ObamaCare “would decrease costs…” is the nominal Democratic talking point regarding costs in the brave new world of government interference in the health care system. Of course, it’s a lie. It’s a lie that the Democratic members of Congress will repeat, and their lapdogs in the media will be all too happy to echo. Here is an example of the truth, one that you will never see in the MSM.
Dow Jones Newswires | Caterpillar Inc. said the health-care overhaul legislation being considered by the U.S. House of Representatives would increase the company’s health-care costs by more than $100 million in the first year alone.
In a letter Thursday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio, Caterpillar urged lawmakers to vote against the plan “because of the substantial cost burdens it would place on our shareholders, employees and retirees.”
Caterpillar, the world’s largest construction machinery manufacturer by sales, said it’s particularly opposed to provisions in the bill that would expand Medicare taxes and mandate insurance coverage. The legislation would require nearly all companies to provide health insurance for their employees or face large fines.
“We can ill-afford cost increases that place us at a disadvantage versus our global competitors,” said the letter signed by Gregory Folley, vice president and chief human resources officer of Caterpillar. “We are disappointed that efforts at reform have not addressed the cost concerns we’ve raised throughout the year.”
A letter Thursday to President Barack Obama and members of Congress signed by more than 130 economists predicted the legislation would discourage companies from hiring more workers and would cause reduced hours and wages for those already employed.
“Unfortunately, neither the current legislation in the House and Senate, nor the president’s proposal, meets these goals,” the letter said.
We have to remember that when a industry’s costs are increased, there are basically four ways to recover these costs; increase prices, lay off employees, close up shop entirely, or outsource production overseas. So, when businesses start to close, and more of our already battered manufacturing sector cease operations, or move over seas, we’ll get to personally experience more of Obama’s socialism. Of course, don’t expect the MSM to tell you any of this. We’ll get the stories about unicorns that excrete rainbows.
Image Credit: Chicago Breaking Business News
Conservative Links:
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Wyblog is discussing fiscal responsibility in NJ (which is surely a sign of the apocalypse)
The Classic Liberal has more links!
Steve at Motor City Times has a view of things to come.
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You are right Matt—all extra cost to private companies will be passed along to the consumers making these less competive with foreign companies. This is one big entitlement that will eventually cause us to cut vital funds from national defense in a very dangerous world and cause us to lose our place as the worlds only super power. I think it was Calvin Coolidge who said something like you can’t lift someone up by tearing someone else down. Socialist and Marxist don’t believe this and Obama’s plan for wealth redistribution (this is what his healthcare is all about) will drag everyone down with the exception of the ruling elite
Socialism doesn’t raise people up, it screws everyone down equally.
Matt I heard about a 10 second sound bite on this on CNN and that was it. So clearly the MSM is going to bury this. This healthcare bill has zip to do with healthcare. It is about wealth redistribution. I’ve been giving this some thought these last few days and it still comes back to the states. The states have the authority granted by the Constitution to push back on this unconstitutional act. We need to start targeting our efforts towards local state politicians. We need to once again clarify the term of federalism. The Founders provide detailed insight on what they thought federalism meant.
Great post my friend.
This plan does so much for the Democrats. It’s Cloward-Piven for the health care industry. It’ll wreck it enough to “justify” first a public option, and then single payer. It’s Cloward-Piven for the economy, causing more jobs losses, and therefore, more dependency on government. Lastly, it gives them more and more control over our personal lives. No wonder that they’ll stop at nothing to pass it.
What do you expect from someone who has never met a payroll in his entire life? Not only is he a fanatical, arrogant ideologue, but he is clueless to boot.
Good post, Matt.
The guy has really never worked in the real world. Met a payroll? It is obvious he has never created anything of value or provided a service.
He is an academic.
Being a leftist academic, he’s too good to produce or provide. He’s an elite, he reserves the right for himself to determine what others can produce or consume.
Well done, Matt. All of the post is good, but I especially liked the part about how these companies will go about recovering the extra costs that will be tacked onto what they are already paying. Does the government expect them to just absorb the cost and go on? If so, do they not realize there is only so much cost absorption that can go on before a company has to change it’s ways or go out of business? Or do they simply not care what happens to these companies.
I think they might care. The more people that lose their jobs, the more people become dependent on the government. That gives them more power, and more voters.
Regarding how we can help protect companies like Caterpillar by putting the big, Constitution-ignoring federal government back on its constitutional leash, please consider the following. People need to be made aware of the anti-state sovereignty 16th and 17th Amendments, IMO.
More specifically, as evidenced by Article I, Section 3, Clause 1, the Founders had established the federal Senate to be the voice of the constitutionally powerful state legislatures in the Constitutionally humbled federal government. And the constitutionally powerful states are important where federal taxes versus state taxes are concerned. This is evidenced by the following case precedent established by Chief Justice Marshall, but now wrongly ignored by both federal and state lawmakers. Justice Marshall wrote that the federal government cannot lay taxes in the name of state power issues.
“Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” –Chief Justice Marshall, GIBBONS V. OGDEN, 1824.
With this in mind, consider that not only is Obamacare, for example, constitutionally unauthorized as evidenced by the federal Constitution’s silence on public healthcare, but Justice Marshall’s official words appropriately indicate that neither does Congress have the power to lay taxes to fund Obamacare.
So ideally, when constitutionally clueless FDR cried for Congress to make constitutionally unauthorized tax and spending legislation in the 1930s and 40s, legislation which not only usurped state powers but also stole hard-earned citizen dollars that should never have left the states, federal senators should have stood up and stopped Congress from giving FDR what he wanted.
So why didn’t federal senators stop Congress from approving legislation which usurped state powers and stole associated taxes? After all, as previously mentioned, the Founders had established the federal Senate to protect state interests.
To begin with, mostly rural US citizens seem to have forgotten about state sovereignty before 1913. This was the year that state legislatures unthinkingly ratified the ill-conceived, anti-state sovereignty 16th and 17th Amendments.
And I surmise that the reason that state legislatures ratified these amendments is this. Not only had the people evidently forgotten about state sovereignty since the Civil War, but the lawmakers that they were electing to their state legislatures must have been as state sovereignty-impaired as the voters were.
As a side note to the possibility of widespread ignorance of state sovereignty after the Civil War, consider this. The Pledge of Allegiance, written in 1892 by a Christian Socialist, is arguably pro-big federal government propaganda. This is evidenced by the words, “one Nation,” and “indivisible” in the Pledge. Indeed, given such wording, the Pledge has been arguably diluting the idea of state sovereignty in the minds of school children for many generations.
Getting back to the insane 16th and 17th Amendments, not only must voters have filled state legislatures with constitutionally inept lawmakers by 1913, but voters did an “encore performance” by using their new 17th A. power to likewise fill federal Senate seats with lawmakers who were evidently as constitutionally-impaired as the clowns that they had been sending to the state legislatures.
So by the time that FDR demanded his social spending programs from Congress, instead of getting the resounding “hell no” that he deserved from a state sovereignty-saavy Senate, a Senate that understood that its job was to protect state sovereignty, constitutionally inept federal senators unthinkingly did the following. Senators told FDR, “Anything you want FDR,” just as state legislators had unthinkingly ratified the 16th and 17th Amendments decades earlier.
And since FDR was in office long enough to nominate eight pro-big federal government justices by the early 40s, all constitutional firewalls to protect state sovereignty from a corrupt, power-hungry federal government had ultimately failed.
Again, the consequence of the 16th and 17th Amendments is that state lawmakers stupidly made it difficult for themselves to fight constitutionally unauthorized federal laws and taxes legislated by a corrupt Congress that the state legislatures no longer had a voice in.
Are we having fun yet?
What a mess! :^(
The bottom line is that Constitution-defending patriots have a big mess to clean up in both the federal and state legislatues in this year’s midterm elections.
Good Constitutional arguments, I know that Mark Levin has a brief and lawsuit ready to file the minute the bill passes.
He did raise some good ones, didn’t he? I hope he comes back.
Thanks for the comment. These are all things that need to be addressed.