The former governor of Minnesota was in Pennsylvania recently acting as Mitt Romney’s surrogate because Mitt Romney was unwilling or unable to appear personally:
Although he campaigned on being a champion of the middle class, Pawlenty said Obama’s policies have destroyed small businesses by imposing a new tax – the AHCA’s individual mandate – as a regulation on small businesses.
Pawlenty is lying. I think we’re going to be hearing this lie a lot by Republicans and (of course) it will go completely unrebutted by media, because God forbid people should actually find out what’s in this law. That would be unfair to Republicans, because Republicans don’t have a health care law. You see the third grade logic here, I’m sure. “Having a health care law” is an unfair advantage for that Lucky Duck Obama and the Democrats. Unfair! Level the playing field, pronto. Don’t ever mention what’s in the law. That’s a shame, because the PPACA is really good news for smaller employers, and people should know that. Here’s the actual provisions of the law that apply to those employers with fewer than 50 employees:
If you have up to 25 employees, pay average annual wages below $50,000, and provide health insurance, you may qualify for a small business tax credit of up to 35% (up to 25% for non-profits) to offset the cost of your insurance. This will bring down the cost of providing insurance.
• Under the health care law, employer-based plans that provide health insurance to retirees ages 55-64 can now get financial help through the Early Retiree Reinsurance Program. This program is designed to lower the cost of premiums for all employees and reduce employer health costs.
• Starting in 2014, the small business tax credit goes up to 50% (up to 35% for non-profits) for qualifying businesses. This will make the cost of providing insurance even lower.
• In 2014, small businesses with generally fewer than 100 employees can shop in an Affordable Insurance Exchange, which gives you power similar to what large businesses have to get better choices and lower prices. An Exchange is a new marketplace where individuals and small businesses can buy affordable health benefit plans.
• Exchanges will offer a choice of plans that meet certain benefits and cost standards. Starting in 2014, members of Congress will be getting their health care insurance through Exchanges, and you will be able to buy your insurance through Exchanges, too.
• Employers with fewer than 50 employees are exempt from new employer responsibility policies. They don’t have to pay an assessment if their employees get tax credits through an Exchange.
What this law actually does is provide an immediate and direct benefit to those small businesses with fewer than 25 employees. What this law actually does is allow those small businesses with fewer than 50 employees to compete with larger businesses in terms of offering benefits to employees. What this law actually does is give individuals some measure of health insurance security, so they can leave an employer and start their own business. With the PPACA, one could quit a job with a larger employer and START a small business, without putting the entire family at risk for actual bodily harm due to loss of employer-provided insurance and subsequent denial of medical care.
Here’s the (applicable) provisions on larger businesses:
Starting in 2014, large businesses (those with 50 or more full-time workers) that do not provide adequate health insurance will be required to pay an assessment if their employees receive premium tax credits to buy their own insurance. These assessments will offset part of the cost of these tax credits. The assessment for a large employer that does not offer coverage will be $2,000 per full-time employee beyond the company’s first 30 workers.
The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that fewer than 2% of large American employers will have to pay these assessments.
Republicans like Pawlenty and Romney are protecting larger businesses to the detriment of smaller businesses, because larger businesses do indeed have new responsibilities under the law. That’s why larger businesses are fighting it. Larger employers with low-wage uninsured or under-insured employees will no longer be able to pass their employee health care costs onto the public. They will have to pay us back if they refuse to provide decent health insurance to their employees, and their uninsured or underinsured employees then go to the federally-subidized exchanges to purchase health insurance.
Oh, and read this last sentence again:
The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that fewer than 2% of large American employers will have to pay these assessments
Not only are Mitt Romney and his surrogates lying about the law to elevate the interests of larger business over smaller business (those with fewer than 50 employees) they are protecting the bad actors. They are protecting that 2% of larger employers who refuse to provide any health insurance to their employees, and also refuse to reimburse the public when their employees inevitably end up receiving publicly-subsidized health care, now, and publicly-funded subsidies, later.
If you are a small business owner with fewer than 50 employees, Mitt Romney and the GOP are actively working against your best interests. What’s more, they are working against an individual’s ability to (responsibly) leave employment with a larger business and start their own small business, or go to work for a small business, while retaining comprehensive health insurance. That’s what federally subsidized universal coverage allows people to do. Your health care coverage will no longer be determined by and dependent on your employer. One has to wonder why that scares the GOP so much.
Davis X. Machina
They’re not lying. They’re expressing a higher truth.
We must begin by asking whether a statement or document furthers the aims of the Party, and supports its leading role, as Vanguard of the Revolution. If it does, then it possesses revolutionary Truth, which both subsumes and transcends the outmoded, bourgeois conceptions of ‘truth’ and ‘falsity.’ Simply comporting with reality is no longer enough — we must demand more of our Truth than that.
All power to the soviets of preachers and hedge-fund managers!
The GOP is the last major Leninist parliamentary party in the developed world.
gbear
If you go to a dictionary and look up the word ‘loser’, the first entry will be 1. Tim Pawlenty. No one would walk across the street to hear what this guy has to say.
I blame Obama.
Baud
I generally hate giving campaign advice, but I hope the campaign can find a number of small business owners who understand how the ACA benefits them and are willing to speak out publicly. For whatever reason, “facts” don’t seem to resonate as well with some folks.
rikyrah
you are always on it, Kay.
thank you for bringing it to us.
of course, they’ll be lying about it. lying is all they do.
askew
This provision is a huge boon to my father’s business not that he would ever admit that a Democratic plan helped him in any way.
It would be nice to see Obama’s team air some ads with small business owners talking about this provision and their savings.
gumbo957
Thank you for publishing these facts, Kay. I am a small business owner in N.C., and I am trying to spread these facts far and wide. I cannot tell you how many small business owners let out groans in comment sections of various political blogs when the ACA was upheld because they were convinced it meant they were now going to have to pay some tax or cover all or part of their employees’ health insurance (the horror).
We have always covered at least half, and now 70% of our full-time employees’ costs for insurance, and the ACA is going to help us better afford that expense – HUGE for us, especially as health insurance premiums rose 30% last year alone.
This law is such a boon for small business owners and individuals trying to buy insurance on the individual market. The exchanges should drive down costs, and the immediate tax benefits are great!
Yutsano
I call this the Wal-Mart clause. No wonder the Spawn of Sam are squealing.
Kay
@Baud:
I don’t know if you remember this, but they called people like that “validators” in the 2008 campaign. Whatever the lie ‘o the week was, they’d produce local people with specific knowledge to rebut. It was smart.
The small business lie is easy to disprove.
JCT
Great post, Kay. At this point it is almost AMZING when they don’t lie.
Maybe someone should point out to that asshole Allen West that we have his “slavery” right here. Maybe we could get the self-certified optometrist Rand Paul to explain why unshackling your employment decisions from your health care choices goes against his “liberty and free market principles”.
Oh well, there goes my blood pressure, better stop trying to apply logic to the Republican talking points.
JGabriel
__
__
Obama campaign pwns Buzzfeed. Roy Edroso:
Brilliant.
Via Thers @ Powder Blue Satan.
.
Violet
Because the corporations know that a lot of people work for large corporations because they need the health insurance. Corporations won’t have those health care handcuffs anymore if people can leave to start their own business and still get health insurance. Rich corporate CEOs, the type who donate to the GOP, don’t know how this is going to affect them—smart, talented employees leaving plus exciting new competitive businesses beginning. Hmmm…sounds scary. They’d much rather keep people tied to their job with Big Corporation.
Baud
@Kay:
I don’t remember, but excellent to hear about it. They will need validators in spades this time around.
piratedan
@gumbo957: sounds like you need to contact your local Dem organization and let them know. If you don’t mind going public, that is. This is the kind of information that needs to get out there to let folks know that the ACA actually works for some people. I shout down my relatives letting them know about my son and how its made a difference in his care being able to stay on our policy.
Kay
@gumbo957:
Thank you. You’ll be more credible than 1000 out of state governors telling people you know. You won’t have a traveling media bus behind you, however, and it’s a big country.
Hard to go door to door :)
Kay
@Baud:
I remember when I heard the word I was sort of knee-jerk repelled, and then I found out they meant “local people, credible on a specific subject, who will write letters to the editor”.
Baud
@piratedan:
I can understand how people can see the world in black and white when they get all their info from our news media. I’ll never get how people can personally know someone who is affected and not be moved.
MikeJ
@Yutsano:
Somebody told me, but I was never able to confirm the truth of it, that the new City Target downtown has no employees at more than 29 hours per week. Wal-Mart may be the first that springs to mind, but they aren’t alone.
Davis X. Machina
@piratedan:
@Baud:
You expect too much from family. The people who jumped off Marpi Point on Saipan had families, and in most other regards were just like you and I. Sometimes you just have to make sacrifices for the emperor and for the nation.
Davis X. Machina
@ding dong: “ding dong”, huh? Nomen est omen.
Yutsano
@MikeJ: I’m not certain of this but I find that hard to swallow. Their staff would have to be that much larger to cover the gaps, and that place is going to be BUSY when it opens. Even staffing needs override corporate bottom lines sometimes.
MikeJ
@ding dong: Actually Romney uses Trajan Bold. He wants to be a Roman emperor.
Oddly enough, Trajan was born in Italica.
Baud
@Davis X. Machina:
Seems different to me. Those people apparently didn’t have families who could provide them with information different from what the emperor was telling them.
Kay
@MikeJ:
The biggest complainer locally on the large employer health insurance provisions is our hospital CEO. It’s a for-profit with an essentially captive market (rural) and they have absolutely lousy employee health insurance. This area is still unionized, so they BENEFIT from decent health insurance, they get paid, in other words, they just don’t provide any. I find this incredible. I disliked him (personally) before, but now I have contempt for him. I want to say “you are dependent on decent employer-provided health insurance for your giant salary”.
piratedan
@Baud: doesn’t take too much effort… of all things the kid suffered from killer hangnails in his big toes. Infection and inflammation to the point of it being painful to stay on his feet. His jobs at the time, were working as a TKD instructor and as a convenience store clerk while also being a FT student at 22. The costs of the OP surgery on his feet would have been small potatoes in the real world of health care costs, yet was just shy of 20K if it was all out of pocket. Mom was still gainfully employed and ACA allowed us to keep him on that policy and cost us roughly 500 with all of the co-pays. Doesn’t seem like much, but the burden of him trying to get a loan to cover it would have drawn laughs at the bank and with my being out of work at the time would have probably generated some nasty interest rates for us, his parents and we’re still what you would call safely middle class.
The likely outcomes without ACA…
a) we get the loan, he takes a semester off from school because we couldn’t afford both without his part time jobs supplementing the costs.
b) he suffers and now has a pre-existing condition that follows him a lifetime
c) he gets the loan and has that extra pressure to inspire him of having a loan to pay off while being in school.
If I can see the benefit, not sure why others couldn’t see the same but when you have the propaganda channel running 24/7 and no one else actually bothering to report the good things that come with the bill’s passage.
Violet
@Yutsano: So they just hire more people. I’m sure management types will be full time employees, but everyone else is just cannon-fodder.
If this tactic gets out as a way to avoid paying any benefits, it might backfire on them, though. If it’s true. It’s not flattering and is the kind of thing that might get attention. I’d suspect that instead they’d keep a certain number of full time employees and just add more part time to fill the gap.
Josie
Thank you, Kay, for always doing your homework and for reporting on it in such succinct and understandable language. I am sending this to a number of people.
Joey Maloney
@Davis X. Machina: I want to make proper Marxist dialectical love (utterly free of bourgeois romantic illusions) to this comment.
Baud
@piratedan:
Well, I think it’s a great testimonial. If your relatives don’t see it, I hope others will if you’re willing to tell it.
I wish more people viewed health as an asset worth preserving instead of a cost to be avoided.
hoodie
@Kay: This dovetails with a discussion I had at a 4th of July barbeque. We were invited to the house of a family whose son is my son’s best friend. Our host, his dad, is a nice guy, but a pretty conservative ex-military guy (his wife is bit more moderate). I try not to get into politics at social events, even with folks I know share my views, but the topic of the new health care law came up. One of the other guests started into the standard teabaggeresque “government can’t do anything right” modes (turns out the moron is paying $1700/mo for health insurance), and the host surprised me by saying he thought Justice Roberts decided the ACA case correctly. It turns out that our host is responsible for administering the health plan at his small company, and he was starting to dig into the details of the plan – because now he has to. I don’t think he’s digested the whole thing but, based on what I’ve seen, I wouldn’t be surprised if he eventually becomes a convert. I think that will be the case for a lot of conservative-leaning small business owners, now that we’re past the whole “unconstitutional!” hyperventilating. The devil is in the details, though, and the Republicans will do their level best to throw a monkey wrench in the works wherever and whenever they can.
Steeplejack
@MikeJ:
This is endemic in retail now. I worked for several years at Barnes & Noble, was rated as “full-time,” and my weekly hours seesawed wildly from the high 20s to the mid-30s. I could probably count on one hand the times my hours reached as high as 38.
And I think my hours were that high only because I was one of the few employees who could run the Music/DVD department solo.
Steeplejack
@Yutsano:
When the staff consists of interchangeable cogs with low pay and low (or no) benefits, it doesn’t matter whether you have 40 or 80 “on staff.” In fact, sometimes it’s easier to schedule coverage when you have, for example, a lot of small four-hour pieces to work with instead of a smaller number of eight-hour pieces.
ding dong
@MikeJ: Don’t confuse me with the facts when I am trying to do my best Fox News impression but I have to admit I like this. Trojan font you talk about. It shows how hypocritical the Republicans are to be using propylactic contraceptives.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
Of course one of the big featured bitchers here about the ACA decision is the owner of a 12 employee business – 14 counting him and his wife. Interviewed by the local red rag, he loudly proclaimed that it was likely to put his business into a death spiral. He’s also vice chair of his county GOP. Coincidence?
And thanks Kay.
Patricia Kayden
While I agree with the meme here (and on other liberal blogs) that the mainstream media doesn’t challenge conservatives when they out and out lie, isn’t it up to President Obama and his supporters to get the truth out there?
We can mourn our way right up to the election vis-a-vis the lamestream media, or we can encourage President Obama supporters to write letters to newspapers, post comments on the internet, etc. And most of all President Obama has to get some (more) tough ads out there telling the truth about the ACA and his other accomplishments.
While around 30% of Americans will never vote for Obama under any circumstances, I think most regular Americans can be reached if the truth gets out there. And Romneybot 2.0 is just not a likable guy and seems to be prone to making errors. If he wins, it will be because the economy totally tanked or the US is hit by another 9/11 terror attack.
General Stuck
Just listened to the replay of Fox News Sunday, and the wingers all sound like a chorus fit for a funeral dirge.
With all sorts of numbers leading Kristol to cry in his bowl of blood. They can’t understand why they, the voters, can’t stand Romney, and like Obama, even though they want the economy to be better. And why oh why do the voters by 68 percent blame Bush for our woes on the econ front. With 27 percent thinking Romney has a good plan for fixing that bad economy. Obama must be doing something right, considering beguiled and bewildered wingnuts chewing their own feet off to get free from the agony of likely defeat.
Redshift
When they say “small business,” they mean ones with 20,000 employees, just like when they say “middle class,” they mean people making over $200K, so really, they’re not lying. It’s not their fault if you misunderstand and think they’re talking about businesses with thirty employees.
Kay
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
Shouldn’t he have to explain that? Seriously. Can people just say anything with no consequences? That right there should let him in for an hour of intense questioning :)
I would be genuinely curious to know how he gets there.
piratedan
@Patricia Kayden: okay Patricia… I understand your point… feel free to ratchet up your google fu and do a search yourself for what is actually in the ACA and then look at where the sources are… The information is there on the government site. What you’ll find is that the national networks aren’t concerned with actually reporting the pros and cons of what is in there. Again, I’m a single payer proponent but I do believe that the ACA gets more Americans covered and has the potential to reduce costs if the provisions for limiting providers overhead costs are enforced. What people are attempting to tell you is that media is complicit with furthering the R’s agenda because they are in fact arms of corporate entities whose sympathies tend to color what is actually reported.
Ruckus
@Redshift:
Must be nice to live in a candy cane world where everything is just so because one gets to make up everything. And get paid for it.
In my world I get totally crapped on about 2-3 times a year with smaller helpings every so often just to help smooth out the lumps. And I’m not alone in my world, I have lots and lots of company.
Kay
@Patricia Kayden:
You know, I would agree with you, but for the paid advertising. When the NYTimes editorial board wag their finger at Obama about “getting the word out” and then mention in the next paragraph that conservatives have spent hundreds of millions of dollars running ads lying about this law, they are not being straight with their readers. Because what are they saying? That one has to buy ad time to get facts out? That’s a really damning admission for a newspaper.
You tell me how to rebut millions of dollars in paid media with federal funds and/or the bully pulpit.
That they don’t put these two things together, the unlimited cash that goes to media to run ads misinforming people and then the (apparent) inability of “government” to inform people, they are being cute with us. Those two things are connected.
Nutella
@Yutsano:
NOTHING overrides corporate bottom lines, especially the needs of their staff for consistent hours and benefits. Retailers have very few full-time employees with benefits and will sacrifice ANY other business goal to keep it that way.
Example: People in the delivery business hate dealing with Walmart on Fridays. Deliveries are carefully planned and scheduled so the truck is packed in order and the responsibility for unloading is specified. Walmart always chooses to handle the unloading themselves since it’s cheaper but by Friday they have filled up all the loading dock staff’s schedules to the hour limit for remaining part-time and sent them home. The delivery driver will have to throw a fit to get the stuff unloaded as the contract specifies, usually by some reluctant store manager.
This may be one of the unexpected benefits of the ACA, that more of these part-time people will be able to work full-time since retailers won’t be able to keep up this crappy system if they’re penalized for not providing health insurance.
Well, I hope so. Does anyone know if there’s a loophole for part-timers in ACA?
Baud
@Kay:
Typical liberal. Expects the media to report facts for free.
scav
@Baud: OH great. Reality’s gone behind a paywall.
Ruckus
@Steeplejack:
Had a friend who worked for the union all the local grocery store employees belonged to. When the recession hit almost all the members went from full time to part time and the stores no longer had to pay benefits. So people were having to work 2 jobs at 2 locations, working around a schedule that suited the store but not the employee, and lose health care benefits.
Kay
@Baud:
Not at all. I pay for newspapers. I’m wondering why I’m paying newspapers to tell me people are horribly misinformed on the health care law. I knew that. I wonder what they could do about that? Nothing? They’re helpless in this information thing. Throwing up their hands. Just as frustrated as their readers!
FlipYrWhig
The “IT’S A TAX!” meme is supposed to work by making people think that the premiums themselves count as A Tax under the terms of the Constitution. And there are _so many_ idiots out there who haven’t put two and two together to realize that if they already have health insurance through work, none of this tax/penalty/mandate verbiage applies at all to them.
Randy P
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I find it very exhausting to see a paragraph of lies (for instance, in a comment on a WaPo article) and try to think about rebutting it. Which of course is the point of using a firehose to spew large volumes of lies. Drown the opposition, literally. So I guess I’ll keep trying where I can.
Anyway, a Big Lie floating around right now is “$500 million (or is it billion?) being taken aware from Medicare”. Can somebody tell me what that one is supposedly based on and where the facts are to combat it?
FlipYrWhig
@Kay: Modern media people LOVE stories about stagecraft, marketing, and “messaging.” They would rather cover how politicians are trying to affect the way the public thinks about an issue than examine the actual issue. A disproportionate part of political coverage is “meta.” It’s the political equivalent of the locker-room reporter covering the local sports team. It lets them feel like they have a window onto the REAL action that the rest of us can’t get just by crunching numbers and carefully tracking factual events. To me, that has been the characteristic development of the major media since the 1990s, and it’s done a lot of harm to the citizenry.
FlipYrWhig
@Randy P: It has to do with controlling payments to health care providers in order to “bend the cost curve.”
Yutsano
@Randy P:
This is the subsidy for Medicare Part C, or Medicare advantage. Basically the ACA re-directs that towards premium support rather than private insurance boondoggles.
Davis X. Machina
@Patricia Kayden:
45%. And that’s a floor.
Valdivia
@Kay: #42
absolutely. it kills me every time a pundit or journalist starts going on about the Administration’s bad job at selling the ACA when the media gave free air to the crazy wingnut talking points and then repeated like parrots the paid message of the outside groups. And never ONCE reported on what the ACA actually does.
Roger Moore
@hoodie:
Which, of course, is the Republicans’ greatest fear. The absolute worst outcome for them is that ACA winds up being popular enough that any politician who opposes it, or is a less-than-full-throated supporter, risks losing votes. They’re already tapdancing pretty fast to be simultaneous defenders of Social Security and Medicare while claiming the government can’t do anything right. Obamacare will make things that much harder for the anti-government nihilist brigade.
Kay
@FlipYrWhig:
I just read a long piece that was written in 2001 by a wonkish person who worked on Hillarycare. He sounded exhausted and sad. It was just page after page of lies about that law, and lies about the process that led to that law (Hillary! Tyrant! Secret Meetings!) and then his rebuttal.
What was extremely depressing was, this is TWICE.
TWICE we have been deliberately and carefully and brutally misinformed on universal health care. Most of the “debate” on Hillarycare was flat-out lies.
God almighty, but there are powerful interests that do not want this to happen.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
Not enough to keep them going. Their main business isn’t selling newspapers to subscribers, it’s selling subscribers’ eyeballs to advertisers. They know damn well which side their bread is buttered on.
gene108
@Violet:
The people I’ve known, who work retail usually work long, long hours, like 12 hr shifts 4-6 days a week.
I don’t see how Target can get around not having store managers, department managers, etc. that are not full time. Those are demanding jobs and you need qualified people to fill them.
I just don’t see how they can do away with all full time jobs and still function.
You may not have any full time cashiers, but otherwise there are plenty of jobs in retail stores that just need full time personnel.
FlipYrWhig
@Yutsano: Oops, I defer to you on the subject.
sagesource
@efgoldman: Really? I don’t recall anyone calling out Reagan on his welfare queens and young bucks tales, even though we now know they were simply lies, and racist lies at that.
Davis X. Machina
@Kay:
A successful, popular new, major social provision is a near-lethal threat to the GOP as it is constituted, on many levels, beginning with its mere existence, because that implies there is such a thing as a ‘society’ after all.
It cannot be allowed to succeed.
sagesource
@Davis X. Machina: Not just to the GOP. Little-known social fact: church membership in Canada used to be higher than in the US, but has now tanked to twenty per cent or below. The decline began at the same time universal health insurance was put into place. Coincidence? Maybe, but….
Roger Moore
@sagesource:
Almost certainly, at least if the people I know in Canada are to be trusted. They think the Church blew up its own popularity.
Wazmo
Here’s a simple fix to the overreaching Federal Gubmit issue for the Jindhal’s and his ilk: any state that does not wish to participate in what the Fed acts are pushing are offered a one-time Get-out-of-Dodge card they can play-secession. After a vote is tallied and if the popular vote (50% + 1 of the affected state citizens) tells the Feds to go fsck themselves, then in 18 months said state gets to become their own lil’ country-the US Gubmit pays out FICA/FUTA to residents of the new country at the time of separation. That also means your own currency (I.e, The US won’t have a Euro crises, by gum!), treaties, border patrol, public health, etc. etc. etc.
You want states rights? We’ll, here’s yer chance-do ya got the balls/ovaries to do it?
hal
Does anyone know what the penalty, tax, mandate or that every the hell it’s called today?
$98. But the IRS cannot garnish you wages, take your house, bank account or anything else.
Neat huh???
Did any member of the so-called news media read the bill……not a pray…..it is more fun debating tax, penalty etc.
Camus said when you say the sky is
Svensker
@Roger Moore:
Which church would that be? Catholic? Anglican? United Church? Orthodox? Or?
RAM
How come so many right wing Congresscritters are so rabidly against the ACA? How about this:
Triassic Sands
Mitt lives by the “Too Big To Liquidate” rule. That is, if it is small enough for Bain to take it over and kill all its jobs, then it is a small business.
Davis X. Machina
@RAM: That’s not a reason for rejecting the ACA for all but a literal handful of Congresspersons.
Your average right wing Congress-critter — and most of the left wing too, come to that, doesn’t need the health care, salary, or pension that comes with serving in Congress. He or she has got enough money to buy better on the outside.
You could treble it, eliminate it, whatever, and it wouldn’t materially change the composition of either House, but especially not the Senate.
It’s symbolic politics, pure and simple. Doesn’t move the needle an inch.
Swellsman
I’m not sure I am understanding the small business benefit referenced in the first quote from the ACA. It applies to businesses witn up to 25 employees, but that pay out annual wages of only $50,000? So . . . $2,000 per employee, per year?
That doesn’t sound like it can be right, since I cannot imagine any kind of business to which it would apply. What am I missing?
WereBear
Oh, silly consumer! Who says they need to function?
People will show up at Wal-Mart and Target and K-mart; no matter how badly they actualy work, no matter how stupidly the floor is stocked, no matter how long they wait in line.
The prices are low, you see, and nothing else matters. Literally. Nothing.
gene108
@Swellsman: It’s average wages of $50k or less per year.
The people, who’ll not benefit from this are small professional service firms, such as accountants and doctors, where staff might cost more than 50k per year, but are still subject to the ups of rising healthcare costs.
Anne Laurie
@Swellsman: I’m pretty sure that “average annual wages below $50,000″ means ‘average-per-employee’. If Bain Capital wants to set up a shell company with 24 employees, each making $51,000 per year — no tax credit for them.
I suspect it’s aimed at the bold libertarian orthodontist-and-CPA demographic that started the first SUV boom in the 80s, when every “smart bidnizman” set up a shell corporation for himself, his wife, his worthless brother-in-law and/or his even-more-worthless teenage kid so that all the family “light trucks” could be written off as “commercial vehicles” under the tax code.
Steeplejack
@Swellsman:
That’s average per employee, not staff in total.
Steeplejack
@gene108:
They are not getting rid of full-time jobs completely, and Violet is not saying they are. Managers will continue to be full-time, but the vast majority of the staff will be part-time and “hourly.”
At the Barnes & Noble where I worked, the store manager was the only salaried person. Everyone else, including the two assistant store managers, was hourly. No one worked 40 hours a week, except for the assistant managers, and anything they did over 40 hours was off the books, i.e., unpaid. Illegal? Yes. Want to make a complaint? Kiss your job goodbye, and good luck with the legal system.
Swellsman
Thanks all — knew I was missing something.
urizon
Mitt Romney is an expert in business in the same way Jack the Ripper was an expert in surgery.
kay
@Swellsman:
If you’re interested in further details, email me. I can send you links.
There’s lots out there on the small business parts because some of it is (currently) operative.
Commenting at Ballon Juice since 1937
To be fair, where are the Democratic politicians bragging about how good this is for small businesses? The fact that they aren’t makes me suspect that it isn’t, although I’d like to wish otherwise.