US Midterm Elections

[Moniker]

This is probably timely:

Why the ACA is bad for, like, everyone outside an urban center:

As a manager of a small-medium business in a small town, I find myself having to vote against my heart in the midterm elections. Obamacare is freaking deadly to small businesses; not only as a whole but to the workers as well. Obamacare defines full-time workers as anyone working 30+ hours per week. I manage a grocery store, which means high turnover, high use of high school and college students.

We offer fully paid healthcare (medical/vision/Rx/dental/life insurance) to non-students who have worked for us for more than a year and a half. This is a great deal for anyone who wants to make a life working for the store. But now, we're forced into a position where only those who currently qualify for our benefits are allowed to work more than 30 hours per week. Students and new hires working to pay their rent/tuition/whatever are now limited to 27 hours or less per week, because the store simply cannot afford paying the premiums of an additional 30 people. (Currently we support about 25 employees' health benefits.)

That means that anyone who isn't currently covered is getting a massive paycheck decrease. In order to pay their rent, they have to take a second job. There really aren't many second jobs to be had around here. It's a dying coal town. If the limit were 35 hours instead, we could operate as usual, but the ACA wants employers to pay out the ass.

On top of that, Democrat senators recently tried to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10. With some finnegling, we can adapt to Obamacare, but that kind of a base wage is simply untenable. $10.10 may be a living wage in urban centers, but in small town/rural settings it's far and above what's necessary to build a good life. Even as a manager, I don't make much more than that (+40c), and am living comfortably.

Republicans right now are really fucking dysfunctional, and I hate the way they've paralyzed Congress, but what other choice do I have? I support gay marriage, I'm pro-choice, I'm pro-citizenship for illegal immigrants, etc., etc., etc. It kills me that I have to vote against my conscience just to keep my business going.

All I have to say to those I know is, "I don't care what your politics are. Please vote Republican. Or else, you'll get a nice bump in your paycheck for 1-2 years, but after that, you'll have to go looking for work, and so will I."

[Ed Oscuro]

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/0 ... d-freedom/
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/0 ... continued/

Moniker, don't be an idiot.

[ED-057]

1) Democrats are corrupt. Republicans are corrupt. If you like crap government, vote for Democrats and/or Republicans.

2) If your costs go up, then I guess you have to raise prices. Your competitors will be subject to the same law so in that case they will be raising prices as well.

3) How is it that you consider $10.10 excessive, when at the same time you are talking about people who won't be able to pay rent if their hours drop from 35 to 27? (not to mention that they have no health insurance and will now most likely have to apply for government subsidy or pay the "tax")

Note that I am not here to defend ACA, it is far from ideal.

[Moniker]

3) How is it that you consider $10.10 excessive, when at the same time you are talking about people who won't be able to pay rent if their hours drop from 35 to 27? (not to mention that they have no health insurance and will now most likely have to apply for government subsidy or pay the "tax")

Note that I am not here to defend ACA, it is far from ideal.

Because making $7.50-9.00 in the area I live in is more than enough to pay the bills. If they get enough hours, that is. I want to give them enough hours to make ends meet, but now it isn't up to me. And, w/r/t health insurance, most of them are on their spouse's/parent's plan. And that'd be great. But under the ACA I'm forced to offer them healthcare if they work more than 30 hours/week, regardless of any other plan they're being covered by. And their personal expense can't exceed more than 9.5% their weekly wage, by law, which means I have to cover the rest of it. As I understand it, every person who works more than 30 hours/week qualifies for a premium tax credit. Which costs my business $2,000 a pop.

Your typical grocery store's net margin is razor thin - 1-2% per year. I have a choice to either give good people workable hours and wages (I'd much rather do this), or hire a bunch of part-timers who I can actually afford. (And ouch, Ed. I respect your opinion and that hurts.) Also, Paul Krugman is a stooge, just like Rush or Bill.

[Moniker]

2) If your costs go up, then I guess you have to raise prices. Your competitors will be subject to the same law so in that case they will be raising prices as well.

And all of my competitors are doing the same thing, because they have to. Increased costs = increased prices. Even though that doesn't necessarily hurt my business, so long as I'm competitive, it definitely doesn't help Joe Sixpack, either.

[Ed Oscuro]

Why should I and the other millions of previously uninsured Americans give up our coverage so you can save a few thousand here and there? I'm not some old sick guy who smoked all his life and is barely hanging in there, btw. Don't give me that "Joe Sixpack" bullshit. Joe Doesn't Drink Himself to An Early Death still could fall through the cracks in the old system. So, sucks to be you, so let's work on that rather than burning the whole system down. Overall, the new system definitely sucks a lot less for everybody than the old one did, and that's what we should be focused on.

You think it's expensive now, but you never had a preexisting condition that insurance under the old regime wouldn't pay for, did you? Overall, I'll end up paying a lot more into insurance than I get out of it - the difference being that under the old regime I also wouldn't have gotten coverage when I needed it, despite paying a lot of money into the system over the years.

I'm pretty sure I gave you the right answer the last time we had this go-around: It's more expensive to insure because the plans are no longer cash grabs that let the insurers get away with not paying for anything expensive (i.e., the stuff people buy insurance for). Without knowing details of the actual plan (which I never saw you share), it's impossible to do an apples-to-apples comparison here.

Back to 2014, there's actually more going on with the Republicans than I had realized:

Last week, House Republicans released a deliberately misleading report on the status of health reform, crudely rigging the numbers to sustain the illusion of failure in the face of unexpected success. Are you shocked?

You aren’t, but you should be. Mainstream politicians didn’t always try to advance their agenda through lies, damned lies and — in this case — bogus statistics. And the fact that this has become standard operating procedure for a major party bodes ill for America’s future.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/05/opini ... ilure.html

You think Republicans give a shit about fixing Obamacare? Where's there giving a shit about Medicare and Medicaid, or Social Security? This election cycle Republicans want to forget about Obamacare. Instead, they're back to cynically using the death of a big-D Democratic ambassador against the Administration. If Republicans get ahold of Obamacare, you can bet they won't do anything positive with it.

I don't have the link right now, but there was something I read the other day about how Southern Republicans would literally rather die than vote for something that the Democrats liked. It's funny because it's true.

Words can't express how astonished I am your reasoning here, Moniker. "Oh, the Republicans stand for absolutely nothing I believe in. But along with the whole goddamn country, they'll also burn down Obamacare. I like it!"

[BulletMagnet]

The real problem is the fact that Obama was (shamefully, frankly) cowed into taking the public option off the table when he was cooking up the ACA; meanwhile, the rest of the civilized world looks at us and says "how in the hell do you people put up with having for-profit healthcare as your only option, when you pay two to three times as much for care as we do and oftentimes get inferior results?"

I don't know the ins and outs of your particular situation, Moniker, but I do know that a lot of million- and billion-dollar businesses are using the same "we can't afford this" excuse despite sitting on record profits (and in cases like McDonald's outright telling their employees to get on Medicaid and food stamps when their pitiful wages can't pay their bills, i.e. let the taxpayer do it for you because we won't). While we're on the topic, in the suburb where I live a one-bedroom apartment is $1,000 a month; my current full-time job pays me less than 8.50 an hour (and that's including two raises since I started), which works out to 1,200-1,300 a month. Feel free to work out how I'd be able to pay for everything else, before you even get into possible emergencies (especially those private insurance will refuse to cover) or saving anything for retirement - short version, if my folks weren't willing to let me stay with them I'd probably be out on the street, even with a college degree, no criminal record and no debt. Wages for everyone except the affluent haven't come close to keeping up with the cost of living for a LONG time now, and the fact that the 1% can claim over 90% of the economic recovery since the recession has only made it worse. Attempting to get more people insured, half-hearted as the measure unfortunately is, is not the cause of our ills.

Also, Paul Krugman is a stooge, just like Rush or Bill.

Krugman, like any human being, isn't right about everything, but there's no way in hell you can honestly pack him in with bought-and-paid-for shills like Limbaugh, who spout whatever they're paid to say and rarely if ever pay any real price when it blows up in their face; at the VERY least Krugman was one of the few who saw the housing bubble coming, while most of the other "experts" were insisting that people ought to take out those unaffordable mortgages, since the housing market would absolutely continue to skyrocket forever (and still have their cushy jobs even as they wag their fingers at us regular folks for being so darned irresponsible with those crazy mortgages). He's also been proven right on "austerity" measures, as neither skyrocketing interest rates nor the "confidence fairy" has shown up, and businesses are taking full advantage of the fact that they're being given free rein by the right to keep waiting for them; translation, workers lose again, as they have done almost uninterrupted since the Reagan years.

[Moniker]

Why should I and the other millions of previously uninsured Americans give up our coverage so you can save a few thousand here and there?

Words can't express how astonished I am your reasoning here, Moniker. "Oh, the Republicans stand for absolutely nothing I believe in. But along with the whole goddamn country, they'll also burn down Obamacare. I like it!"

I don't know the ins and outs of your particular situation, Moniker, but I do know that a lot of million- and billion-dollar businesses are using the same "we can't afford this" excuse despite sitting on record profits (and in cases like McDonald's outright telling their employees to get on Medicaid and food stamps when their pitiful wages can't pay their bills

You're both assuming that this is a matter of big corporations with huge Wall Street-style unearned bonuses is the whole picture. It's not. We are not the 1%. We don't have yachts or Cadillacs. We have Honda Civics and Buicks. I personally want everyone in America to get adequate medical care. It's a basic human right. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" includes medical treatment.

What's wrong about it is that the pursuit of perfect medical treatment necessarily ensures the death of small business. We aren't sitting on millions or billions of dollars. We aren't saving 'a few thousand' dollars here and there by not giving our employees full insurance. We're in a battle for existence, and being forced to fully insure all of our employees, including those already insured, is economically untenable. This is small town retail. And it's the segment of America that Democrats currently choose to not give a shit about.

Republicans have fucked themselves. They're on the wrong side of history, but they also are [programmed] to understand what legislation does to business. Mainly because they're wrong on everything else.

As I said before, if Obamacare defined full-time as 35 hours or less, there would be no problem. If the ACA were emended to accept that fact, then I would gladly jump aboard.

But as it is, I either have to limit hours, or accept that my company can't continue existing. Maybe some callous assholes would say we don't deserve continued existence. I invite them to come to the local watering hole and see how that view is tolerated. Studies say stuff like "If the min wage was raised to 10.10, the poverty rate would reduce, but we'd lose 500,000 jobs." That sounds pretty amazing, until you realize that your own business is a component of that 0.5M jobs. It's a nice, easy philosophical win for you all. But for those of us who are actually living in the 99%, it isn't so easy an answer.

[Ed Oscuro]

The biggest aggravation here is that you don't tell us what research you've done on the problem, what state you live in, but you sure do tell us what a bunch of callous assholes we are for being 1%ers who enjoy having meaningful coverage for the first time in ever!

Nothing I've read indicates that small businesses are forced to provide coverage. In fact, the opposite is true:

Q: Will I be required to provide coverage that I can’t afford?

A: No.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/health-care-m ... l-business

Learn what the law means for small businesses and self-employed business owners.

http://www.sba.gov/healthcare - they break it down by employer size (self-employed; fewer than 25 employees; fewer than 50; more than 100) and they also have an ongoing webinar series which you should register for. But again, a quick check of this indicates that you either could inform your employees that they might be eligible for certain benefits if they enroll themselves in the Healthcare Marketplace, or

This isn't a collection of friendly links I had sitting around ready to pounce. This is the result of literally two simple Google searches.

And even with these things in mind, your insistence that Republicans have a silver bullet that magically makes things better defies belief and also all the evidence. They want to burn the system down, so your fellow Forumers who have been able to get affordable health care get fucked, and you probably get fucked too, anyway! Or maybe they just want to institute the kinds of reforms the President has been asking for, but call it a repeal so everybody believes that the good, noble Republicans saved us from the terrible dark man and his government while keeping government Obamacare out of our Affordable Care Act.

Do your reading, call up the healthcare marketplace.

[Ed Oscuro]

...I don't know why I bother trying to help, though, since you refuse to even read what I write. I don't know where the hell you got that "Wall Street corporations" thing from. I didn't say anything about Wall Street or corporations, and neither does Krugman. So instead of strawmanning the hell out of what I'm saying, look at the link I posted:

Meanwhile, the word formerly known as the hottest buzzword of 2014 has gone incognito. Earlier in the year, Republicans stubbornly insisted that if they said Obamacare three (million) times, their 50+ senate seats would appear. However, "Obamacare" has been mentioned a paltry 19 times in floor speeches in those eight days.

The Republicans don't want to save you from Obamacare. (The best they can do, if they tried, is reform it further.)

[BulletMagnet]

We're in a battle for existence, and being forced to fully insure all of our employees, including those already insured, is economically untenable.

It might not be if more rank-and-file conservatives would demand that their leaders quit opposing the public option; even if you don't plan to switch over to government insurance yourself, the fact that the industry would finally have some real competition (funny how quickly that whole concept vanishes from your campaign platform when one of your donors benefits from its disappearance) would make things better across the board, at least if it went the same way it's gone pretty much everywhere else that has it.

This is small town retail. And it's the segment of America that Democrats currently choose to not give a shit about.

For all the lip service that the conservative leadership heap on "ordinary Americans", when push comes to shove they're also the first ones to kick them to the curb: not making enough to pay the bills? Well, obviously you're not working hard enough, or aren't smart enough to get a better job. Go back to school, work three jobs to pay the tuition while raising a family, what's the problem? If you really wanted it the market would reward you, the fact that you're poor must mean you want to be poor, so don't come crying to us! Not to mention that the billionaires hiding money overseas to avoid taxation are capitalist heroes, but people too poor to pay federal income taxes (though they're still taxed in myriad other ways) are freeloaders. Remember: to the hard-core conservatives who have taken over the modern Republican party, the mere existence of the middle class is an unacceptably Socialist construct, and their mission is to crush it.

The Dems can be remarkably tone-deaf (and, as I mentioned earlier, far too easily cowed by the moneyed interests backing their opponents), but at the very least they're not quite so quick to embrace the plutocratic dystopia their opponents are working to build for themselves.

As I said before, if Obamacare defined full-time as 35 hours or less, there would be no problem. If the ACA were emended to accept that fact, then I would gladly jump aboard.

That might be the case, but there would be scads of others insisting that the cutoff be at 40 hours, or even more than that. So how far do we go before we're not "anti-business" anymore?

Studies say stuff like "If the min wage was raised to 10.10, the poverty rate would reduce, but we'd lose 500,000 jobs." That sounds pretty amazing, until you realize that your own business is a component of that 0.5M jobs. It's a nice, easy philosophical win for you all. But for those of us who are actually living in the 99%, it isn't so easy an answer.

Again, considering how far everyone but the richest in this country have fallen from grace over the past few decades, methinks the solution, in one way or another, is not to insist that all the dead-end, menial jobs persist, but to either make those jobs better or replace them with superior ones. Off the cuff I'd suggest a wide-reaching training (because nobody except the bottom tier bothers to actually train their workers anymore; go pay through the nose for college, losers!) and employment program to repair the country's much-maligned infrastructure, which would pay dividends in both money saved on repeated band-aid fixes and the infusion of skills into the workforce once the projects are done. But that, like everything else that might help the cause of ordinary workers and the country as a whole, is Marxism at its worst.

[Ed Oscuro]

A bit old, but should still be correct:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/20 ... -obamacare

Question: Our business has under 10 employees who work 25 to 35 hours per week. How will the employer health insurance mandate affect us?

Answer: Short answer: It won’t. Under Obamacare, the mandate requires employers with 50 or more employees (or “full-time equivalents”—we’ll get to that next) to offer coverage or pay a $2,000 fine per employee, not counting the first 30 employees, starting in 2014. Micro-businesses like yours, with fewer than 10 employees, are well under the limit.

The mandate has gotten lots of attention, but nationwide it will apply to very few businesses. That’s because 96 percent of all businesses have fewer than 50 employees, says David Chase, an outreach director at Small Business Majority, a lobbying group that supports health-care reform. “Of the 4 percent who’ll be mandated to offer insurance, 96 percent of those companies already offer it. So it’s 4 percent of the 4 percent that will be affected by the mandate.”

Question: My company fluctuates from 37 to 53 employees, depending on how many paint jobs we are doing. Does “employing over 50” mean daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly? If I drop lower than 50, can I drop the insurance I’m mandated to offer?

Answer: If you employ fewer than 50 “full-time equivalent” employees, you will not be mandated to offer coverage in 2014. The FTE calculation considers full-time any employee who is scheduled or has worked more than 40 hours per week, averaged over a month. So if you have two part-timers who work 20 hours a week, they would count as one FTE.

A business like yours, which employs variable-hour workers who may work 40 hours one week and not at all other weeks, must add up the total hours those employees worked in a year. Divide that number by 2,080 (which represents 40 hours/week times 52 weeks in a year) and you’ll get the number of FTEs your company employs.

A complexity: That calculation determines whether you are mandated to offer coverage, not which of your employees are eligible for coverage, says Marcus Newman, a registered health underwriter and chartered benefits consultant at brokerage GCG Financial in Chicago. “If you are mandated to offer coverage, you’ll have to cover employees working 30 or more hours per week on average, starting 90 days after they are hired,” he says.

Part-timers under 30 hours and seasonal employees who work fewer than 120 days annually do not have to be covered even if your company falls under the mandate. To avoid penalties, employers under mandate must offer insurance to eligible employees that covers at least 60 percent of the actuarial value of the cost of benefits; the employees’ share must not be more than 9.5 percent of their income.

Again, I am completely and utterly mystified as to what Moniker is talking about, since part-time work isn't going to trigger mandatory insurance buys by an employer.

And again, one search in Google.

Looking again at the official site, this might also be what you were looking for:
http://www.sba.gov/content/employers-wi ... -employees

Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP)

Open for enrollment year-round, small employers with generally up to 50 full-time equivalent (FTE) employees have access to the new Health Insurance Marketplace through the Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP). Currently, small businesses pay on average 18% more than larger businesses for health insurance. The SHOP Marketplace offers small employers increased purchasing power to obtain a better choice of high-quality coverage at a lower cost. Costs are lowered because small employers can pool their risk.

They provide a calculator to determine whether you qualify for SHOP.

And here's a number for you to call:

1-800-706-7893 (the SHOP hotline)

[BryanM]

Right, those on the edge are actually encouraged to use fewer employees with longer hours since a guy covering 40 hours a week will only count as one person, while the guy doing 27 hours a week counts as 90% of a people. If 50 people can really handle all 245 days of business.

Yeah it's still plenty weird and derpy.

I like to be an optimist and claim the entire thing will eventually lead to single payer (Vermont's already going there as soon as the law allows.). If the history of the SNAP program is anything to go by, we'll only have to wait 30 years to see it happen.

Ahhh it might be slightly faster than that. 10 years ago gay rights were political poison, and now they're an ambrosia. We've got another economic crash coming up soonish and those always lead to some progressive gains. Maybe we'll elect a real socialist instead of a pretend one this time.

[Moniker]

@Ed, obviously this is a sensitive issue, and I have read your posts, I've even read the law directly, and am reasonably well-educated on the matter. Better than most presenters at seminars I've attended, anyway. We're obviously talking at cross-purposes, so let me break it down cleanly.

The amount of labor we require depends mostly on sales. X dollars in sales necessitates Y hours of labor, because sales per man hour is something pretty well fixed, unless you're grossly inefficient. We cannot reduce our hours because that's just what's needed to get the job done.

Our total FTEs is over 50, not by much, but by enough, which makes us a "medium" employer. So starting in 2015 at the very latest (that's when the 2016 look back period begins), we have to adjust to be compliant. We therefore also don't qualify for SHOP, at least not yet. There isn't any real way to reduce those FTEs except make full timers work more. And I have to work with 3 definitions of "full time" - the Department of Labor puts it at 40/week, Obamacare at 30/week, and our union contract at 33+/week. A handful of managers and a few long-term employees aside, we employ almost entirely part-time employees. Traditionally, they've worked 32 hours on average and as a maximum, unless they want more (many of them do), and then we can work them up to 40 if they give the OK.

Now we can't really reduce hours without sacrificing sales.. which is something no company wants to do. The only way we could would be to make our part timers (full-time by the ACA definition) work more hours, since in the ACA calculation, they're counted as an integer, meaning that if someone works more than 30, they are one FTE unit, no matter how many hours they work over 30. The rest of the hours are lumped and averaged and that gets you the rest of your FTEs. But by union contract, we can't work them more than 32 unless they OK it. And enough of them don't want the extra hours, so it's all a moot point. And if you might counter with the idea, "make more full timers," well, there're problems with that as well. If they're full time they *must,* by the union contract work exactly 40 hours a week. Most of our employees are mothers, grandmas, wives, and students, and don't want to work that week upon week.

So OK, we're under the employee mandate. Now we have to look at everyone currently receiving benefits (about a third to a half at any given time), and say, alright, these folks are going to be covered no matter what, so no worries. Work them as many hours as they want. The rest of the folks, mainly students and new employees, we have to cut down to 27 hours/week, because in two years, if they average over 30 for 2015 (and for any month at all starting in 2016), we'll have to cover them. As I've said, we pay the entire cost of premiums, so it isn't cheap. In 2013, about 80% of our workforce worked more than 30/week.

If we don't cut back that remaining 50 or so percent of employees to 27 hours, our bills go through the roof. We can deal with that, fine, we just have hire more ACA-part-time employees. Except that 27 hours isn't good for many of our employees. They need a second job to pay the rent, and we're living in an area where second jobs aren't in abundance. We do what we have to to survive, but, tragically, that's not enough for our employees to survive.

As far as minimum wage goes, as I've said, $10/hour is far more than enough to get by around here. Should it be the minimum in some places/most places? I don't know. Probably. But in all the little shitkicker towns in America where land is cheap, food is cheap, there's basically nothing in the way of municipal taxes, etc., it's not realistic. Maybe 8 or 8.50. Not $10.10.

So the previous two paragraphs seem to contradict one another. If we're cutting their hours, and genuinely care if they can make ends meet, why wouldn't we increase their wages? First and foremost, we're unionized, and can't change wages on the basis of anything but seniority. If someone's doing a bang-up job and we want to keep them around, guess what, all we can do is give them a pat on the back. Their wages are locked until the next union negotiation. We also can't fire anyone unless they steal from the store or make some other extreme infraction. Which means a lot of new hires will be perfect angels during their probation period (30 days during which we can let them go for any reason), and then decide to work a lot slower, be bitchy and make peoples' lives hell, and call off work for no good reason (e.g., feeling yucky today, surprise doctor's appointments that we have no way of proving actually happened).

Is $7.25 too low a wage? Yes, absolutely. That's not even our base wage. But guess what. If every single new hire automatically started at $10.10, including students just working for pocket money (a big part of our workforce.. working grocery isn't most people's dream job), and people who hate being there and intentionally do a crap job with a lousy attitude, but not enough to fire them for, we're fucked.

I see what your'e saying about the baby-with-bathwater argument. But I honestly don't trust Democrats to reform the ACA to be friendly to small (or medium, whatever) businesses. A big supporter of the Democratic Party? Unions. The unions love the ACA, and is it because just about every business out there is now cutting hours and hurting their employees? No. It's because we have to hire more employees to keep things running. And fancy that, union dues are a flat rate. The more bodies they get, the better their bottom line is.

In any case, I'd appreciate refraining from further impugning my integrity. Perhaps I'm not making my case clearly or comprehensively enough, and maybe I'm wrong about some things (the ACA is a moving target, after all), but I'm earnest in endeavoring to know what's right for my company and employees. The ACA in its current form isn't it.

[Ed Oscuro]

I'm sorry that you're going to be harmed by the law, but you need to get realistic here. You simply shouldn't be asking me to give up my coverage because your business is one of a vanishingly small number that is going to be adversely affected by the law, and believe in a magical promise by Republicans where they keep the good in the ACA without gutting it. Republicans massively won the House and state legislative races in 2010. With this bargaining chip, what have they done for ACA reform? Ignore Senate bills so they can send poison pills over that can't get passed - and that's when they actually buckle down to get some obstruction done instead of attempting to score cheap political points. As Krugman pointed out years and years ago, evolving the system into a single payer system would be better for inefficiency and for removing corner cases like yours. We needed less Republicans (at least of the current variety) to make that happen, not more.

So yeah, I'm going to question your integrity when you ask me to swing my vote (and vote against my interests!) based on a massive rant and a fable, disregarding the needs of the nation at large, and when you refuse to even give details why we should do that just for you. The fable crops up again in your beliefs about minimum wage and Republicans: House Republicans had a chance to hold a vote on minimum wage. Why do you think they refused? Because their caucus doesn't know what it's doing. Elections and politics aren't about having everybody else cater specifically to you and get nothing in return. That's why the Republicans are splintered over this - some of them actually appear to want to make the tough decisions. There's ways to fix these problems without actively making things worse for everybody else, with minimum wages languishing (for example) at their lowest real value since 1968. People have to live on that nationwide - that's just reproachable.

It's pretty obvious that Democrats and Republicans both want to fix your unique situation with the ACA, but Democrats can't risk giving Republicans openings to shoot down the law or gain leverage against it by opening that discussion, as the Republicans want to portray the law overall as a failure. Republicans would like to fix the law, but they are hampered by their much greater desire to use cynical politics and lies to win seats now, and then maybe figure out the hard details later. They're also harmed by having a bunch of crazies in their caucus. As far as I can tell, Republicans are overall much more interested in having black people tell them "thank God for slavery, otherwise we'd all be languishing in Africa right now!" than actually electing policy-minded individuals.

[Ed Oscuro]

A quick followup with some details about Republican alternative plans (sorry for the obviously biased source, but the information is sound):
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/09 ... ternative/ The 2013 "American Health Care Reform Act" appears to be a retread of a bad '07 idea
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empowerin ... _First_Act - more of the same
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014/01 ... ternative/ The "Patient CARE" act is yet more of the same.

I realize you're focused on the nuts and bolts of yearly operation here, but let's consider again what insurance is supposed to do: Help people out in vulnerable times with a pool of money from all participants. Here is a little story about exactly what happened under the old regime, and what the new regime does about it, when somebody on a small business's health care plan gets sick. Is that a rare case? Yes. But it illustrates what the ACA is meant to do, and why we need to save it.

If the tradeoff was just between your having to juggle employee hours, and people nationwide going into bankruptcy and flat-out dying because they were "uninsurable" after years of getting soaked by their fairweather friends in the insurance industry...I don't have to spell out how I'd choose, would I?
Of course, that's a false choice you're stuck on. Unfortunately, I don't see that the Republicans are at all interested in preserving the good things in the plan.

[Acid King]

It sounds like the employer mandate may get the axe anyway, Moniker. Some new research estimated that the mandate would only help a small segment of the workforce and removing it would have only a small effect on the bill's functionality. Might as well vote for the Democrats.

[BryanM]

At this point a vote for a republican is essentially a vote for extinction, assuming we're not doomed where we stand anyway. Which, hey, why just kill a guy with cancer when you can kill all the guys.

It's kind of sad to see Bill Nye trying so hard to get the memo out that science is real at this juncture when that war's been lost decades ago. Eh, it's been alright killing time with you gents these past years /tips hat

[Acid King]

At this point a vote for a republican is essentially a vote for extinction, assuming we're not doomed where we stand anyway. Which, hey, why just kill a guy with cancer when you can kill all the guys.

As a pro-extinction voter, I have to say that I'm pretty saddened by the GOP's failure to mention the creation of new radioactive supermonsters in their party platform. Meanwhile the Democrats failure to work a forced abortion provision in to the ACA has me concerned as well. I find myself a man at a crossroads...

[Doctor Butler]

Moniker, you realize that you'll receive a tax-credit; certain businesses are exempt, et al. There's a lot of consideration for people in your position. I'm not an entrepreneur myself, so I'm not intimately familiar with the specifics, but I know enough to know that your concerns, while totally valid and understandable, are probably just smoke. I'm sure you'll be fine, and I wish you good luck, the grocery game is tough.

And about wages raises, the minimum-wage increase is universal; the theory being that people who are better paid, will be able to fend for themselves, and have more money to financially support your businesses, with increased traffic. The (rather small, actually) increase in taxes would ideally be rounded out by reducing tax-breaks for multi-national companies, and private top-earners.

These are the core strategies of the Democratic party, and while it's certainly not at all perfect, and likely nothing more than a band-aid until we can get back on our feet, it's still a better tactic than what the Conservative party has offered, which is Dom't-fix-anything-and-wait-until-the-nation-collapses. Inflation happens over time, due to population-growth, which means the standard of living increases naturally over-time as well. And as this happens, more and more people slip below the poverty line, due to low wages; nearly half the nation is considered close, or below the poverty line, and about 90 percent of those people are working for 30-55 hours a week. If we don't increase wages, and dismantle tax-breaks, we will slowly become a welfare-dependent state, where people can't afford basic amenities without gov. aid.

The Left-wing's legislation isn't perfect, but it's better to try and fix a problem, than actively encourage the behavior that got us here.

edit - I forgot to mention, the GOP seems to be trying to downplay the anti-Obamacare movement; it's becoming apparant that the ACA is gaining momentum, and any effort to undermine it now is wasted. A lot of conservative politicians are rethinking their strategy, so if you're mostly liberal, but are against the ACA, voting republican to opposes the ACA isn't going to help, since the right-wings has more or less given up on that issue, and is refocusing their campaigns on other topics.

Also, we can prevent this situation from happening again here: http://www.wolf-pac.com/the_plan

Feel free to give that a look. It's very interesting.

[Ed Oscuro]

^ excellent post and information there, and I agree with this analysis generally. Also, I figure that going into panic mode over the penalties is a bit premature since they don't come into effect for the 51-99 (or is that 50-99?) employee category for a year or two.

[Moniker]

Moniker, you realize that you'll receive a tax-credit; certain businesses are exempt, et al. There's a lot of consideration for people in your position.

Last I read, that credit only extends to business with 49 or fewer FTEs, so my business doesn't qualify. Exemptions are more in the flavor of educators, volunteers, and other non- or mostly non-profit related enterprises. The only real concession that medium employers like us get is that the employer mandate doesn't kick in until 2016. It doesn't really help a whole lot, because the look-back period that determines how many employees we have to cover starts 1/1/2015, and we have to use the time until then to figure out how we can make it work across the various seasonal fluctuations in business. The good news is that at this point, we're confident that it's not a case of 'whether' we'll make it. It'll just get pretty uncomfortable with a large number of our employees. The next union negotiation is going to be murder, that's for sure.

And about wages raises, the minimum-wage increase is universal; the theory being that people who are better paid, will be able to fend for themselves, and have more money to financially support your businesses, with increased traffic.

I get the theory, and I don't necessarily disagree with the concept, just the execution. Every business wants to pay their employees the lowest wages possible, except in the case of truly valued workers, so as to keep them from seeking more lucrative employment. But, yeah, the labor market isn't terribly competitive in many places, include my own backyard, so I understand the need for a minimum wage. But $10.10? That's flat-out unreasonable. Will the folks around here get more pocket change and spend more at my store? Probably. But that's short term. Long term, I see the employment opportunities dwindle at an accelerated rate, and all we'll be left with is SNAP folks (we're already far too reliant on them as it is) keeping us afloat. $8, sure, maybe even $9. That's why I think that the universal increase should be more modest. Different locales have different costs of living, and making the really big jumps regional is a must.

Which is what scares me about a Democrat-controlled Congress. The Senate had the majority vote for $10.10, just not enough to be filibuster-proof or any real chance to pass the House. If they could clear it despite Republican opposition, we'd be out of business. Simple as that.

What I don't like about the Democratic Party is similar to what I don't like about unions. Their populist base makes them promise the world to their voters, even if it simply cannot work economically. Again, I can't speak for any business but my own, but I can't be alone in my situation. They foster an attitude of workers vs. corporations, which is obviously true to an extent. But we're also all in it together. Those promises have to be realistic, and they often aren't, especially in this case.

[BulletMagnet]

But $10.10? That's flat-out unreasonable.

I'd have to dig a bit to find where I saw it, but I recall reading that if the minimum wage had actually kept up with the cost of living over the past several decades it'd be somewhere between 10 and 15 an hour (and that if it had increased at the same rate as the incomes of the 1% it'd be between 20 and 25).

[Moniker]

But $10.10? That's flat-out unreasonable.

I'd have to dig a bit to find where I saw it, but I recall reading that if the minimum wage had actually kept up with the cost of living over the past several decades it'd be somewhere between 10 and 15 an hour (and that if it had increased at the same rate as the incomes of the 1% it'd be between 20 and 25).

I don't dispute that, so long as we're talking on an average federal level. But there are so many variations in different regions where that average doesn't hold water. I never thought I could make it on $10.50/hour. And when I was living in a city it was true. Now, I do far more than OK, have considerable medical expenses, and I don't have a girlfriend/spouse to supplement my income. I qualify for SNAP, but it's honestly kind of embarrassing to use benefits in a business you manage. So I pay for food, too. The federal average just simply isn't true in small town/rural areas. Some fixed costs like medical, gasoline, and electricity are constant everywhere. Other things like mortgages/rent, food, tobacco (dial up your friendly neighborhood Indian reservation!), local taxes, water, trash, transportation, construction, maintenance (particularly automobile), vary widely.

[Ed Oscuro]

I'm holding my head in my hands here. One moment you're telling us how rotten we all are for asking simple questions, another you're implying people who want people to have a decent wage should be beaten up, and then you start telling us we all need to get along. You admit you're just one person, but refuse to see that perhaps you need to start looking at this more as individual issues, and focus on them, instead of trying to create some kind of grandiose politico-economic synthesis out of it.

You've still resisted calling that 800 number, I see.

Bullet points, then:

- Your argument about Democrats waging class warfare isn't rooted in reality. Remember the bank bailouts? Across all different strata of the different parties there are different opinions on this and similar issues. Tim Geithner has been defending his own role in the bank bailouts recently; there were splits in the party and even the Administration. Some were more focused on a technical response to the bank failures (i.e., not destroying the banks and spreading the panic) while others thought that making examples out of bad actors would be a good idea. Of course, a government is made of laws, not men and women; it can accomplish goals seemingly at cross-purposes, at the same time. Indeed, it should.
- So it's better to focus on things in terms of a level of analysis. What is the problem, and how big is it really? Don't just lazily conflate a bunch of unrelated shit together and say that's the big picture.
- So now you've figured out that there's a few portions of a couple laws that cause you problems. How to fix it? Write your representatives and join a lobby. That's how you get stuff fixed.


I don't know what you're trying to do with that fixed costs of living section, but here's how it actually breaks down: Hospital charges swing WIDLY from hospital to hospital. Gas varies substantially from state to state as you enter places with road upkeep taxes and other stuff bolted on, and as you get closer to or farther from refineries. Additionally, many drivers get nickeled-and-dimed every time they travel the great open roads of America as they loiter at toll booths. If you're in a food desert, food might be cheap but not very good. Electricity charges swing WILDY from place to place, in large part based on the season and region. Ditto for natural gas, which saw an unexpected and unprecedented spike in prices over this winter (temporarily doubling, at least, in some sales) due to the confluence of high home heating demands with heavy farm demand.

The perfect example of this is New Orleans, Louisiana. Now, I'm not going to draw any simple connection from that to business planning - but I think the argument is pretty compelling that certain forms of insurance for living in obviously at-risk areas should be higher. So that's a reasonable form of discrimination, IMO. What this says to me is that there's ways of targeting and actually rewarding good choices, and not so much rewarding risky choices, instead of saying that costs should just be higher across the board. Maybe there's a connection from that to minimum wage.

It's also a complete scandal that we have people living like this. Having money to pay for some of the things that have allowed democracy to flourish recently, like even just having a good phone (I don't have one; mine's going on seven years old now!) are going to be expenses on top of this. So basically I don't see the value in saying let's flush the potential of these people down the toilet because it makes economic planning difficult. That's something any business administrator has to deal with. There's likely going to be a balance between employer flexibility and worker quality of life, whether we like it or not. And I would like to focus on what makes those individual workers' lives better, instead of making assumptions based on some paternalistic feeling that may or may not actually line up with the reality of a good policy.

On a related note, I've been reading economics stuff long enough to know that a lot of the "common wisdom" about how the government should be run is totally wrong. Fiscal / austerity hawks pretend that the government shouldn't be run even like a business, as if investments never pay off and as if the government has no financial tools available to it. But this is wrong: The government can print money. Infrastructure pays off.

[Doctor Butler]

But $10.10? That's flat-out unreasonable.

I'd have to dig a bit to find where I saw it, but I recall reading that if the minimum wage had actually kept up with the cost of living over the past several decades it'd be somewhere between 10 and 15 an hour (and that if it had increased at the same rate as the incomes of the 1% it'd be between 20 and 25).

This is correct. If min. wage had increased proportionately to inflation since the late 70's, it would currently be around 20 bucks an hour.

Long comment

Succinct and true. Agree 100%.

[xorthen]

Just curious OP, but why are you in favor of illegal immigration?

[trap15]

Because it's not illegal.

[xorthen]

Because it's not illegal.

Really? Then why are they called illegals?

[Mischief Maker]

As Krugman pointed out years and years ago, evolving the system into a single payer system would be better for inefficiency and for removing corner cases like yours. We needed less Republicans (at least of the current variety) to make that happen, not more.

I'd say we needed even less "Blue Dog" Democrats.