Why I am happy and thrilled to have voted for Obama...

[4est_4est_Gump]

He screws his own constituents as he pursues Cloward-Piven dreams of the collapse and Socialist retooling of The United States...



Leviathan Eats Its Tail
Municipal governments cut employees’ hours to avoid the Obamacare employer mandate.
Jillian Kay Melchior, NRO
AUGUST 12, 2013

Government autocannibalism is emerging as perhaps the oddest unintended consequence of the Obama health law. As Big Government tinkers with the insurance market, Small(er) Government is being forced to cut back on the hours of its employees.

The health law mandates that employers with more than 49 full-time workers offer approved insurance coverage. If an employer fails to provide this but crosses the 50-worker threshold, it must pay $40,000 in fees plus $2,000 to $3,000 for each full-time employee over the first 50.

Late last year, businesses including Carl’s Jr., Hardee’s, Red Lobster, and Olive Garden came under fire for accurately describing how the employer mandate would affect their hiring and employment policies. Because each additional full-time employee carries such a heavy cost, they warned, many small-business or franchise owners would choose not to expand their workforce.

This summer, municipal governments are realizing they face the same problem. Across the United States, they are already facing financial strains. The Great Recession and the housing crisis caused property-tax revenue, a critical income source for cities, to decline sharply. The stimulus may have delayed the pinch, but now that federal and state aid to local governments is also on the decline, municipal finances are increasingly tight.

Given that context, the employer mandate is a particularly tough burden for many cities and school districts. In the public sector, the 50-worker threshold is almost always already surpassed. Because the employer mandate pertains only to full-timers, the insurance requirement or penalty doesn’t apply when a worker puts in 29 hours a week or less.

So state and local governments, as well as school districts, are cutting back on hours for their employees to get around the added costs imposed by Obamacare.

As the Detroit News editorial page reported, 200 part-time and seasonal employees in Dearborn, Mich., will have their hours scaled back to 28 hours a week or less. The city’s mayor attributed the decision directly to the employer mandate.

In Medina, Ohio, many city employees are already working six fewer hours a week than they had been when the employer mandate wasn’t a factor. The city has estimated the employer mandate would add around $1 million in health costs, a hard burden for a city with fewer than 27,000 residents.

Back in February, Medina’s mayor, Dennis Hanwell, lamented that “we have the budget to pay the people, but we do not have the budget to pay for the health care” under the new law. Some of the affected city workers have already quit, seeking employment elsewhere because they can’t afford to be part-timers.

Around 280 part-time workers at Nebraska’s Papillon–La Vista school district will see their hours cut, too, the Omaha World Herald has reported.

The school district broke down the costs: Already, these part-time paraprofessionals cost the school district $5 million. Giving them health insurance would add an additional $2.5 million in expenses, and the penalty for not insuring them would be $3.4 million. All those options were too costly, so the district is instead cutting hours, and the school’s paraprofessionals will earn up to $3,300 less than they did last year.

And in Virginia, about 7,000 part-time public employees will see their hours curtailed. Some of them had worked up to approximately 40 hours a week, but they’ll now be forbidden to surpass the 29-hour weekly cutoff.

These are just a few examples. A recent report from Fox cited at least eleven other school districts and colleges and five other municipal governments that are being forced to cut back on employee hours as a direct result of the Affordable Care Act.

A fiscal conservative’s first reaction might well be schadenfreude: After all, the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees was a big supporter of the health law. And the union’s director of collective bargaining and health-care policy, Steven Kreisberg, has gone so far as to claim that AFSCME played “an important role in the passage” of Obamacare.

There’s a delightful irony when the hungry Leviathan ends up eating its own tail.

 

[RobDownSouth]

Except you didn't vote for President Obama.

You changed your mind at the last minute and voted for Romney to "teach Mercury a lesson".

Unless, of course, you were lying back then.
:nods:

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

tee hee
tee hee

'Cause nobody's there
Just me and my shadow
All alone and feeling blue

 

[Busybody]

Except you didn't vote for President Obama.

You changed your mind at the last minute and voted for Romney to "teach Mercury a lesson".

Unless, of course, you were lying back then.
:nods:

that isn't the point

is it

 

[koalabear]

that isn't the point

is it

He has no point. He is just a giant wobbling mass.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Throb lives in some sort of a virtual reality...



lol

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

He has no point. He is just a giant wobbling mass.

He mistakes his own gravity and the circling snack crumbs for gravitas...

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

LET THEM EAT CAKE!​

We’re No. 1 — In Public-Employee Pay
The U.S. pays its public sector better than the private sector — and other countries, too.
Andrew G. Biggs, NRO
AUGUST 12, 2013

Amid the recent hubbub over municipal bankruptcies and rising public-employee pension costs, pay for state and local government employees has gotten a great deal of publicity. Lost in the press attention, however, is that federal-employee compensation remains a problem, too, and new data again indicate that Washington, D.C., may be overpaying for the two million workers it employs.

In a 2011 AEI paper with Jason Richwine, I concluded that federal workers receive salaries and benefits around 37 percent higher than do private-sector workers with similar levels of education and experience. This prompted congressional requests for the Congressional Budget Office to conduct its own analysis, which, the requesters hoped, would rebut ours. Using slightly different methods, the CBO showed a smaller wage premium for federal workers. They omitted a $2.3 billion per year federal subsidy to government workers’ accounts held by the Thrift Savings Plan, but still reached qualitatively similar conclusions: Federal workers receive pay and benefits 16 percent above private-sector levels.

There are other ways to assess government-employee pay, such as analyzing how a given person’s pay changes when he switches from a private-sector job to a public-sector one. Contrary to myth, most federal workers take a pay cut when they switch to private jobs, and most private-sector workers receive a salary increase when they move into the federal workforce. Likewise, we can look at the low rates at which federal employees quit, which may indicate that they consider their jobs superior to the alternatives. All of these measures point to the conclusion that federal employees receive higher pay and benefits than they would in private-sector jobs.

But here’s another approach, thanks to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the “rich man’s club” whose membership includes most of the world’s developed, high-income countries. The OECD figures let us compare how U.S. federal-government employees are paid relative to central-government employees in 18 other countries.

The OECD analyzed the salaries, benefits, and paid leave for government employees; the combined value of these three categories equals total compensation. The OECD looked at four main categories of public employees:
....
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/355419/were-no-1-public-employee-pay-andrew-g-biggs
....
The results aren’t surprising. U.S. federal employees receive significantly higher total compensation than do central-government workers in other countries. For instance, in the U.S. federal government, a secretary receives total annual compensation of over $69,000; in the central government of the average OECD country, less than $48,000. With apologies to my friends in federal-policy shops, U.S. economists, policy analysts, and statisticians appear to do best of all, earning nearly twice the OECD average.

 

[RobDownSouth]

Hey, it's another NRO cut-n-paste!

Did anyone see THIS coming?

 

[koalabear]

Hey, it's another NRO cut-n-paste!

Did anyone see THIS coming?

Liposuction may work on your eyelids Fatty.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

He only reads Democratic Pravda pablum...


He's the ME in TEAM.

 

[Busybody]

Hey, it's another NRO cut-n-paste!

Did anyone see THIS coming?

Distract

Deny

Denigrate

I KNOW

BIG BIRD with the TONED ARMZ holding a BINDER ready to throw a RACIST ROCK at the HAIRCUT giver who is married to SWEATER DRESSAGE

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Remodeling and wardrobe!



ZIMMERMAN!!!

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Surprise! DoJ’s mortgage-fraud prosecutions claim turns out to be … fraudulent!

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/...rosecutions-claim-turns-out-to-be-fraudulent/

Enter Monsieur, lay down your load
Unlace your boots, rest from the road
This weighs a ton, travel's a curse
But here we strive to lighten your purse
Here the goose is cooked
Here the fat is fried
And nothing's overlooked
Till I'm satisfied

Food beyond compare. Food beyond belief
Mix it in a mincer and pretend it's beef
Kidney of a horse, liver of a cat
Filling up the sausages with this and that
Residents are more than welcome
Bridal suite is occupied
Reasonable charges
Plus some little extras on the side!

Charge 'em for the lice, extra for the mice
Two percent for looking in the mirror twice
Here a little slice, there a little cut
Three percent for sleeping with the window shut
When it comes to fixing prices
There are a lot of tricks he knows
How it all increases, all them bits and pieces
Jesus! It's amazing how it grows!​

 

[Busybody]

EVERYTHING

IS

A

LIE

Doesn't matter

LOOK!

MACCAU!

 

[John Doe]

that isn't the point

is it

n00b.

 

[John Doe]

Remodeling and wardrobe!



ZIMMERMAN!!!

Yeah, yeah, lipstick on pig, blah blah blah...

Make a new character already.