Limiting hours means they have to hire more people to get the same amount of work done, so Obamacare is a job creator!
Plus, not providing employees with health insurance used to be criticized as cheap and mean spirited. Now it is a patriotic fight against creeping Socialism!
On one hand we have the green energy protectionists, and on the other we have immigration restrictionists. Both sides of the same defunct economics coin and they don’t even realize it.
I think you’ll find even the Libertarian Party is divided on immigration.
Myself, I think that if your business, small or otherwise, can’t afford to pay its adult full time employees a living wage and healthcare then it SHOULD go under. The market niche will be filled by a company owned by someone that is GOOD at running a business.
When your business can’t stay afloat without paying their employees a wage that doesn’t allow them to afford food,housing and healthcare without government assistance, then the taxpayers are subsidizing YOUR business.
And most of the big publicly held companies will do just fine in the long run if the are forced to stop paying substandard wages…Ok, maybe McDonalds will only make 4 Billion instead of 5.5B, and their stock price may correct and that may annoy their investors, but aside from that they’ll do just fine. And if not, some other company will fill the market niche for crappy hamburger.
That’s a ridiculous argument, although you’re right at least that most businesses can handle it. They can handle it by hiring less people. That’s why a lot of smaller businesses are staying under the 50 employee limit now.
Isn’t this an argument in favor of government healthcare, though? The free market has apparently shown that it DOES NOT want to provide healthcare to its employees. Taxpayers already cover the costs of people who show up to the emergency room, so what’s really the difference?
I have a nebulous argument in my head, so forgive me if this doesn’t entirely make sense: conservatives believe employees are best served when there’s mobility, correct? If you don’t like your job, find a new one. If it doesn’t pay enough, take your skills elsewhere. Why, then, are conservatives in favor of compelling workers to A) stay in jobs they don’t like because of healthcare options not present if they move jobs or self-employ, or B) falling out of the system entirely due to health issues and becoming takers dependent on handouts like disability pay?
Government healthcare would remove this burden from employers entirely, and employees would be more free to pursue better options. I almost think this would be something conservatives would be in favor of.
This is what is ridiculous, we hire the bare minimum amount of workers required to do the job. If I hire someone it’s because I NEED them and I guarantee you they make me a whole lot more money than I pay them. Giving me or taking away money from me is not going to change the number of people I need to employ. Stop looking at jobs as favors the “job creators” do for us.
Adaher: The problem is to make it efficient and cost effective, something the government has never been able to do with a product.
Tennessee Valley Authority?
This statement: “businesses hire people when and only when they believe that additional employees will contribute to higher revenue for the business (i.e. they have more orders than they can fulfill with their current staff)” seems so intuitively obvious that I’m continuously baffled by those (usually on the right) who seem to deny it.
The now-default Republican economic theory is supply-side, remember? The “theory” that completely reverses cause and effect?
Every *other *government that has implemented single-payer health care, or anything close to it, has made it efficient and cost-effective. What makes ours so uniquely hopeless, other than the fact that it has a party determined to make it so?
I’ve always wondered what makes the US so incompetent when it comes to things “lesser” governments handle easily.
You lack serious business acumen. A marketing strategy aimed at bringing in new customers isn’t the same as a bottom line increase in the price of a good or service.
As it is, the problem with this “I would pay more” line is that it’s simply untrue for the vast majority of people. I’m sure Papa John’s employs economists who have calculated what the price elasticity of demand is for their pizzas, and I’m positive that they know better than you, I or the government the effect any given percentage increase in the cost of their pizzas would have on demand, sales and revenue.
Of course I lack business sense. I’m not a businessman. I work in TV, where business sense isn’t required of me. What I do understand is appearance and messaging, and “giving away two million free items” while crying about your inability to pay for what the law requires of you, and in fact further cutting employee hours to ensure they can’t make a living wage is what I’d call a messaging problem.
And, in fact, the bad press they received from visibly screwing over their workers surely undercuts the marketing strategy, don’t you think? Maybe I’ve got business sense after all.
Sure. But their competitors have the same burden they do, and a duly elected majority of the government voted this regulation into being. They need to deal with it (which they have, by cutting hours), but that doesn’t mean they’re exempt from criticism. They could have shaved a half-inch off each pizza, or given 25% fewer ingredients, or charged more… there are a lot of solutions, and I believe they picked the very worst option, and am incensed that they seem proud of that choice. What, exactly, is the point you’re trying to make?
Cite for the bolded part?
You left something out: expansion. If you own two pizza places, you won’t open a third if it puts you over 50 employees.
The main issue is that people tend to like what they have. That’s why despite decades of evidence that multi-payer is superior to single-payer, single-payer countries resolutely refuse to change(and multi-payer nations never go single payer either). The US has a long history of getting insurance from employers, and people like their insurance. So any UHC plan had to make sure that people keep their current insurance(mostly).
The problem isn’t the basic outline, it’s the 2000 pages of regulations, plus an incompetent administration that wouldn’t have been able to successfully implement a 2-page plan.
Bullshit. I bet you a nickel that in the next 10 years more businesses in general will expand to more than 50 employees when they can rather than not expand even tho the opportunity and economy exists because, uh, “Obamacare”. Hell, I’ll bet you a dime on that one. There’s no way your prediction will be correct. Come on: bet me.
I predicted no such thing. Incentives don’t cause businesses or individuals to change things en masse, it happens at the margins, which has noticeable effects on the economy. A sizeable minority of small business owners are going to stay under 50 employees.