An 8-year-old Florida boy was suspended from school after using his finger as a pretend gun while playing cops and robbers with his friends.
Worse,
[A]dministrators at Harmony Community School in Harmony, Fla., said the gesture was an act of violence[.]
Because all 8-year-old boys are terrorist wannabes. Sure.
The government—i.e., us taxpayers—will pay for a significant portion of health “insurance” premiums under Obamacare, starting yesterday. Under Obamacare rules, individuals making as much as 400% of the Federal Poverty Guideline—up to $45,000 per year—will get these subsidies. Individuals making up to 250% of the Guideline—up to $28,725 per year—will get yet more subsidy (yet more of our tax money) to partly cover their deductibles, co-pays, and co-insurance costs. The same applies for families, and 400% of the Federal Poverty Guideline for a typical American family of four works out to $94,200 this year.
Think about that. Under the prior system costs were high. Obamacare, instead of going after those costs (right wing kook solutions like competition, like letting the doctors and patients decide what care actually was warranted, etc), props them up with those subsidies.
Sounds like manufactured government dependency, to me.
…Cyprus example. Deposits continue to shrink (read: disappear from the country) in the country’s banking system. As the Wall Street Journal last week cited the European Commission as reporting [emphasis added],
the radical shake-up of the banking sector coupled with unprecedented restrictions on the movement of capital in and out of the tiny island have left it exposed to deep economic pitfalls.
And
Confidence in Cyprus’s banks has plunged after the bail-in of depositors, culminating in the gradual flight of deposits despite the government’s imposition of capital controls to stem the outflow[.]
Why? Not despite the government’s controls, but because of them. The Cypriot government
appropriate[ed] all uninsured deposits above €100,000 [$135,000] to pay for [Cyprus Popular Bank]’s resolution. The biggest bank, Bank of Cyprus, underwent a long, deep restructuring, during which 47.5% of uninsured deposits were blocked and then converted into shares in the new bank.
Whether the depositors wanted a slice of a failing bank or not. Whether that slice could be used to put food on a depositor’s table, or pay his rent, or not.
People found a way to get their money and get it out of the government’s reach. And now it’s hard to find money to loan, even to a willing borrower. Because there’s no money to lend to support business expansion, it’s hard to hire. Because there’s no money to lend to roll existing debt, bankruptcies occur, and jobs are lost. Because there’s no money to lend to cover the time gap between payouts due (e.g., existing debt or payroll) and money arriving (e.g., payments for goods sold), bankruptcies occur. And so on.
Thus:
17% of the Cypriot workforce would be out of a job this year [reported the EC], up from an original projection of 15.5%, while unemployment will hit 19.6% in 2014, not 16.9% as previously thought.
The wages of government controls are lost jobs.
Labor Secretary Thomas Perez…threatened to cashier federal grants for 83 local transit agencies because he claimed California’s pension reforms violate the Federal Transit Act, which requires the Labor Department to certify that “protective” arrangements are made for workers (i.e., the Teamsters) before the feds dole out dough. Nearly $2 billion in federal funds are at stake this year alone.
And there’s this:
In July, HUD published…”Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” in the Federal Register…a sweeping set of land-use regulations…. The agency wants the power to dismantle local zoning so communities have what it considers the right mix of economic, racial and ethnic diversity. A finding of discriminatory behavior, or allegations of discrimination, would no longer be necessary. HUD will supply “nationally uniform data” of what it thinks 1,200 communities should look like.
Local governments will have to “take meaningful actions to further the goals identified.” If they fail to comply, HUD can cut federal funding.
Of course, if the States weren’t addicted to Federal handouts, the Feds’ pushers wouldn’t be able to make such threats, much less have this control over a State’s internal affairs.
Casey Mulligan has looked into this in a paper he has at the National Bureau of Economic Research titled “Average Marginal Labor Income Tax Rates under the Affordable Care Act“. The full paper can be had through the NBER for five bucks.
Mulligan summarizes his paper here, on his blog supply and demand (in that order).
My summary of Mulligan’s summary is his comparison of Obamacare’s impact on our marginal tax rates with the impact of a couple of other programs and his comment on the impact of Obamacare on our take home pay—the part of our paychecks we actually get to use for our own purposes.
Several SNAP (formerly food stamp program) expansions in combination were a quarter of the ACA’s magnitude. In terms of its impact on average marginal tax rates, the ACA hike is almost double the effect of permanently increasing unemployment benefit payments to 99 weeks from a baseline of 26 weeks[.]
And
[Obamacare] has not been introduced into a tax-free economy, so its marginal tax rate hikes add to marginal tax rates already in effect. I estimate that, by 2015, the average marginal after-tax share among household heads and spouses with near-median weekly earnings will have fallen to 0.50 from 0.60 in 2007, largely from the ACA but also from other expansions in safety net programs. That is a massive 17 percent reduction in the reward to working—akin to erasing a decade of labor productivity growth without the wealth effect….
That is to say, in just two short years—immediately on implementation of Obamacare—our median income wage earner will see his take home pay drop 17%, from 60% of his paycheck (already too small a portion) to a miniscule 50% of his paycheck. As Mulligan notes, that is an enormous penalty to pay for the opportunity to work for one’s living.
Keep in mind, also, that the median weekly income in the US as recently as 2012 was the princely sum of $775. This works out to a skosh over $40,000 per year. It’s hard enough to feed, cloth, and educate a family on three-fifths of that. Think about trying to do it on only half.