FACT: ObamaCare Causing Part-Time Nation

"Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that the ratio of part-time to full-time jobs has completely flipped this year from historical trends," writes health policy expert Grace-Marie Turner.  "Last year, six full-time jobs were created for every one part time job. This year, only one full-time job is being created for every four new part-time jobs" [emphasis added]

The shift to part-time has accelerated over the past several months because of the “look back” provision in ObamaCare that sets the baseline this year for the number of full-time workers a company employs to determine their compliance with the employer pay-or-play mandate.

The administration may have been trying to stop the damage when it announced in July it would delay for a year the reporting requirements for the health law’s employer mandate – the requirement that businesses with 50 or more employees provide health coverage that is acceptable to the government or pay a fine of $2,000 to $3,000 per employee per year.

The damage is real, and the one-year delay is unlikely to have a significant impact on hiring. Businesses are not going to hire full-time workers for year or less only to have to fire them next year.

In our still struggling economy, we should be making it easier for businesses to grow. Instead the law is causing huge dislocations in the labor force and imposing major new costs on businesses — money that could have been invested in growth and new hiring.

ObamaCare is hurting more than the job market. Consumers will see prices of virtually everything soar as businesses of every size are forced to raise prices to cover the high costs of ObamaCare. As Turner notes, "A recently-leaked letter from Delta Air Lines to the Obama administration states that the 'cost of providing health care to our employees will increase by nearly $100,000,000 next year,' much of it due to Obamacare." 

Read her full article.

Harvard Study: Gun Bans Don't Reduce Murder Rates

In a Harvard study, researchers asked, "Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide?" To find an answer, they reviewed the crime data of several European countries. They discovered "that countries with HIGHER gun ownership often had LOWER murder rates." Key findings:

• Russia, which enforces very strict gun control on its people, has a murder rate 4 times higher than the US. [So much for the Left's false assertion that the US has the highest murder rate in the world.]
• Luxembourg, "where handguns are totally banned and ownership of any kind of gun is minimal, had a murder rate nine times higher than Germany in 2002."
• Norway, Finland, Germany and France—all nations whose citizens enjoy significant gun ownership—had remarkably low murder rates.

Harvard researchers concluded the study with this:

Over a decade ago, Professor Brandon Centerwall of the University of Washington undertook an extensive, statistically sophisticated study comparing areas in the United States and Canada to determine whether Canada's more restrictive policies had better contained criminal violence. When he published his results it was with the admonition:

If you are surprised by [our] finding[s], so [are we]. [We] did not begin this research with any intent to "exonerate" handguns, but there it is—a negative finding, to be sure, but a negative finding is nevertheless a positive contribution. It directs us where not to aim public health resources. [Brandon S. Centerwall, Author's Response to "Invited Commentary: common Wisdom and Plain Truth," 134 AM. J. EPIDEMIOLOGY 1264, 1264 (1991)]

Summarizing the Harvard study, Steve Adcock noted:

Further, the report cited, "the determinants of murder and suicide are basic social, economic, and cultural factors, not the prevalence of some form of deadly mechanism." Meaning, it's not guns that kill people. People kill people.

Gallup: Joblessness Jumps to 8.9% in One Month

"Outside of the federal government's Bureau of Labor statistics, the Gallup polling organization also tracks the nation's unemployment rate," reports John Nolte @ breitbart.com. "While the BLS and Gallup findings might not always perfectly align, the trends almost always do and the small statistical differences just haven't been worthy of note. But now Gallup is showing a sizable 30 day jump in the unemployment rate, from 7.7% on July 21 to 8.9% today. This is an 18-month high."

"Gallup also shows an alarming increase in the number of underemployed (those with some work seeking more). During the same 30-day period, that number has jumped from 17.1% to 17.9%."

Barone: Obama Admin's Astonishing Incompetence

From Michael Barone:

Evidence of the astonishing incompetence of the Obama administration continues to roll in.

It started with the stimulus package. One-third of the money went to public employee union members — a political payoff not very stimulating to anyone else. Billions went to green energy loans, like the $500 million that the government lost in backing the obviously hapless Solyndra.

Infrastructure projects, which the president continues to tout, never seem to get built. He's been talking about dredging the port of Charleston, for example, to accommodate the big container ships coming in when the Panama Canal is widened. The canal widening is proceeding on schedule to be completed in 2014. The target date for dredging the port of Charleston: 2024.

Then there's ObamaCare. Barack Obama has already said the administration will not enforce the employer mandate, will not verify eligibility for insurance subsidies and will not require employer-provided policies to cap employees' out-of-pocket costs. The Constitution's requirement that the president take care to faithfully execute the laws apparently does not apply.

ObamaCare administrators continue to miss deadlines set by the health care law — 41 of 82 of them, according to Forbes' Avik Roy's reading of the Congressional Research Service report.

Then there's the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law. According to the law firm Davis Polk, the administration as of July had missed 62% of the deadlines in that law.

All of which indicates incompetence in drafting or in implementing the legislation — likely both. We have a president who delights in delivering partisan speeches to adoring audiences but doesn't seem interested in whether his administration gets results.

Read the rest at Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-perspective/082613-668794-evidence-of-obama-administration-incompetence-piles-up.htm#ixzz2dBHUPVtT

Pennington: Millenials Can Do Something About this Mess

Millenial Maura Pennington, writing in Forbes with a followup in Ricochet, laments that millions of her peers "Live at Home and Support the Policies That Keep Them There."  She argues the solution is to "stop supporting anti-growth politicians pushing agendas that strangle the economy, weaken the dollar, and surreptitiously erode civil liberties."

Consider this isn't the first time young people have faced a sluggish economy ... When Ronald Reagan took office, there was double-digit inflation and unemployment.  In December 1982, unemployment hit 10.8%, which is higher than anything we’ve experienced since.  Yet, with a strengthening of the dollar luring investors back to American business concepts, and a decrease of the income tax penalty on productivity, by the time Reagan left office, unemployment was down to 5.3%, the S&P 500 had soared over 200%, and inflation was all but forgotten.  People were working.  For the twenty-somethings who remember their first birthday parties or Christmas mornings in the late 1980s, it was a time of plenty.

August 26: Women's Equality Day

President Obama proclaimed August 26 as Women's Equality Day, then promptly repeated radical feminism's favorite phony 'fact': "On average, women are paid 77 cents for every dollar paid to men." Economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth makes mincemeat of this false assertion (and others) in The Myth of Women as Economic Victims.

...if a Martian were to come down and see there were two groups of people—men and women—and one of the groups earned 58% of all Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, more than half of all PhD degrees, an equal number of medical degrees and legal degrees, had a longer life expectancy by about 5 years, had a lower unemployment rate, and fewer of this group were in jail and fewer were on drugs, they would say, oh, this must be the favored group of people.

And if that Martian then was told it is the favored group that is "discriminated against" and it is the favored group that the President wants to give affirmative action to, the Martian would just be shocked because by many, many metrics women are doing better than men.

 

Mark Levin Explains "The Liberty Amendments"

From PJTV:  

The Great One, Mark Levin, sits with Glenn Reynolds to discuss his new book The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic.  Levin thinks that progressivism has intentionally undermined the U.S. Constitution. Is it time for an Article V convention to propose amendments to the United States Constitution? Hear what the Great One thinks. 

 Watch the short video here:

Obamacare Fallout Continues

Thanks to the Obamacare law:

• Forever 21 Inc. became the latest national company to cap employee work hours at 29.5 hours per week.
• Beginning Jan 1, 2014, working spouses of University of Virginia employees will no longer be covered under UVA's health plan.  And UVA premiums are going up, too:
  "Provisions of the federal Affordable Care Act are projected to add $7.3 million to the cost of the University health plan in 2014 alone. ... 'Ironically, by providing generous benefits, the University becomes exposed to a federal excise tax known as the Cadillac tax,' [UVa Vice President and Human Resources Officer, Susan] Carkeek said." (The UVa Medical Center wholeheartedly endorsed Obamacare back in 2010.)
• UPS will drop about 15,000 working spouses in 2014 for the same reason.

However, there will be no pain for Congress and their staff due to Obamacare, according to the Wall Street Journal. The law requires the nearly 11,000 Members and Congressional staff to switch from Federal Employees health program to the new Obamacare exchanges, which could mean "thousands of dollars a year in out-of-pocket insurance costs" they weren't paying before.

The result was a full wig out on Capitol Hill, with Members of both parties fretting about "brain drain" as staff face higher health-care costs. Democrats in particular begged the White House for help ... And now the White House is suspending the law to create a double standard. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) that runs federal benefits will release regulatory details this week, but leaks to the press suggest that Congress will receive extra payments based on the FEHBP defined-contribution formula, which covers about 75% of the cost of the average insurance plan. For 2013, that's about $4,900 for individuals and $10,000 for families.

How OPM will pull this off is worth watching. ... In any case the carve-out for Congress creates a two-tier exchange system, one for the great unwashed and another for the politically connected.

This latest White House night at the improv is also illegal. OPM has no authority to pay for insurance plans that lack FEHBP contracts, nor does the Affordable Care Act permit either exchange contributions or a unilateral bump in congressional pay in return for less overall compensation. Those things require appropriations bills passed by Congress and signed by the President.

The lesson for Americans is that Democrats who passed ObamaCare didn't even understand what they were doing to themselves, much less to everyone else. But you can bet Democrats will never extend to ordinary Americans the same fixes that they are now claiming for themselves. The real class divide in President Obama's America is between the political class and everyone else.

Obama's War on Economy Hurts Millenials Most

A recent Pew Research report and the latest jobs report show how badly the 18- to 31-year-old Millenials are suffering under the progressive leadership of the man they supported so strongly.

Pew reports:

In 2012, 36% [21.6 million] of the nation’s young adults ages 18 to 31—the so-called Millennial generation—were living in their parents’ home, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. This is the highest share in at least four decades and represents a slow but steady increase over the 32% of their same-aged counterparts who were living at home prior to the Great Recession in 2007 and the 34% doing so when it officially ended in 2009.

Their "life-on-hold" status appears driven by three things:

• declining employment:  63% had jobs in 2012, down from 70% in 2007;
• rising college enrollment: 39% were enrolled in college in 2012 vs. 35% in 2007;
• declining marriage: 25% were married in 2012 vs. 30% in 2007. [See Pew's chart at end of this post showing the dramatic shift since 1968 in married households in this age group.]

Jobs Report: Despite media cheerleading, the latest jobs report is nothing to cheer about. The primary reason for the slight decline in the unemployment rate is due to more people dropping out of the job market. And the drop-outs are disproportionately young people!

Using Bureau of Labor Statistics, Joe Malchow at powerlineblog.com (under the headline "The Saddest Chart") created the graphic below, which shows labor participation by age cohort, indexed to January 2007. He explains:

Young people—most strikingly 18 to 19, but also 20 to 24, and 25 to 35—are simply dropping out of the work force.

These young Americans are not in the denominator of the headline unemployment figure. They’re the most energetic, strongest, most inventive Americans. They’re sitting on couches in the Obama economy. Su casa es la casa de su madre. It’s not because “the economy sucks,” which is the strange existential answer that even Ivy-educated twenty-somethings will give you. It is because the Obama presidency actively harms young people, and seeks to do so more every day.

Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com blog has an equally eye-opening chart. Of all jobs created in 2013, only 23% were full-time. The rest of the jobs—731,000 of 953,000 in all—were part-time, according to BLS data.

Finally, Pew's marriage factor. In 1968, 56% of adults ages 18 to 31 were married and living with their spouses.  In 2012, that figure had dropped to only 23%:

Joe Manchow is right. To think that the oldest cohorts in the Millenial age group have lived a third of their lives in a childhood cocoon is sad.