Denny’s will be cutting back employee hours and adding a 5% surcharge to customer bills to pay for Obama care.
And the response of our brave Republicans in Congress? We won’t fight it.
But the Republicans in Congress are on the right side of the abortion question which should make the Republican base so ecstatic that they will forget all about economics. After all you can’t be a fiscal conservative if you are not a social conservative. Or so I have been told many times in the comments here.
Update: 15 Nov 2012 2023z
Well food service works are not the only people being affected by the new medical taxes. The amount of taxes paid by the medical device industry will be going up 30%. Health insurance prices (for those who can still afford it) will be going up to pay the new taxes.
Obamacare will be bending the medical cost curve. Upwards.
I wonder if the rising costs and lost jobs will have any effect on the next election? How could it? Obama got re-elected.
And in case you missed it from the first link:
The program mandates that only employees working more than 30 hours a week are covered under their employers health insurance plan, chains like Olive Garden and Red Lobster are already considering reduced worker hours.
Comments
23 responses to “Obamacare Kicks”
I suggesting dedicating even more of your efforts toward the Benghazi conspiracy. That’ll win you elections.
AJ,
Benghazi is the Watergate of this administration. That took 2 1/2 years to get the final result.
An people getting their hours cut an prices rising to pay for Obama care will have an immediate effect.
People getting pay cuts and rising prices causes immediate attention.
But I think your smug attitude is correct. Keep it up.
Who cares what Denny’s does? My experience with them was bland food and crappy service, I don’t even know if there is one near me to avoid going to any more.
Honestly, if they need to raise their prices to provide healthcare for their employees they weren’t paying those employees enough to justify *not* offering a viable healthcare benefit (which would explain the crappy service).
Well Daniel,
I might not have met the First Mate had the Obama tax been in force. She worked at Denny’s back in the day. (’73)
The Watergate of this administration? Lol. Right on cue, I’m guessing the massive intelligence failures relating to 9/11 and the Iraq War 2 are just shoulder shrugs. I suspect you will still be talking about Benghazi ten years later, but you’ll conveniently ignore the multiple intelligence failures in Iraq. You can’t make this stuff up.
You’ll have to clearly explain what the scandal is here, beyond screaming “Benghazi!,” “Coverup!” or “Act of Terror!” Already the attack on Rice is on, apparently because she happened to repeat the information given to her by the CIA at the time . . now she must be involved in the coverup.
One of your co-bloggers had the tenacity to claim that Petraeus’s resignation was suspiciously post-election, implying that Obama had a hand in it and timed it perfectly to keep him from testifying to the Congress.
As it turned out, it was an idiot right wing nutjob at the FBI that kept snooping through the emails, hilariously, because he suspected a coverup by Obama to protect the general (Either way the righties win, its a coverup either way!). Of course, your co-blogger never acknowledged this. A lot of allegations have been made, and I suspect, neither one of you will acknowledge it you’re in error. Let’s face it – you will never accept a judgement that does not vilify Obama.
Oh, as late as ’90 I wasn’t avoiding them actively, but around ’95 something changed and 3 visits in a row were just complete disasters culminating in me sitting with my wife and son on a 90+ degree day for over 20 minutes *after being seated* without anybody coming to the table with drinks or even to say hi. We honestly could have emptied the register on the way out without being noticed, now that I think about it >.>
Nine times out of ten we have a bad habit of responding to imminent calamity in a self-destructive way. Wait till the death rate for the poor jumps through the roof, and the rich get their medicine on the black market.
Purely anecdotal; A co-worker of a nephew schedules the employees’ hours and he has now been told that an occasional hour or two of overtime will not be the egregious error it has been in the past. OTOH scheduling part time employees in excess of the new goal of a 28 hours (previously 30) could be grounds for dismissal. The full/timers are happy.
Nine times out of ten we have a bad habit of responding to imminent calamity in a self-destructive way. Wait till the death rate for the poor jumps through the roof, and the rich get their medicine on the black market.
Wait? It’s already happening in conservative America.
http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/LE-Changes.jpg
Call me crazy but it looks like that little communist region up there in the Northeast (and out there in California, South Florida, Minnesota) seem to be on the right track. But then again, lower life expectancy after 20 years of technological and economic growth, well that’s just Real America baby. Tough!
Just wait till Obamacare kicks in. Poor folks life expectancies might just go up like it did in Massachussetts. Simon might not like that though, because then leftists might get *gasp* credit!.
AJ,
Your problem will be with the voters. Will they think the extra cost is worth it?
If the 2010 elections are an indication I think not. Especially if the “recovering economy” takes a dive.
And of course if the loss of work hours puts people on the street that will be some unfortunate publicity.
But there is a way for the Ds to profit at the expense of the Rs. Make prohibition an issue in the next election. It drives the socons of the party nuts.
Fiscal cons will vote for social-cons just to keep the # of democrats reasonable. Social cons are much less committed to getting fiscal conservatives into office. An atheist who’s somewhat socially conservative would lose to a religious social-con who’s basically otherwise a democrat in the primaries. Then the press will ask foreseeable abortion questions. Result: terrible. So it goes.
And then AJ what happens when the Government runs out of money?
Staking out a socially conservative posture means never having to deliver on fiscal conservatism. They do it for cover. And of course they can do nothing about abortion anyway, so their asses are covered both ways.
It’s so bad that even some socons in the Tea Party movement are wising up.
Simon: I am trying to understand what this means – what are the consequences of the government running out of money? It seems to be that Massachussetts’s budget is doing just fine. It seems to me that a healthier population has a better chance of keeping the government functioning properly than a dying one. I posted a graph showing that the difference in life expectancy between parts of the south and parts of the northeast have diverged by another 5-7 years and you’re only reaction is to continue to think about the money?
I don’t know how many times I have to tell you this, its like you don’t listen. You keep blaming the fiscal conservatives’ problems on SoCons. Do you realize that there are more people who are for overturning Roe v Wade than there are for ending Medicare or Social Security? There’s more people for a marriage amendment as well. Why don’t you guys ever talk about reducing the military budget?
You have the big picture down – yes, the government should do less – but like with “BENGHAZI!!!” when you go into the details, you realize you have nothing. People don’t want to get rid of Social Security, Medicare or reduce the Defense budget. Thats 2/3s of the budget. You make it seem like theres $1.5T in spending on contraceptives and food stamps every year – they are basically negligible and immaterial components of the budget.
The consequences of running out of money:
For a State:
Taxes go up. Business goes elsewhere.
California and Illinois have this problem. In addition it creates a death spiral as moochers move in and the productive leave. California especially has this problem.
For the Federal Government which can print money: Inflation. Inflation means that money cannot be used as a store of wealth. This depresses economic activity as people put their wealth into hard assets instead of productive assets. i.e. land and gold instead of factories.
Milton Friedman got a Nobel Prize for explaining all this. You might want to read him some time.
If taxes go up (instead of running the presses) outsourcing becomes attractive. Business goes elsewhere. i.e. it looks similar to what happens in an individual State.
The AJ,
If you are correct that the people do not want to get rid of their beloved programs (“free” stuff) then barring a technological miracle nature will take its course.
Energy will balance. That is a law that cannot be repealed.
The military budget is a form of signaling. It prevents world wars (I admit that the price is that it encourages lesser wars – and the lesser wars are a form of signaling).
The US trimmed the military budget in the 30s. It got the 40s as a result. The policy since has been to prevent a repeat.
We are forgetting the lessons. There will be a world war.
Industrial capacity is more important than overt military spending as a signal of military preparedness for a major war.
Who has the highest industrial capacity in the world today?
Daniel,
Wars these days are come as you are.
Besides the lesson of WW2 is that industrial capacity is not as good a signal as arms in being.
You not only have to have the capacity but show a willingness to use it. Thus the occasional small war.
Ugly facts to be sure.
Actually, I’d say that US disengagement in world affairs was a bigger problem in the leadup to WW II.
I don’t think that anybody in the late ’30’s could have called for certain which side we were going to come down on, and it’s probably only due to the personal convictions of Roosevelt that we didn’t side with Germany instead of France and Britain.
Now *that* would have lead to an entirely different outcome to the war, wouldn’t it?
You can’t be engaged in world affairs with a small military. The small military was both a symptom and a cause.
Late 30s? Roosevelt had been in office 8+ years.
In the 30s America was not yet ready for fascism. We are well on our way now.
The military budget is a form of signaling. It prevents world wars (I admit that the price is that it encourages lesser wars – and the lesser wars are a form of signaling).
The US trimmed the military budget in the 30s. It got the 40s as a result. The policy since has been to prevent a repeat.
We are forgetting the lessons. There will be a world war.
There you go. If you want something, then fucking pay for it. I don’t care what your rationale is.
The consequences of running out of money:
For a State:
Taxes go up. Business goes elsewhere.
California and Illinois have this problem. In addition it creates a death spiral as moochers move in and the productive leave. California especially has this problem.
Actually, the primarily problem that California and Illinois (and New York, and Massachussetts, New Jersey and the rest of the maker states in the Union) have is that 20 cents of the dollar is being taken from them and transferred to red-state takers who then proceed to preach about their awesome low-tax environments. For us on the east coast, we are sending welfare of up to 30 cents on the dollar to unproductive conservative America.
For the Federal Government which can print money: Inflation. Inflation means that money cannot be used as a store of wealth. This depresses economic activity as people put their wealth into hard assets instead of productive assets. i.e. land and gold instead of factories.
Milton Friedman got a Nobel Prize for explaining all this. You might want to read him some time.
LOL. Friedman won a nobel prize for his work in developing monetary theory. Learn something.
If taxes go up (instead of running the presses) outsourcing becomes attractive. Business goes elsewhere. i.e. it looks similar to what happens in an individual State.
Again, I’m still waiting for some solutions here on Medicare and Social Security, which have 80% popularity. I’m sure a good amount of the rest are probably people like you who are actually on it in the first place but just don’t care for having it around for there rest of America. The majority of Americans are willing to pay taxes to support these institutions because the effects – reducing old age poverty and improving health outcomes of all Americans, go further to improve American productivity than tax cuts ever have. So basically youre just another analyst coming into my office with some grandoise big picture idea but no actual method of implementing a proposal. I’ve seen enough of those. You rant on an on about FREE CONTRACEPTIVES but while ignoring everything that is actually material to the discuss. Materiality is all the matters. Come up with some material.