Month: January 2013

Corporate Rights

Inhuman Rights

 

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson

January 8th, 2013

 

Another moronic businessman who wants to make a principled stand for employee subjugation popped up yesterday. The owner of eleven Omaha Nebraska franchises, Scott King, ordered full time employees’ hours cut to 28 a week or less (except for management, of course) in order to evade having to pay for Obamacare. He’s not the first cheap dirtbag to come up with this, of course; other outfits, including most famously Papa John’s Pizza, have tried the same stunt, and they’ve discovered that their open displays of contempt for their own employees cost far more than the minimal savings of not enrolling in Obamacare would have.

He’ll learn that screwing the employees like that really hurts his own best interests, and he’ll back down, whining loudly that he shouldn’t have to pay for employee medical care.

That’s one of the strangest things about the set up America has for health care. Most employers hate the costs and time involved in providing insurance to their employees, and the scummier ones, up until now, simply didn’t bother. This is America. Life is cheap.

It demonstrably hurts American competitiveness; one reason Detroit lost so much ground against European and Japanese car makers was because while employees on the lines overseas got paid as well as or better than their union counterparts in America, the employers here also had to shell out for medical insurance. In Europe, it came out of everyone’s taxes, and the employer had absolutely nothing to do with it. Not only did this save the employer money, but it saved everyone money, because it was a much more streamlined and efficient system, one with cost controls built in. A medical provider who tries to cheat National Health and gets caught is out of business.

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The One Thirteen

Broken Mirrors and Walking Under Ladders

 

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson

January 5, 2013

 

The 113th Congress has already set one new standard that will be hard to improve upon. In just two days, it managed to make itself even more loathed and ridiculed than the 112th, arguably the least popular and most ineffective Congress in the history of the United States.

They began with the sheer petty snittery that is the trademark of the trash right. Led by the estimable Michelle Bachmann, they held what I’m sure will be the first of dozens of utterly pointless votes to repeal Obamacare. The 112th had 33 such votes, firmly making themselves look like a pack of obsessive morons who have endless tantrums if they don’t get their way.

Normally, such an occurrence wouldn’t get much press play, and people who did hear about it would just shake their heads in disgust and reflect that the House is in session and many a village is missing its idiot as a result.

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