So President Obama has issued executive orders that directly contradict passed legislation bearing his signature. Firms employing 50-99 workers are now exempt from the penalty fines for not insuring all of their full time staff under the “Affordable” Care Act. This was as deeply generous and caring as it was constitutionally legal. But, as President Obama explains. “The great thing about being President is that I can do anything I want.”*
Firms that are larger than 99 employees aren’t President. They encounter the following restrictions to their corporate free will.
Obama officials made clear in a press briefing that firms would not be allowed to lay off workers to get into the preferred class of those businesses with 50 to 99 employees. How will the feds know what employers were thinking when hiring and firing? Simple. Firms will be required to certify to the IRS – under penalty of perjury – that ObamaCare was not a motivating factor in their staffing decisions.
If you pinky-swear to the IRS, you can still whack people to get down to 99. But there has to be a pretense that The politburo on The Potomac frowns upon such venal reasons to whack headcount. At least in The Soviet Union, if someone pretended to work, you could pretend to pay them. Here in the USSA, you have to ask the IRS “Mother, may I?”
And why are we subjected to this bureaucratic schlock parade? Because people with 102 employees who can the far left tail of their corporate bell curve to cop a tax break are cheating. Presidents who sign a piece of legislation passed by both houses of Congress and then issue executive orders that directly contradict the letter of that law can do anything they want.
This blatantly offends both sensibility and reason. Obamacare is such a wonderful law that we now have to sick the IRS on people to prevent a payroll purge from rent seeking firms that need to whack a few access bodies to get under 100. If you come into office fighting a recession and your signature piece of legislation that you will forever be known for incentivizes people to fire each other, than you are probably not doing it correctly.
The highly-politicized American Journo-list Class has flown hither and yon to defend the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Now even Ron “Righty is Racist” Fournier is tired of continuing. Perhaps his arms are tired. He whines below.
Not coincidentally, the delays punt implementation beyond congressional elections in November, which raises the first problem with defending Obamacare: The White House has politicized its signature policy. The win-at-all-cost mentality helped create a culture in which a partisan-line vote was deemed sufficient for passing transcendent legislation. It spurred advisers to develop a dishonest talking point—”If you like your health plan, you’ll be able to keep your health plan.” And political expediency led Obama to repeat the line, over and over and over again, when he knew, or should have known, it was false.
But that just highlights what sycophantic leftists like Ron Fournier won’t admit to themselves. If they want to force entities such as insurance markets to hew to their beckoning, they need both the hammer and the sickle to enforce their discipline on those apostates who refuse the new state religion of Socialism. They need the hammer of Obamacare, and now that this laughable gallimaufry of unworkable statist mandates is falling apart like tissue paper in a hurricane, they also need the sickle of the IRS. It’s as close as President Obama can come to Karl Marx’s preferred monopoly on coercion. And that’s what makes life tough on someone who views himself as more a Dungeon Master than the President of a Constitutional Democratic Republic. It takes an iron fist to even give some people a break from the omnipresent gripping hand.
*-Famous last words, Mr. Nixon.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member