Tag Archives: regulation

All Lives Don’t Matter

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Certainly not in Colorado.

[Governor Jaried, (D)] Polis signed HB 22-1279, the “Reproductive Health Equity Act,” which the governor said “codifies a person’s fundamental right to make reproductive health-care decisions free from government interference.”

And this:

A fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus does not have independent or derivative rights under the laws of this state[.]

Baby’s lives don’t matter; the State and anyone residing in it are free to murder unborn babies, and those babies don’t even get a voice to speak for them in court. This pretty much says it all regarding Colorado’s Polis (D) and the State’s Progressive-Democratic Party-controlled legislature.

But not quite. There’s this, too, in this…law:

The law prohibits state and local public entities from denying, restricting, interfering with, or discriminating against a person’s right to…have an abortion. It also bars public entities from restricting abortion due to the individual’s “potential, actual, or perceived impact on the pregnancy, the pregnancy’s outcomes, or the pregnant individual’s health.”

The persons being called upon to execute the abortion, whether private or public, are barred from refusing to do so due to that person’s religious beliefs. This Progressive-Democrat move also is a naked assault on religion and on simple conscience.

Progressive-Democrats’ Continued Assault on our 2nd Amendment

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Especially cynically, President Joe Biden (D) is using the tragedy of the Sacramento, CA, shooting—other people’s blood—to press his assault on our 2nd Amendment.

Ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Repeal gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability.

Ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Where in our Constitution is the Federal government given the authority to limit the weapons us American citizens are allowed to have and to carry? Here, for Biden’s edification, is the 2nd Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

In order to have a population that is armed and that understands its arms and so can muster at need to defend our nation, every American has the right to keep and bear Arms, entirely unfettered by Government. Nowhere in that Amendment is there any authority of Government to dictate to us citizens the kind of Arms each of us can keep and carry.

Beyond that, the Supreme Court has already ruled, in District of Columbia v Heller and in McDonald v City of Chicago that the Amendment means precisely what it says: the right to have and to carry firearms is an individual right, with the addition (incorporation) that State governments also cannot (not may not) infringe on this right.

Repeal gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability? Based on what actual theory of law, gun rights, or other? Biden continues to offer no rationale other than his desired gun grab for his abuse. Gun manufacturers have no more control over the uses to which purchasers put their product than have car manufacturers, knife manufacturers, baseball bat manufacturers, hammer manufacturers, or pillows.

That last isn’t me being facetious or sarcastic. Suffocation is the third most common technique for murder.

Biden doesn’t care about any of that. He just wants our firearms; he just wants us disarmed.

Yet Another Start

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The House has passed—by 414-5—a bill that markedly improves Americans’ 401(k) retirement plans that are offered by most employers. If also passed by the Senate and signed into law by the President (or passed anew over a President’s veto) the bill would

  • raise the age at which retirees must start taking money out of their Plans, over the next decade, to 75
  • allow older workers to make bigger contributions: the current “catch up” contributions of $6,500/yr for those older than 50 would rise to $10,000/yr for people ages 62, 63, and 64
  • the extra $1,000 people 50 and older can contribute annually to an IRA would become indexed to inflation

These are important moves. However, there are no reasons in logic or economics for those age or contribution limits. Folks should be able to contribute as much as they want to their retirement plans, whenever they want, at any age, and regardless of income.

They should be able to delay making withdrawals for as long as they wish—and not be required to continue making withdrawals once they start. Retirement withdrawals should be in the amounts and at the times the retiree deems useful, not when Government dictates them.

The benefits of such finishing touches are readily apparent. The more we’re allowed to save during our working years for our retirement, the less dependent we’ll be on increasingly fragile government retirement programs like Social Security and Medicare when we do retire.

The more retirees have for their own retirement resources, the less stress retirees will impose on those government programs, which can only reduce their fragility.

Micromanaging

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A State government is reaching into the business decisions of private enterprise, presuming to dictate to State-domiciled businesses what their business decisions must be in an otherwise competitive labor market. Here’s Pennsylvania House of Representative Jennifer O’Mara (D, Delaware):

The Healthy Employee and Healthy Workplace Act will help Pennsylvania’s families by requiring employers to provide paid sick leave to their employees. Workers would be able to use paid sick leave to seek treatment for an illness or a family member’s illness, in addition to treatment related to domestic violence or sexual assault.

Elizabeth Stelle, director of policy analysis at the Commonwealth Foundation offers one reason this is a counterproductive, if not outright idiotic, idea.

The real question is how to help the small percentage of workers that don’t have this benefit. The answer is more flexibility, not more regulation. For example, the federal Working Families Flexibility Act would allow employers to give hourly workers the choice of accumulating “comp time” in lieu of overtime pay[.]

The Progressive-Democrat O’Mara and her cohorts don’t care about such trivia. For Progressive-Democrats, it’s not about individual choice—us average Americans are just too grindingly stupid to be trusted with making our own choices.

I offer another, more general objection, to the principle so plainly underlying O’Mara’s proposal. It’s about accruing personal and Party power in government and the ego trip of controlling other people’s lives and businesses.

There’s no need for this bill. That competitive labor market I mentioned will solve the matter. Just like “dental” and then health insurance became, in the competition for labor, a standard benefit and not a perk for the few.

Just like paid vacation became, in the competition for labor, a standard part of the worker’s pay package, and then grew from a few days to a week, to two weeks, and more. With accrual from year to year.

Just like paid sick leave became standard….

Now paid vacation and paid sick leave rapidly are becoming simply paid time off—adding the two original time blocks into a single time block with the same number of days that the two pay components separately had—with the worker no longer having to differentiate between the two because employers, if not Progressive-Democrats, trust their employees’ decisions.

Transparency in Schools

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Florida now has a significant measure of some.

As a part of the “Year of the Parent,” a commitment [Florida Governor Ron (R)] DeSantis has made to prioritize parental rights, DeSantis signed HB 1467, which includes several protections for parents, such as requiring school districts to allow parents to review all books in the school library, all required classroom book lists, and any instructional materials teachers use.

And

The new law requires school districts convening for the purpose of selecting instructional materials to post meeting notices and make them open to the public. They must also provide access to all materials at least 20 days prior to the school board taking official action on instructional materials, according to the new law. The Department of Education will also be required to publish a list of materials that have been removed or discontinued by school boards as a result of an objection and disseminate the list to school districts for their consideration.

Transparency—what a concept. We all still need, though, a resumption of the practice of parents occasionally sitting on a class their children are taking.