Daily Archives: 8 January 2014

YGTBSM

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Here’s another installment in this series, this time (again) with ObamaMart.

Finally get enrolled in an Obamacare health welfare package via ObamaMart?  Don’t die this year.  Don’t take that raise.  Put that baby back where it came from.  You can’t update your package to account for these life changes—that functionality deliberately was put on the back burner in favor of fixing other…glitches…in the Web site.

The list of life changes that you can’t tell ObamaMart about include, in addition to the above,

  • marriage and divorce
  • death in the family
  • new job
  • moving to a different community

Remember, moving to a different community also changes the premiums you have to pay—that community rating thing.

Remember, also, you still have to repay the subsidy payments you received after the raise made you ineligible.  And you still owe the taxes on the raise.

Just be sure, after you’ve separately told your Plan provider about your life change, you go back and tell ObamaMart.  After they get around to fixing this.

Emergency Unemployment Insurance Extension

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The existence of unemployment insurance payments means, especially for the low-skilled, that the change in income for taking a job ranges from slightly negative to slightly positive.  This is what underlies much of the argument against unemployment insurance payments of any duration.

That’s only background to the present situation, though.  There are two more, and more important, considerations surrounding the present push by President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) to extend emergency unemployment insurance payments.

One is these Democrats’ refusal to allow job training requirements to be attached to any such emergency unemployment insurance payment extension.  This criterion would cull those who are just using the payments to live on.  See the work requirement attachments and their results during/after the Clinton years.  Seethe work requirement attached to TANF when it replaced AFDC.  But the work training requirement has an additional direct benefit.  The training will help these low-skilled workers get better jobs, not just return, of necessity, to the same type of job.

One is these Democrats’ refusal to pay for this extension with spending cuts anywhere else, but only with continued borrowing: this is an emergency, and “we’ve never paid for emergencies.”  Actually, we do pay for emergencies, if only by borrowing against our children’s and their children’s futures.  Which we’ve already done, to the tune of $17+ trillion.  And this sort of unending wealth redistribution is exactly the sort of thing against which Madison warned us in the 3rd Congress.

Which brings up a third consideration.  This “emergency” has been going on for five years.  The demand to extend emergency unemployment insurance payments in this emergency situation is a clear admission that the economic policies of Obama and his Senate cronies are a dismal failure, even if none of them have the integrity or courage to say so out loud.

Plainly, this is just crassly naked vote pandering and an attempt to distract honest Americans from the disaster of Obamacare and Obama’s failed economic and jobs policies.  And from his failed, retreat-oriented foreign “policies.”

It’s also insulting to honest Americans.