Tag: small businesses

Another #obamacare lie revealed: healthcare costs for small business will go UP.

This is not what Barack Obama and his Democrats promised.

Nearly two-thirds of small businesses that currently offer health insurance to their workers will pay more for coverage as a result of new rules in the health care law, as will millions of small-business employees and their family members, according to new estimates released by the Obama administration.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which has spearheaded the implementation of the law, has acknowledged that new rules requiring insurers to offer guaranteed coverage and renewal options to small employers will likely drive up the price of insurance for some companies. So will rules banning insurance companies from varying their rates based on factors like a company’s industry or the age of its employees.

Continue reading Another #obamacare lie revealed: healthcare costs for small business will go UP.

President Obama: ‘encouraging’/planning to tax into oblivion start-up businesses.

Never mind the fact that Obama got yoghurt splashed on him last night – that’s just an ongoing hazard of being a politician running for re-election in this country. The real story here is this: the President went to Colorado to, essentially, lie to a bunch of kids about how they can get themselves out of this mess that they’re in.  And it is a mess.  50% of college graduates are unemployed/underemployed; couple that with student loan debt levels that should really be frightening more people and we end up with a situation where millions of kids are getting out of college and staring DOOM right in the face.  And while they are adults – and thus, responsible for their own fates – guess what?  The people that connived to put them in this mess are adults, too.  We expect twenty-somethings in this culture to make poor life choices, sometimes; what we don’t expect is for the generations above them to so ruthlessly take advantage of that.

Anyway: Obama’s answer in Colorado, last night? …Entrepreneurship. That’s what he was telling the kids. Start that restaurant! Develop that smartphone app!  Make your own destiny!  Get slammed with a tax hike on small businesses in the form of tighter restrictions on payroll tax exemptions!

…Yeah.  One of these things is not like the others.

Continue reading President Obama: ‘encouraging’/planning to tax into oblivion start-up businesses.

Administration caught lying on insurance relief law.

Yes. You are shocked.

(Via @amandacarpenter) Let us walk through a test case on the administration’s claimed insurance support for small business owners.

  • Zach owns a small business (24 employees, average salary $35K) and provides them with health care ($79.2K/year).
  • He has already seen a 15% increase in health care costs this year, so he is quite keen to hear about insurance relief.
  • The White House’s PR flunkies were bragging about a program that gives ‘broad eligibility’ to companies with less than 25 employees and average salaries below $50K.
  • Zach is covered both ways!  Bring on that insurance relief!
  • …Oh.  If you have more than 10 employees and average salaries above $20K… well.  The answer is, no, at Zach’s level he’s not getting insurance relief.
  • And here’s the important thing: he was actually told otherwise by the White House’s PR flunkies, remember?
  • We call that “a lie.”
  • And – possibly more importantly – “business as usual.”

Continue reading Administration caught lying on insurance relief law.

White House’s ‘Blame Bush’ reflex embarrasses them, EPA.

More than usual, that is.

It goes like this (H/T & links via Ed Driscoll and OpenMarket.org).

A memo from the EPA surfaced a while back that mentioned in passing that regulating greenhouse gasses to the extent desired by the most fervent global warming believers might have an adverse effect on the impious, too:

In contrast, an endangerment finding under section 202 may not be not the most appropriate approach for regulating GHGs. Making the decision to regulate CO2 under the CAA for the first time is likely to have serious economic consequences for regulated entities throughout the U.S. economy, including small businesses and small communities. Should EPA later extend this finding to stationary sources, small businesses and institutions would be subject to costly regulatory programs such as New Source Review.

As this was somewhat alarming, once you translated it into Standard English, the White House eventually started a little pushback that no, they wouldn’t be junking the entire American economy just quite yet.  So far, so good: after all, you don’t need to be a conservative to know that the government produces a lot of unfortunately relevant documents that later have to be eliminated and/or repudiated*. Continue reading White House’s ‘Blame Bush’ reflex embarrasses them, EPA.