, the organization said that an appendix to the Army Field Manual (AFM) can still facilitate cruel treatment of prisoners and detainees at home and abroad.

The Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment (CAT) is the most comprehensive international human rights treaty dealing exclusively with the issues of torture and abuse. It came into effect in 1987 and has been ratified by 146 countries.

The treaty was initially signed by the Ronald Reagan administration in 1988 and was ratified by the Senate on Oct. 21, 1994, but with reservations, understandings, and declarations (RUDs) that failed to make the treaty fully applicable.

The administration of former president George W. Bush exploited these RUDs to justify abusive interrogation policies, including the use of waterboarding, stress positions, extreme isolation, and sleep deprivation.

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Federal deficit triples from year ago

AP – WASHINGTON – The federal budget deficit has surged to an all-time high of $1.42 trillion as the recession caused tax revenues to plunge while the government was spending massive amounts to stabilize the financial system and jump-start the economy.

The imbalance for the budget year ended Sept. 30 more than tripled last year’s record. The Obama administration projects deficits will total $9.1 trillion over the next decade unless corrective action is taken.

As a portion of the economy, the budget deficit stood at 10 percent, the highest since World War II, according to government data released Friday.

Failure to curb runaway deficits could trigger a financial train wreck that would push interest rates and inflation higher, and send the dollar crashing if foreigners suddenly started dumping their holdings of Treasury securities.

None of those problems are evident now as the worst recession since the 1930s has depressed borrowing by consumers and businesses, giving the government a break on the interest it paid this year on the record debt. Net interest payments actually fell by about $10 billion in 2009 from 2008.

But economists worry investors will grow fearful of the nation’s ability to repay all the debt unless the administration and Congress begin developing credible plans to deal with the deficit problem once the recession has ended and unemployment has begun to come down.

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