Freedom Line Blog

The number of constituencies for Obamacare keeps shrinking everyday. From Elizabeth MacDonald at Fox Business:

Health reform is now causing job turmoil across the country in three key groups that the White House has depended on for support—local government, school workers and unions.

School districts in states like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Utah, Nebraska, and Indiana are dropping to part-time status school workers such as teacher aides, administrators, secretaries, bus drivers, gym teachers, coaches and cafeteria workers. Cities or counties in states like California, Indiana, Kansas, Texas, Michigan and Iowa are dropping to part-time status government workers such as librarians, secretaries, administrators, parks and recreation officials and public works officials.

The next time you hear the president drone on about income inequality, remember that his signature domestic achievement has a nasty habit of kneecapping the working class. Even if the president’s gripe is that these people had low wages and no health insurance before he took office, consider the net effect of his tenure: they now have even lower wages (thanks to fewer hours) and still have no insurance. Heck of a job, Barry.

The debate over unemployment benefits isn’t an easy one. While the left completely ignores the rudimentary economics (and the empirical evidence) showing that prolonged benefits tend to keep unemployment artificially high, the fact remains that many workers use the system in good faith, relying on it as a bridge during uncertain times. We can all probably agree, however, that this doesn’t make any sense. From MarketWatch’s report on rising unemployment claims:

Weekly jobless claims jumped by 13,000 to a seasonally adjusted 380,000 in the week ended April 7, the highest level since late January, the U.S. Labor Department said Thursday.

Much of the increase was related to spring break, when many school bus drivers and cafeteria workers are allowed to file for temporary unemployment benefits.

Hey, if this is the direction we’re going, why not allow them to file for unemployment over the weekend? Or perhaps for those oppressive hours of 5 PM-9 AM every weekday when they’re not gainfully employed?

This is an offense both to people who really require unemployment benefits and to the taxpayers who are underwriting school workers’ spring breaks. And with MarketWatch attributing”much of the increase” to these workers, are we to understand that it’s become common practice for school workers to exploit this outrageous provision?

Some aspects of the unemployment debate are difficult trade-offs between economics and empathy. This one, however, is a no-brainer.

At this time of “shared sacrifice”, the political class is fond of telling us that there are “no easy choices” to combat the nation’s crisis of overspending. Yet as private companies have cut back on their payrolls to cope with the Great Recession, Washington hasn’t even been firing on the merits, according to USA Today:

Death — rather than poor performance, misconduct or layoffs — is the primary threat to job security at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Management and Budget and a dozen other federal operations.

The federal government fired 0.55% of its workers in the budget year that ended Sept. 30 — 11,668 employees in its 2.1 million workforce. Research shows that the private sector fires about 3% of workers annually for poor performance, says John Palguta, former research chief at the federal Merit Systems Protection Board, which handles federal firing disputes.

The 1,800-employee Federal Communications Commission and the 1,200-employee Federal Trade Commission didn’t lay off or fire a single employee last year. The SBA had no layoffs, six firings and 17 deaths in its 4,000-employee workforce.

From today’s iteration of the inimitable (thank God) Dr. Krugman’s column in the New York Times:

… what’s happening in Wisconsin isn’t about the state budget, despite Mr. Walker’s pretense that he’s just trying to be fiscally responsible. It is, instead, about power. What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy.

If this is what makes it to print, one wonders what function it is exactly that Dr. Krugman’s ‘editor’ serves. The Grey Lady is on life support.