Obamacare may cost small business as much as 65% of their profits.
At these levels, the question that will soon occur to the business owner is “Why am I bothering?” If he can shrink his business to less than 50 employees and avoid the Obamacare costs, he will.
And in related news: Health insurers are privately warning brokers that premiums may double next year for many individuals and small businesses due to Obamacare.
According to a federal report, businesses nationwide remain reluctant to hire because of Obamacare.
Earlier this month, the Fed released its latest “beige book” – a monthly report on economic conditions across the country. The book noted that employers across the country have “cited the unknown effects of the Affordable Care Act as reasons for planned layoffs and reluctance to hire more staff.”
And it is only going to get worse. Read the whole article. The new taxes imposed by Obamacare are going to crush the healthcare industry.
The Democratic Party leadership: “The debt is not endangering us a bit — not at all.”
And then there’s this comment on Wednesday from President Obama: “We don’t have an immediate crisis in terms of debt.”
Fiddling while Rome burns: The first Democratic Party budget from the Senate in four years calls for a 62% increase in federal spending over the next ten years.
The worst aspect of this story is that this is what the voters requested in the November elections. Bankruptcy, here we come!
The top ten organizations slashing jobs and hours in order to deal with Obamacare.
And we’ve only just begun!
My heart bleeds: NASA has clamped down on travel expenses, reducing it by 30 percent in the past year.
I’ve been to too many science conferences where there was a whole slew of NASA engineers and scientists from all across the country, there because they were getting a free ride from the taxpayer. Often it was absolutely worthwhile for NASA engineers or scientists to be there. More often, it was a complete waste of money that could have been used elsewhere to better effect.
In related news: NASA’s inspector general has suggested the agency could save a lot more money by closing many of its almost 5,000 facilities nationwide.
Here too I’ve visited many NASA operations and found the work being done there redundant, completely unnecessary, or there was no real work being done at all. In the last case a lot of what I’ve seen is featherbedding, this time imposed by Congress to keep the money flowing to their constituents as pork. Unfortunately this last fact will probably make it very difficult to shut any of these facilities, as our representatives, from both parties, appear completely uninterested in serving the country. They’d rather act as union reps for these government employees.
My heart bleeds: Congressman Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) told employees at the Goddard Space Flight Center yesterday that sequester might force some layoffs there.
So, who does Hoyer work for, the employees at Goddard or the taxpayer? He apparently thinks he is the union rep for government employees.
Two stories today highlight not only the budget problems at NASA, but also illustrate the apparent unwillingness of both Congress and Americans to face the terrible budget difficulties of the federal government. In both cases, the focus is instead on trying to fund NASA at levels comparable to 2012, before the Obama administration or sequestration had imposed any budget cuts on the agency.
It is as if we live in a fantasy world, where a $16 trillion dollar debt does not exist, and where money grows on trees and we can spend as much as we want on anything we want.
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According to conservatives sources in the House, it was the Republican leadership that killed a measure to defund Obamacare.
With friends like these, who needs enemies?
Pigs fly! The Democrats in the Senate are about to introduce their legally required annual budget — for the first time in four years.
Not that this budget will do much to solve the federal debt, as it will likely continue the out-of-control spending and is expected to be loaded with new taxes galore.
On that note, has anyone but me noticed this tendency of the modern Democratic Party to grab and grab and grab? They want a blank check in spending, for their own uses, while repeatedly demanding as much money from everyone else as possible. In another time, this behavior would have been perceived as somewhat power-hungry, even tyrannical.
And then there’s this: “We don’t have a spending problem.” Guess who said it.
The dirty little secret of electric cars.
A 2012 comprehensive life-cycle analysis in Journal of Industrial Ecology shows that almost half the lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions from an electric car come from the energy used to produce the car, especially the battery. The mining of lithium, for instance, is a less than green activity. By contrast, the manufacture of a gas-powered car accounts for 17% of its lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions. When an electric car rolls off the production line, it has already been responsible for 30,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide emission. The amount for making a conventional car: 14,000 pounds. …
So unless the electric car is driven a lot, it will never get ahead environmentally. And that turns out to be a challenge. Consider the Nissan Leaf. It has only a 73-mile range per charge. Drivers attempting long road trips, as in one BBC test drive, have reported that recharging takes so long that the average speed is close to six miles per hour—a bit faster than your average jogger.
In other words, government subsidies for electric cars are nothing more than another feel-good program, accomplishing nothing.
