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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Jobs</title>
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		<title>Thank You to the Koch Brothers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/thank-you-to-the-koch-brothers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=thank-you-to-the-koch-brothers</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 04 Apr 2014 04:04:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[business]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[donation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Harry Reid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jobs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Koch Brothers]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222651</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Left's war on pro-liberty job creators and philanthropists. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/KochNKoch1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-222672" alt="KochNKoch1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/KochNKoch1-450x337.jpg" width="315" height="236" /></a>Americans of all political stripes must stand up and say thank you to David &amp; Charles Koch, billionaires who are the majority shareholders of Koch Industries, an oil, gas, and chemical company which is the second largest private company in America.  Simply by virtue of owning a huge company – which employs so many – these men should be thanked.  (Imagine their tax bill.)</span></p>
<p>This patriotic family has a family foundation that devotes hundreds of millions to charities, offers tens of thousands of people a chance to prosper, and is the epitome of entrepreneurship, which should be celebrated.  The charities that they donate to include a recent $100 million donation to New York-Presbyterian Hospital and charities devoted to the arts, including the American Ballet Theatre, the New York City Ballet, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the American Museum of Natural History.</p>
<p>Their parents have the Fred and Mary Koch Foundation, which, according to Wikipedia, is devoted to “support non-profits in Kansas&#8221; focusing on &#8220;arts, environmental stewardship, human services, enablement of at-risk youth, and education&#8221; through the funding of diversity programs at Kansas State University; the program Youth Entrepreneurs, a high-school level entrepreneurial and business program; the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, which develops programs to enhance schools&#8217; history curricula; and the Bill of Rights Institute, an organization that holds seminars and workshops for teachers and administrators to provide &#8220;educational resources on America’s Founding documents and principles&#8221; to enhance the learning experience for students.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">These are the things which people do not know about him.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Of course, the Koch brothers are leading advocates of a free-market economy and all-important issues of liberty.  </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" title="" href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303978304579475860515021286?mg=reno64-wsj&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702303978304579475860515021286.html" target="_blank">As Charles Koch wrote yesterday in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, he is “Fighting to Restore a Free Society,” and “Instead of welcoming free debate, collectivists engage in character assassination.” He could not be more right. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) recently said that the billionaire Koch brothers are &#8220;un-American.&#8221; For daring to speak out against Obamacare, Reid said, “It’s too bad that they&#8217;re trying to buy America, and it&#8217;s time that the American people spoke out against this terrible dishonesty of these two brothers who are about as un-American as anyone I can imagine.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" title="" href="http://www.newsmax.com/RonnTorossian/reid-koch-adelson-obama/2014/03/17/id/559908/" target="_blank">How terrible is it that a private citizen is attacked by the Senate Majority leader, Harry Reid</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. Imagine a private person is forced to write an op-ed in one of the nation’s most influential papers, where he writes, “[T]he fundamental concepts of dignity, respect, equality before the law and personal freedom are under attack by the nation&#8217;s own government.” Of course, we saw it coming, when Obama in a well-publicized speech to business owners during his re-election campaign said, “You didn’t build that.”</span></p>
<p>Koch is so right when he writes that “[t]he central belief and fatal conceit of the current administration is that you are incapable of running your own life, but those in power are capable of running it for you. This is the essence of big government and collectivism.” (This government also wants to run the lives of people in countless other foreign nations as well.)</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Read this paragraph in Koch’s op-ed: </span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Koch companies employ 60,000 Americans, who make many thousands of products that Americans want and need. According to government figures, our employees and the 143,000 additional American jobs they support generate nearly $11.7 billion in compensation and benefits. About one-third of our U.S.-based employees are union members.</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Is not an employer of that size and magnitude worthy of private dialogue? Or a certain level of respect?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Koch family employs 60,000 Americans, donates hundreds of millions of dollars to philanthropic (non-political) causes, and they are attacked as un-American?  These private citizens who are among the most prominent executives and philanthropists are attacked by the most powerful man in the world and his allies for opposing the Democratic Party and exercising their democratic rights.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This is what Obama’s America has come to. It’s awful, unfair and brutal. The right admires and respects hard-working executives, while the left hurts and attack. All the American people should say to this fine family is: &#8220;Thank you.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>A Socialism Spill on Aisle 9</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/a-socialism-spill-on-aisle-9/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-socialism-spill-on-aisle-9</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/a-socialism-spill-on-aisle-9/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Feb 2014 05:51:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jobs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[minimum wage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219353</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The minimum wage hike mess and the poor workers who will have to live with it. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/20101026_054910_1027_biz_WALMART_MAIN_ml.jpg_GALLERY.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219354" alt="1027_biz_WALMART_MAIN_ml" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/20101026_054910_1027_biz_WALMART_MAIN_ml.jpg_GALLERY.jpg" width="320" height="215" /></a>The working class in the United States has no better champion than Barack Obama. Like most champions of the working class, he has never actually worked at a real job and instead divided his time between academia, non-profits and politics which explains his current work ethic in which he tries to get a speech in between every two vacations.</span></p>
<p>The progressive law professors, who are currently the only thing standing between the working class and the abyss, at least according to other progressive professors, not only haven’t worked for a living, but don&#8217;t know what working for a living entails and don&#8217;t even understand the concept.</p>
<p>The protectors of the working class, currently presiding over a country where over 90 million adults are not in the workforce, have a plan to wipe out another 500,000 jobs. Before Obama, 63 percent of working age Americans had jobs. Today it&#8217;s 58 percent. And Obama is trying to see if he can drop the country below the 50 percent mark.</p>
<p>A minimum wage hike sounds like a great idea to a progressive professor who, like Marie Antoinette, wonders why the poor can&#8217;t just eat cake during a bread shortage. If the poor aren&#8217;t making enough money, just raise their salaries.</p>
<p>The first casualty of the minimum wage hike will be some 500,000 jobs. While just 19 percent of the minimum wage increase will go to those below the poverty line, the same isn&#8217;t true of that 500,000. The most disposable workers also tend to be the poorest. They are the first ones out the door when a small business comes up against the ObamaCare employer mandate or a minimum wage hike. It doesn&#8217;t take much to push them out from full-time to part-time and from part-time to the unemployment line and from the unemployment line to permanent unemployment.</p>
<p>Purge six figures worth of workers and suddenly income inequality becomes an even bigger problem that the Harvard and Yale Friends of the Working Class can use to run for reelection. It doesn&#8217;t occur to them that the living standard of the poor is not defined by an infographic comparing their income to Bill Gates&#8217; spectacles budget or George Soros&#8217; villain lair complete with lasers and piranhas.</p>
<p>It isn&#8217;t even defined by their salary, but by the buying power of that salary.</p>
<p>A salary is just a number. It was once possible to buy a meal for a dime and a politician for a hundred dollars. Today dinner with a politician will cost you that hundred and the politician may cost you a hundred thousand.</p>
<p>The businesses that minimum wage workers depend on are peopled with other minimum wage workers. Even assuming that the pay hike would be employment neutral, which it most certainly is not, it would rebalance once the businesses they patronize pass on the pay hike as a price hike. And then before you know it everyone is making more money that still buys about the same amount that their old paychecks did.</p>
<p>Income inequality is class warfare, a subject of interest to Marxist professors, but of very little relevance to the price of a loaf of bread, a gallon of milk and a pound of ground beef.</p>
<p>The prices of basic staples have risen sharply under the Friend of the Working Class in Washington. While he dines on faux Wagyu beef at White House dinners, the working class victims of his class warfare are standing in Aisle 9 trying to assemble a puzzle that consists of their upcoming paycheck, a Payday loan and a grocery list.</p>
<p>The woman weighting a can of beans in one hand and her pocketbook in the other trying to decide what she can afford to take home doesn&#8217;t need income equality with a Harvard Law prof. What she needs is a living standard that will allow her to afford what working Americans used to be able to afford. A minimum wage hike is a blunt instrument that looks good until it puts her out of a job or until she comes back to Aisle 9 and sees that the price hikes match her new paycheck.</p>
<p>Each progressive solution makes life worse in Aisle 9, but progressives never visit Aisle 9. If they did, they would outlaw the other half of the products in it that they haven&#8217;t already outlawed through various contrived legalisms.</p>
<p>In the Venezuelan Aisle 9, mobs are fighting over powdered milk in government stores in a country that has 85 percent of the oil reserves in the region. Everyone is entitled to powdered milk and other price controlled staples. But being entitled to something doesn&#8217;t mean that you can get it. Not until the government seizes control of the entire production process of powdered milk and when that is done, then no one will ever drink powdered milk again.</p>
<p>The path to Venezuela&#8217;s Aisle 9 is surprisingly similar to America&#8217;s Aisle 9. Governments can raise wages or lower food prices, but they can&#8217;t enforce the availability of food or jobs and they can&#8217;t control how the working class will work around the consequences of foodless government supermarkets and minimum wage jobs that have been priced out of the marketplace.</p>
<p>Venezuela&#8217;s Friend of the Working Class, Hugo Chavez, kicked the golden bucket with an estimated net worth of 2 billion dollars. The Friends of the Working Class are also doing comfortably well in D.C. where it pays to be an expert on poverty and an advocate for helping the working class by adding 12 million illegal aliens to the job market with illegal alien amnesty, shutting down jobs with environmental regulations and freeing the people still working from that dreaded &#8220;job lock.&#8221;</p>
<p>For the Washington Friends of the Working Class drifting from one cocktail party and fundraising dinner to another, the minimum wage hike is their latest gimmick for winning in 2016. They are as ignorant of the lives of the waiters who bring them their Wagyu beef and the vagaries of a working class budget as they are of Ancient Sanskrit or the geography of the moon.</p>
<p>In Aisle 9, things are simple and inflexible, but in politics and academia everything is subjective.</p>
<p>Weighing a can of food in your hands that you need but cannot afford wonderfully focuses the mind on the real, but at the cocktail parties of the Friends of the Working Class, everything is wonderfully unreal. There are no hard facts, only ideas and slogans.</p>
<p>Like The Great Gatsby&#8217;s Tom and Daisy, the progressive law professors and community organizers inhabit a &#8220;vast carelessness&#8221; of conferences and cocktail parties from which they emerge to carelessly smash things up before retreating back into it with no real awareness of what they have done and a certainty that the people on Aisle 9 whose lives they have smashed up ought to be grateful to them.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Lawless Presidency</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/the-lawless-presidency/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-lawless-presidency</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/the-lawless-presidency/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 12 Feb 2014 05:55:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cost]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[delay]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[employer mandate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Healthcare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jobs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lawless]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[unconstitutional]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218620</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Will Congress finally hold Obama accountable for his usurpation of power? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Obama-Lawless1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218622" alt="Obama-Lawless1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Obama-Lawless1-450x324.jpg" width="270" height="194" /></a>In a move both transparently political and utterly contemptuous of the rule of law, the Obama administration has yet again made changes to the healthcare law. The Treasury Department issued a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2014/02/Fact-Sheet-021014.pdf">fact sheet</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Monday, outlining the new regulations (laughingly referred to as &#8220;final&#8221;). They now give employers with 50-99 employees until 2016 to comply with ObamaCare&#8217;s employer mandate. In addition, employers with 100 or more workers who originally had to cover 95 percent of them to be in compliance will only have to offer coverage to 70 percent of their employees next year, transitioning to the original percentage by 2016. In short, a law written and passed by Congress and signed by the president is becoming whatever the Obama administration wants it to be.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And as usual, the administration wants it both ways. Even as it </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/02/11/administration-announces-another-delay-in-obamacare-employer-mandate/">disputes</a> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">the idea that ObamaCare is causing many companies to eliminate employees as a means of getting below the 50-worker threshold when the mandate kicks in, Treasury officials warned that businesses must &#8220;certify&#8221; they are not eliminating workers to avoid that mandate. Employers will self-attest to this reality on their tax forms under penalty of perjury. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In other words the IRS, where not even a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/02/03/not-even-smidgen-corruption-obama-downplays-irs-other-scandals/">&#8220;smidgen&#8221;</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of corruption has occurred according to President Obama, could end up as the ultimate arbiter of any employer-employee disputes regarding reasons for an employee&#8217;s termination. And a decision in the employee&#8217;s favor could yield a one-two punch where a business owner is both cited for perjury </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">and</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> required to implement the business mandate from which he was previously exempt.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet the most unseemly part of this latest exercise was illuminated by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) &#8220;Once again, the president is giving a break to corporations while individuals and families are still stuck under the mandates of his health care law. And, once again, the president is rewriting law on a whim,&#8221; he said in a statement. &#8220;If the administration doesn&#8217;t believe employers can manage the burden of the law, how can struggling families be expected to?&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The answer is obvious. Due in large part to a Republican Party that has demonstrated little appetite for challenging the capriciousness of the Obama administration, it has long grown comfortable with the idea that the executive can assume the role of ultimate lawgiver. Thus it was completely unsurprising that J. Mark Iwry, deputy assistant Treasury secretary for health policy, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/us/politics/health-insurance-enforcement-delayed-again-for-some-employers.html?hpw&amp;rref=us&amp;_r=1">contended</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the administration had broad “authority to grant transition relief,” citing a section of the Internal Revenue Code that directs the Treasury secretary to “prescribe all needful rules and regulations for the enforcement” of tax obligations. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Iwry further noted that such authority has often been used to delay laws that engender “unreasonable administrative burdens or costs” to taxpayers. Thus, despite the reality that the law itself clearly </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/obama-s-new-delay-employer-mandate-violates-plain-language-law">states</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that employers with “at least 50 full-time employees” must provide “minimum essential coverage” in the “months beginning after December 31, 2013” or pay a fine, the administration has determined it can do pretty much as it pleases.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Based on the 2011 Census figures compiled by the Small Business Administration, the rule changes affect 81.9 million employees. Approximately 7.9 million of them work for companies with 50-99 employees that comprise 2 percent of U.S. businesses and 7 percent of workers. The other 74 million work for firms employing 100 or more people that also comprise 2 percent of U.S. businesses. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Unsurprisingly, administration officials focused on the percentages rather than the raw numbers in order to make the case that the change in the law is relatively minor. Yet fewer workers getting insurance through their employers is likely to push more Americans onto the exchanges, where they will receive subsidized coverage underwritten by the taxpayers.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Multiple news sources contend the reason the administration implemented the changes was due to fierce criticism from the business community. Some members of that community applauded the changes. &#8220;I&#8217;m pretty pleasantly astounded by what I&#8217;ve seen on first read here,&#8221; said Neil Trautwein, a vice president and lobbyist with the National Retail Federation. &#8220;This is really the antithesis of the botched rollout of the exchanges, and I think they have tried mightily to smooth the impact of the penalty-mandate structure on the business community.&#8221; Michelle Neblett, director of labor and workforce policy for the National Restaurant Association, echoed that sentiment, contending that restaurants &#8220;certainly will appreciate the additional time.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">On the other hand, it is virtually impossible to believe that ObamaCare’s potentially devastating effects on Democrats running for office in 2014 wasn&#8217;t the primary motivation behind the change. A Washington Post-ABC </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/page/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2013/11/19/National-Politics/Polling/release_274.xml">poll</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> taken in November revealed a whopping 63 percent of voters disapproved of the way Obama was implementing the healthcare law compared to only 33 percent who approved. Yet even more critically for Democrats, 39 percent of those voters say they would be more likely to oppose a candidate for Congress who supports the law, compared to only 23 percent who would back such a candidate.</span></p>
<p>Adding fuel to that fire<i>, Politico</i> <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/02/barack-obama-campaign-democrats-103310.html?hp=t1_s">reports</a> that the White House and Senate Democrats are basing their election strategy around the reality that Democrats engaged in competitive races don&#8217;t want the president anywhere near their campaigns, even as they want to maintain access to party campaign resources. <i>Politico</i> claims to have spoken with &#8220;nearly every incumbent up for reelection and aspiring Democratic Senate candidates across the country, but only a handful gave an unequivocal &#8216;yes&#8217; when asked whether they wanted Obama to come campaign with them.&#8221;</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Neither the poll nor the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Politico</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> report reflect another inconvenient reality that will now be attaching itself to Democrats who have long championed themselves as the party of &#8220;fairness,&#8221; and most recently, as the party that will be </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://nation.foxnews.com/2014/01/22/democrats-discuss-%E2%80%98income-inequality%E2%80%99-%E2%80%A6-posh-manhattan-hotel">campaigning</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> on &#8220;income inequality&#8221; for the mid-term election. In addition to all of the other burdens ObamaCare places on that campaigning, Democrats will have to explain why individual Americans and their families have been subjected to the law as written, while the corporations and businesses Democrats routinely vilify when it suits their purposes get an additional extension on top of the one they already received. Such a gargantuan level of hypocrisy may be dismissed by hardcore Democrat supporters. The rest of the electorate will be far less inclined to do the same.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Wall Street Journal</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> is already </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303650204579375310934336066?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop&amp;mg=reno64-wsj&amp;url=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303650204579375310934336066.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop">leading</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the charge. The Obama administration&#8217;s &#8220;cavalier notions about law enforcement are especially notable here for their bias for corporations over people&#8230;Liberals say the law isn&#8217;t harming jobs or economic growth, but everything this White House does screams the opposite,&#8221; the paper states.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Furthermore, despite the aforementioned fact sheet&#8217;s use of the word &#8220;final&#8221; to describe the latest changes, nothing could be further from the truth. A </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://americanactionforum.org/insights/white-house-holding-45-million-hours-of-aca-paperwork-including-the-individ">report</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> released Monday by Sam Batkins, director of regulatory policy at American Action Forum, reveals that the White House&#8217;s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) is reviewing &#8220;an avalanche&#8221; of new rules that pertain to ObamaCare. &#8220;In total, these 28 paperwork burdens total more than 45.7 million burden hours. For perspective, it would take more than 22,800 employees working full-time to complete the new paperwork (assuming 2,000 employee hours annually),&#8221; the report explains. The most &#8220;infamous&#8221; rule, the individual mandate tax, &#8220;would impose more than 7.5 million paperwork burden hours on American taxpayers,” the report adds. That burden adds up to far more time preparing one&#8217;s taxes&#8211;or far more money paying someone else to do it.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Other revelations about the law came out Monday and yesterday. They range from the pedantic, as in an </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://nation.foxnews.com/2014/02/10/gym-memberships-add-obamacare-tax">additional</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> tax on gym memberships, to the deadly serious, such as the possibility that hundreds of Louisianans with HIV/AIDS may be </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/sns-rt-us-usa-healthcare-obamacare-exclusive-20140208,0,5827926.story">removed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> from the insurance plan they selected. That possibility revolves around a dispute regarding premium subsidies and the interpretation of federal regulations designed to prevent fraud. In September, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) informed insurers that funds available from third party payers such as those under the 1990 Ryan White Act, used by people with HIV/AIDS to pay their premiums, could be used to &#8220;cover the cost of private health insurance premiums, deductibles, and co-payments&#8221; for ObamaCare.</span></p>
<p>In November, CMS did an about-face, warning healthcare providers it has &#8220;significant concerns&#8221; about fraud with regard to using third party payments for plans.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">CMS now claims their guidance excludes Ryan White funds. But Blue Cross and Blue Shield (BCBS) of Louisiana is rejecting checks from the fund, claiming the CMS guidelines require them to do so. Critics contend that BCBS is being discriminatory, a charge the insurer denied. &#8220;We welcome all Louisiana residents who chose Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana,&#8221; said BCBS spokesman John Maginnis. The dispute will likely be ironed out, but it adds to the overall uncertainty associated with the healthcare law nonetheless.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It is an uncertainty not only tolerated, but fostered by President Obama and his administration. By December, Obama </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.teaparty.org/14th-change-obamacare-law-without-congressional-approval-32280/">had made</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> 14 unilateral changes to the healthcare law without consulting Congress. National Journal columnist Ron Fournier, an ObamaCare defender, put the number much higher &#8220;according to Fox News,&#8221; but far more importantly, the scales appeared to be falling from his eyes. &#8220;Advocates for a strong executive branch, including me, have given the White House a pass on its rule-making authority, because implementing such a complicated law requires flexibility,&#8221; he writes. &#8220;But the law may be getting stretched to the point of breaking. Think of the ACA as a game of Jenga: Adjust one piece and the rest are affected; adjust too many and it falls.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Columnist Charles Krauthammer </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://therightscoop.com/krauthammer-on-obamacare-employer-mandate-delay-this-is-stuff-you-do-in-a-banana-republic/">rejects</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the notion of a strong executive branch,  especially one that has been&#8221;wantonly changing the law lawlessly&#8221; for no other reason than to &#8220;minimize the impact leading up to an election.&#8221; That’s what they do in banana republics, he asserts. Ironically, one hour after the changes in ObamaCare were announced, Obama </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/feb/10/obama-i-can-do-whatever-i-want/">joked</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to French President Francois Hollande that the good thing about being president is that &#8220;I can do whatever I want.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A lot of Americans aren&#8217;t laughing. They see a level of contempt this administration has for the rule of law that extends far beyond the borders of ObamaCare. The president has also unilaterally enacted immigration law, attempted to make recess appointments when the Senate was not in recess, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/dick-morris/238501-obama-kills-welfare-reform">gutted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the work requirement in the 1996 welfare reform act, and is moving forward with plans effectively </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/02/22/obama-administration-moves-forward-on-climate-change-without-congress">eliminating</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the building of new coal plants. And he has </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/01/18/obama-ill-act-alone-without-congress-if-they-dont-pass-certain-legislation/">promised</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to move forward &#8212; without Congress if necessary &#8212; to enact his agenda.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Right now such actions satisfy an American left whose credibility has been reduced to defending the equivalent loss of 2.5 million jobs due to ObamaCare as &#8220;freedom&#8221; from &#8220;job lock.&#8221; That they conspicuously omit the fact that other Americans must work to </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">subsidize</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that freedom is a testament to the left’s determination to enact their agenda by any means necessary. Thus, a banana republic is fine with them, as long as they control the levers of power.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet it is precisely those levers of power that appear most vulnerable heading into the 2014 mid-term election. Despite all the support Democrats will get from a hopelessly compromised mainstream media, there is no reconciling their belief in the &#8220;wonderfulness&#8221; of ObamaCare with the reality that every postponement of the law&#8217;s mandates reveals exactly the opposite. &#8220;It&#8217;s getting difficult and slinking toward impossible to defend the Affordable Care Act,&#8221; writes Fournier. For far too many Americans, impossible is already here.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>ObamaCare: &#8216;Liberating&#8217; the Workers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/obamacare-liberating-the-workers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamacare-liberating-the-workers</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 06 Feb 2014 05:39:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218098</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Left explains why choosing not to work because of the health care law is a good thing. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Screen-Shot-2014-02-06-at-4.21.52-AM.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218132" alt="Screen Shot 2014-02-06 at 4.21.52 AM" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Screen-Shot-2014-02-06-at-4.21.52-AM.png" width="257" height="179" /></a>On Tuesday, a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cbo.gov/publication/45010">report</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) revealed that ObamaCare will have a &#8220;substantially larger&#8221; impact on the job market than the originally anticipated reduction of 800,000 full-time workers. Instead, the CBO predicts that the law will reduce the workforce by the equivalent of 2.3 million full-time jobs by 2021, and 2.5 million </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2014/02/04/no-cbo-did-not-say-obamacare-will-kill-2-million-jobs/">over</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the next decade. Most people would consider that bad news. Yet according to media organizations that have devolved into little more than Obama administration cheerleaders, most people are wrong. In short, for an American left working overtime to save the ongoing disaster known as ObamaCare, bad news is good news.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Unsurprisingly, the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">New York Times</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> is leading the charge, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/05/opinion/freeing-workers-from-the-insurance-trap.html?_r=0">characterizing</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the more than tripling in the reduction of workforce participation as &#8220;liberating.&#8221; They contend ObamaCare &#8220;will free people, young and old, to pursue careers or retirement without having to worry about health coverage. Workers can seek positions they are most qualified for and will no longer need to feel locked into a job they don’t like because they need insurance for themselves or their families. It is hard to view this as any kind of disaster.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">LA Times, </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">offers a different </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-cbo-20140204,0,3106578.story#axzz2sS2c0Hf9">spin</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, saying that &#8220;the CBO estimates that on balance, the ACA will increase aggregate demand for goods and services, in part by relieving lower-income people of the burden of health insurance or healthcare expenses, so they can increase their spending on other things. In turn, that will &#8216;boost demand for labor,&#8217; especially in the near term, while the economy remains slack.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">CBS News anchor Scott Pelley </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://newsbusters.org/blogs/matt-hadro/2014/02/04/networks-echo-white-house-spin-obamacare-wont-cut-jobs">contended</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the CBO report was &#8220;both surprising and widely misunderstood,&#8221; and that reduction in labor aren&#8217;t &#8220;necessarily jobs being lost. They&#8217;re also workers choosing to work less.&#8221; ABC&#8217;s Jonathan Karl also played up the good news angle, noting that people &#8220;can qualify for subsidized health care without a full-time job. And again, others will actually find it&#8217;s just not worth it to work full-time.&#8221; NBC&#8217;s Brian Williams noted the reduction in jobs or working hours, but insisted that &#8220;the White House is cautioning, for its part, that those departures are more a result of workers&#8217; flexibility to leave their jobs and still have health insurance.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">White House Press Secretary Jay Carney went much further than that. In a released </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/02/04/statement-press-secretary-today-s-cbo-report-and-affordable-care-act">statement</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, he insisted that &#8220;individuals will be empowered to make choices about their own lives and livelihoods,&#8221; and that they &#8220;would have the opportunity to pursue their dreams.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Senate Majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/02/04/reid-obamacare-doesnt-cost-jobs-it-turns-workers-into-free-agents/">chimed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in as well, claiming the CBO report &#8220;rightfully says, that people shouldn’t have job lock. If they&#8211;we live in a country where there should be free agency. People can do what they want,” he told reporters.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">If all of this &#8220;liberation&#8221; has a familiar ring, it&#8217;s because Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/pelosi-aspiring-musicians-quit-your-job-taxpayers-will-cover-your-health-care">said</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> virtually the same thing four years ago. She spoke about musicians and other creative types who could quit their jobs and focus on developing their talents. “We see it as an entrepreneurial bill, a bill that says to someone, if you want to be creative and be a musician or whatever, you can leave your work, focus on your talent, your skill, your passion, your aspirations because you will have health care,” Pelosi declared at the time.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet who, exactly, is being liberated? As the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">New York Times</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> explains, one of the driving forces behind this newfound freedom is &#8220;the availability of subsidies to help pay the premiums associated with ObamaCare.&#8221; The </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">LA Times</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> is less specific, contending that &#8220;burden&#8221; of ObamaCare&#8217;s costs will be relieved.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In reality such subsidies and relieved burdens amount to nothing more than cost shifting. That means millions of Americans will indeed be bound to </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">their</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> jobs to pay for the subsidies and burdens of other Americans. Adding insult to injury, in Nancy Pelosi&#8217;s universe, much of those costs will apparently be borne by those less artistically inclined and/or creative.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Unfortunately, that&#8217;s only </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://nypost.com/2014/02/05/congressional-budget-office-sends-death-blow-to-obamacare/">half</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the story. Because the aforementioned premium subsidies are reduced or disappear as workers reach certain levels of compensation, ObamaCare provides a massive disincentive to work more, or even work at all. “If those subsidies are phased out with rising income in order to limit their total costs, the phaseout effectively raises people’s marginal tax rates thus discouraging work,” the report states. The CBO report also addresses the possibility that ObamaCare subsidies might need higher levels of taxation to finance them, dealing another blow to the labor market. “If the subsidies are financed at least in part by higher taxes, those taxes will further discourage work or create other economic distortions, depending on how the taxes are designed.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Thus, it should come as no surprise that CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/02/05/budget-office-chief-obamacare-creates-disincentive-to-work/">testified</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> yesterday before Congress that ObamaCare &#8220;creates a disincentive for people to work,&#8221; in response to a question asked by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI). No doubt in response to Democrat and White House criticism that Republicans were mischaracterizing the findings of the report, Ryan affirmed that the CBO did not say people would be laid off, only that more and more of them would choose not to work. Ryan then noted that a lower labor supply lowers economic growth. Elmendorf agreed, but insisted that premium subsidies would improve the lives of lower-income people, and that they would be &#8220;better off&#8221; as a result.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The idea that people are &#8220;better off&#8221; due to increased dependency on government is the essence of progressivism. Gene Sperling, Obama’s top economic-policy adviser, inadvertently added fuel to that particular fire. &#8220;What this report said is a rather obvious point, which is that as people have greater access to healthcare, there is going to be some two-parent families where someone says I’m going to work a little less because we can get healthcare and I’m going spend time raising my children,&#8221; he contended. &#8220;There is going to be somebody out there who because they can afford healthcare has wanted to retire and may retire earlier. This is about giving Americans more choices.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Wrong. This about giving </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">some</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Americans more choices at the expense of other Americans who are being forced to underwrite their fellow Americans&#8217; insurance subsidies. As the CBO report mentions, if such underwriting comes in the form of increased taxes, there will be two parent families forced to work a little more and see </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">their</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> children a little less. Some Americans will be forced to retire later, rather than sooner.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Two items in the report </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304626804579362691500388668">tilted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in the Democrats favor. There was a &#8220;broad and persistent&#8221; slowdown in Medicare costs. And through 2024, the government will collect $8 billion more from the &#8220;risk corridor&#8221; provision &#8212; whereby insurers with healthier and more profitable risk pools subsidize those with sicker, less profitable ones &#8212; than it will be required to pay out.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Democrat claim a third statistic, that premium costs will be 15 percent cheaper than projected for 2014, works out in their favor as well. But the stat is misleading because insurance companies did many things to make their plans cheap, such as narrowing networks and selling policies with high deductibles. That may also be the case next year, when the risk corridors that remain in place until 2017 allow the insurance companies to once again low-ball their prices before there 2014 election. What happens to premiums when those risk corridors disappear is impossible to say, but more than likely, costs will soar without a government net below the insurer tightrope. If projections of those cost increases appear while our &#8220;make law up as I go along&#8221; president remains in power, bet on a unilateral extension of the risk corridor provision. One that will rapidly morph from a profit, to the taxpayer bailout Republicans envision.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The little bit of good news was more than offset by the reality that there will still be 31 million Americans uninsured in 2024, despite almost $2 trillion in new expenditures. The report also states that &#8220;between 6 million and 7 million fewer people will have employment-based insurance coverage each year from 2016 through 2024 than would be the case in the absence of the ACA.” But the most troubling statistic once again concerns government dependency. The federal government will be </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/02/04/five-takeaways-on-new-health-care-projections/">subsidizing</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> five out of six million policies in 2014, and a whopping 19 million out of 24 million in 2024.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Obama administration, Democrats and their media allies apparently believe such dependency is, as the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">New York Times</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> puts it, &#8220;liberating.&#8221; Perhaps it is, as long as one ignores the reality that, more often than not, it is achieved by kicking one&#8217;s dignity, decency and ambition to the curb.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>ObamaCare&#8217;s Economic Destruction Exposed</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/obamacares-economic-destruction-exposed/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamacares-economic-destruction-exposed</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 05 Feb 2014 05:50:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The numbers are in. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/RT_obamacare_pamphlet_jef_130703_16x9_608.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218024" alt="RT_obamacare_pamphlet_jef_130703_16x9_608" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/RT_obamacare_pamphlet_jef_130703_16x9_608-450x311.jpg" width="270" height="187" /></a>A new government study projects that Obamacare will kill 2 million full-time American jobs in 2017, confirming the approaching economic devastation about which the budget-busting program&#8217;s critics have warned for years.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The study came as Obama administration allies unveiled plans to saturate the airwaves with animal videos in a bid to dupe young women into signing up for the failing government program.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As the government report shows, contrary to the promises of President Obama, the Obamacare law will boot people out of their health care plans, encourage idleness, drive wages down, increase the government&#8217;s tax take, and fail to put a dent in the number of Americans without health insurance coverage.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In other words, it&#8217;s Wednesday at the White House.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The job destruction caused by Obamacare will climb to 2.5 million in 2024, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/45010-Outlook2014.pdf">according to</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> &#8220;The Budget and Outlook: 2014 to 2024,&#8221; a new publication of the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan research arm of the U.S. Congress. &#8220;The decline in full time-equivalent employment stemming from the [Affordable Care Act] will consist of some people not being employed at all and other people working fewer hours&#8230;&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Both of those job loss figures are substantially higher than the comparatively modest estimate of 800,000 jobs lost that CBO </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0211/49273.html">provided</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in 2011.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Affordable Care Act&#8217;s &#8220;largest impact on labor markets will probably occur after 2016, once its major provisions have taken full effect and overall economic output nears its maximum sustainable level,&#8221; says the new report.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Hours worked will fall by about 1.5 percent to 2.0 percent from 2017 to 2024 largely because some workers will opt to escape new taxes while others won&#8217;t need to work as much because they will receive subsidies from taxpayers. Lower-wage workers will be hit hardest. In the same seven-year period aggregate compensation (wages, salaries, and fringe benefits) will fall 1 percent compared to what it would have been otherwise, according to the report.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">These trends &#8220;are likely to continue after 2024 (the end of the current 10-year budget window),&#8221; the report indicated.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But that&#8217;s just part of the misery President Obama&#8217;s signature legislative accomplishment </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://thefederalist.com/2014/02/04/5-devastating-obamacare-facts-from-cbos-latest-economic-report/">will inflict</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> on Americans in coming years.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Obamacare will cause paychecks to shrink.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In 2018, the ACA begins to impose an excise tax on some of the more expensive health insurance plans. Workers will pay that tax in the form of reduced after-tax compensation. When some employers limit their exposure to the excise tax by switching to cheaper plans, employees&#8217; wages will rise but the extra compensation will be subject to income and payroll taxes, making workers&#8217; tax payments higher than they would have been had Obamacare not been enacted.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Americans will continue being unceremoniously booted from their employer-sponsored health insurance plans, despite President Obama&#8217;s frequently repeated promise that Americans would be able to keep their health care plans. And as a result of the law, CBO and the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) project that &#8220;between 6 million and 7 million fewer people will have employment-based insurance coverage each year from 2016 through 2024 than would be the case in the absence of the ACA.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Under Obamacare, the number of uninsured people in the U.S., which Obama himself set at 30 million in September 2009, will grow. In 2024 there will be 31 million non-elderly U.S. residents without health insurance, according to CBO and the JCT.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Meanwhile, just in time for Valentine&#8217;s Day, Obama administration allies are hoping to invigorate the moribund enrollment process by having cute, fuzzy singing animals convince women to sign up for the failing government program.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This animal abuse </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/02/04/new-obamacare-ads-use-cute-animals-to-attract-women/">consists of</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> ads on television and in other media that are sponsored by </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/printgroupProfile.asp?grpid=7805">Enroll America</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> and the Ad Council, two left-wing pressure groups.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Enroll America is a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/the-obamacare-navigators-nightmare/">corrupt</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> 501c3 nonprofit </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.groupsnoop.org/Enroll+America">that is funded</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/funderprofile.asp?fndid=5211&amp;category=79">Robert Wood Johnson Foundation</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, H&amp;R Block, and companies that stand to profit from Obamacare, according to groupsnoop, a research website operated by the National Center for Public Policy Research. The Ad Council is an ongoing left-wing brainwashing exercise </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.adcouncil.org/Working-With-Us/Partners/Media-Companies">funded</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by a cabal of media outlets.</span></p>
<p>As the Daily Caller <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/02/04/new-obamacare-ads-use-cute-animals-to-attract-women/">reports</a></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;With the March 31 deadline to enroll fast approaching, Enroll America reports that many women in the 18 to 34 age group remain unaware about the new coverage options. According to the organization’s research, 81 percent of uninsured people are not aware that the deadline to enroll is March 31, and 69 percent do not know about the availability of federal assistance for lower income people. The ads will be offered in English and Spanish to target Hispanic women as well and feature a menagerie of house pets singing about enrolling for [Obamacare] &#8216;today!&#8217;&#8221;</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">No one seems to know how many people have actually successfully enrolled in Obamacare-compliant health care plans. This seems especially true even at the highest levels of the federal government.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/01/29/the-problem-with-obamacares-9-million-enrollment-n.aspx">fudged</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the Obamacare exchange enrollment statistics. &#8220;More than 9 million Americans have signed up for private health insurance or Medicaid coverage &#8212; 9 million,&#8221; he said.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As Brian Orelli of the Motley Fool </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/01/29/the-problem-with-obamacares-9-million-enrollment-n.aspx">explains</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, Obama&#8217;s 9-million figure might be &#8220;technically true&#8221; but it is essentially useless. &#8220;About 3 million Americans have signed up for private insurance on the federal or state exchanges, and around 6 million are now eligible for Medicaid,&#8221; Orelli writes, accepting government-provided figures as gospel.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But the 9-million number &#8220;doesn&#8217;t tell us what we need to know to figure out whether Obamacare is viable,&#8221; he adds. It is unclear how many of these alleged 9 million people are newly covered.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">McKinsey &amp; Co. reported last month that just 11 percent of people who signed up on the exchanges were previously uninsured. &#8220;It&#8217;s not an official number, but even if it&#8217;s in the ballpark, most people were just switching insurance,&#8221; Orelli writes.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Other research suggests that well under a million people have actually enrolled in Obamacare through the exchanges &#8212; meaning they signed up and they paid their premiums.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Michael F. Cannon of the Cato Institute </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelcannon/2013/12/30/what-surge-obamacare-enrollments-remain-dangerously-below-60-percent-of-target/">concluded</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> at the end of December that the Obama administration had fallen far short of its enrollment targets.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The administration wanted to enroll 3.3 million paying customers by the end of 2013 which would constitute 47 percent of the way toward its goal of enrolling 7 million paying customers by March 31. In fact there are only 2 million &#8220;sign-ups,&#8221; according to Cannon, and these sign-ups &#8220;are not paying customers yet, though the administration would like to give the impression that they are &#8216;enrollees.&#8217;&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Anecdotal evidence suggests that only between 5 and 15 percent of the sign-ups &#8220;have actually paid their first premium and are in fact enrolled,&#8221; notes Cannon.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;Only the government can get away with this. If Amazon.com counted everything sitting in their customers’ shopping carts as &#8216;sales,&#8217; they would probably find themselves under indictment and the subject of shareholder lawsuits. I’m guessing President Obama would be outraged.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Of course Obama would be. But he&#8217;s an imperial president and the nation&#8217;s number one media celebrity, so the rules about accountability don&#8217;t apply to him, especially when it comes to his signature monstrosity.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Food Stamp Explosion</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/food-stamp-explosion/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=food-stamp-explosion</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/food-stamp-explosion/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 23 Jan 2014 05:25:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[food stamps]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jobs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[poverty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217102</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What it says about the fraudulent economic "recovery." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/food-stamps.gi_.top_.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217118" alt="food-stamps.gi.top" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/food-stamps.gi_.top_.jpg" width="266" height="176" /></a>Another dose of reality has trumped the Obama administration&#8217;s economic happy talk. According to </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/16SNAPpartHH.htm">data</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), one-in-five Americans were on the food stamp program in 2013. A staggering 23,052,388 households needed supplemental food assistance in FY2013, an increase of 722,675 households compared to FY2012. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The cost of the program, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), has also </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/ali-meyer/record-20-households-food-stamps-2013">reached</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> an all-time high. For fiscal year 2013, the SNAP program cost American taxpayers $79.6 billion. That represents a 36.8 percent increase in expenditures over the last five years. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And it&#8217;s not just households that have seen a huge jump in the SNAP participation rate. The monthly average for individual users of the program has also increased dramatically, as an additional 1,027,012 participants pushed the total number of individual users from 46,609,072 to 47,636,084 over the same time period. Since 2009, the number of individuals using the SNAP program has increased by 42.2 percent.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Obviously the global financial crisis of 2007 contributed to the increased number of people who lost their jobs and/or savings, and were forced to turn to supplemental assistance as a result. But the biggest bump in both the number of households and individuals on the program occurred between FY2009 and FY2010, when America was ostensibly in the beginning of the so-called recovery. Furthermore, the next three years saw a steady increase in usage as well.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The increase leads to one of two conclusions. Either the number of people gaming the system is getting out of hand, or the economy isn&#8217;t in recovery for a vast number of Americans.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Certainly a certain percentage of fraud exists. In Florida&#8217;s Palm Beach County, warrants were issued in December for 60 people suspected of </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/two-year-investigation-leads-to-60-arrests-on-publ/ncMBm/">cheating</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the system out of $2.8 million. The scheme involved a market that allowed SNAP users to illegally swipe their cards for cash. In return, the market got a 50 percent kickback for lying to state and federal authorities and saying that that groceries were purchased. In two Louisiana counties, a failure at Xerox Corp., temporarily taking down the electronic benefit transfer system, resulted in an unknown number of customers </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://theadvocate.com/home/7320109-125/state-taxpayers-dont-have-to">stripping</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> bare the shelves of two Wal-Mart stores and making purchases well beyond their EBT card limits.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) has </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://farmfutures.com/story-senator-wants-food-stamp-purchases-require-photo-id-0-107630">introduced</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> a bill, the &#8220;Food Stamp Fraud Prevention and Accountability Act&#8221; that would require SNAP users to show a photo ID when using their benefit cards. &#8220;Using a photo ID is standard in many day to day transactions, and most of those are not exclusively paid for by the taxpayer dollars,&#8221; Vitter said. &#8220;Food Stamps have more than doubled in cost since 2008 and continue to grow in an unsustainable way, and the events in Louisiana unfortunately highlight the fraud surrounding the taxpayer-funded program.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Naturally those on the left </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/16/david-vitter-food-stamps_n_4610560.html">resisted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the idea. &#8220;Many poor people do not have photo IDs, and it costs money they do not have to get them,&#8221; said Deborah Weinstein, executive director of the Coalition on Human Needs. &#8220;Senator Vitter&#8217;s proposal will be especially tough on elderly and poor people who do not have the documents needed to get their photo ID, and who will struggle even to get to the necessary offices. They will wind up going without food.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A recent inspector general audit estimated that $222 million per year could be saved by cracking down on fraud. The audit found some of the more obvious scams, such as recipients using “erroneous” Social Security numbers, or receiving duplicate benefits in the same state. Others fraudsters were getting benefits from more than one state at the same time, or using a dead person’s Social Security number to collect benefits. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet if that number is accurate, fraud is not a large problem, since it comprises only .28 percent of the $79 billion spent on the program. That is not to say cheating shouldn&#8217;t be addressed. But it leads one to believe that a non-recovering economy is the more likely culprit.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Furthermore, there is far more evidence to support that scenario. Despite the president touting an unemployment rate of 6.7 percent, a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-01-10/people-not-labor-force-soar-record-918-million-participation-rate-plunges-1978-level">record-shattering</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> 91.8 million Americans are no longer in the workforce, and the labor participation rate has reached its lowest level since 1978. That lack of labor force participation includes a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://weaselzippers.us/americans-not-in-labor-force-at-all-time-high-91-8-million/">record number</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of women (55 million), and the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/01/black-labor-force-participation-rate-under-obama-hits-rock-bottom-lowest-level-ever-recorded/">lowest</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> workforce participation rate for black Americans </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">ever recorded</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The population of the United State is </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://weaselzippers.us/americans-not-in-labor-force-at-all-time-high-91-8-million/">approximately</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> 317 million. Thus, more than a few Americans might be wondering how we have an unemployment rate of only 6.7 percent when almost 92 million people no longer participate in the workforce. Surely some have retired and some are not eligible to work, but what about the rest?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.emarotta.com/should-we-wallow-in-the-rising-stock-market/">memo</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> sent out to his clients, Wall Street advisor David John Marotta contends that the government&#8217;s statistics are </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://washingtonexaminer.com/wall-street-advisor-actual-unemployment-is-37.2-misery-index-worst-in-40-years/article/2542604">fraudulent</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. &#8220;Unemployment in its truest definition, meaning the portion of people who do not have any job, is 37.2%,&#8221; he contends. &#8220;This number obviously includes some people who are not or never plan to seek employment. But it does describe how many people are not able to, do not want to or cannot find a way to work. Policies that remove the barriers to employment, thus decreasing this number, are obviously beneficial.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">He also explains the essence of the co-called &#8220;jobless recovery,&#8221; where Wall Street flirts with record highs, even as </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/07/28/americans-poverty-no-work/2594203/">four-out-of-five</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> American adults endure unemployment, near-poverty or reliance on welfare programs for some portion of their lives. &#8220;Given current government policies, it is specifically by avoiding U.S. workers that companies are keeping their profits strong,” he explains. “Obamacare punishes large companies for each full-time worker and provides strong incentives for small businesses to stay below 50 full-time-equivalent employees. Automation and outsourcing are making U.S. companies more profitable at the expense of U.S. employment.&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">He further contends the government is manipulating the data used to calculate inflation, which is also being exacerbated by the Federal Reserve&#8217;s continuing bond purchases that devalue our currency. This combination of unemployment stats and inflation rate is known as the &#8220;misery index,&#8221; and Marotta believes it should be nearly double what the government officially says it is.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Marotta is not the only one accusing the government of fudging statistics for political benefit. The House Oversight Committee has </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://nypost.com/2014/01/20/commerce-muscles-in-on-congress-hearing/">begun</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> an investigation into allegations unearthed by the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">NY Post’s</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> John Crudele. He contends a “knowledgeable source” told him the Census Bureau, which compiles the data used by the Labor Department to calculate the monthly unemployment rate, was manipulating that data in the months leading up to the 2012 election. The focus of the investigation is the period between August and September of that year, when the unemployment rate dropped from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Census Bureau is controlled by the Commerce Department. And in a familiar refrain, some Committee members assert that Commerce is stonewalling the probe.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Whatever the real statistics are, they are not the only indication that all is not well. CNBC </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/101353168">reports</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that the nation is facing a &#8220;tsunami&#8221; of retail store closings. They include Sears, which will close its flagship store in Chicago, adding it to the list of 300 closures the chain has made since 2010. J.C. Penny&#8217;s and Macy&#8217;s have also announced multiple store closings. Target will eliminate 475 jobs worldwide, and not refill 700 positions&#8211;assuming they can weather the massive data breach that </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.wjla.com/articles/2014/01/target-data-breach-info-begins-popping-up-but-source-still-hard-to-track-99508.html">affected</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> 110 million credit card users shopping at their stores.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Last year, retail jobs </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/lower-paying-industries-led-2013-us-job-gains-21491763">accounted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> for the second-highest number of employees in the nation, after government jobs and those in the professional services industry. Thus, large numbers of store closings do not bode well for that sector this year. Yet even more telling, lower-paying jobs in general accounted for most of the nation&#8217;s job creation last year &#8212; with the largest percentage increase occurring in the temporary help industry.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Americans have noticed. A Fox News </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/interactive/2014/01/22/fox-news-poll-voters-say-us-still-in-recession-glad-know-snowden-secrets/">poll</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> published yesterday reveals that 74 percent of the public believes the nation is still in recession. Furthermore, they&#8217;re apparently not buying the administration&#8217;s populist solutions for fixing it. When asked what the most important economic issue facing the country was, 40 percent said jobs and unemployment, followed by government spending at 36 percent. Only 12 percent said income inequality, and only 6 percent thought taxes were the nation’s most pressing economic problem.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And then there is the proverbial 800-pound gorilla known as ObamaCare. On Tuesday, Target </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-21/target-to-drop-health-insurance-for-part-time-workers.html">announced</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it would no longer offer health insurance to its part-time employees beginning April 1. Ironically, this announcement was made the same day the Associated Press (AP) ran a story </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.denverpost.com/obamacare/ci_24956054/law-affects-those-insurance-thru-work-too">contending</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that ObamaCare “isn&#8217;t expected to prompt sudden, radical changes for workers.&#8221; It further contended that &#8220;anecdotes of companies cutting employees&#8217; hours aren&#8217;t showing up in official U.S. employment numbers.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Note the word &#8220;official.&#8221; Last month, a paltry 74,000 jobs were created, even as 347,000 Americans left the workforce. That means for every jobs created, almost five Americans stopped looking for work. As far as the Obama administration and its media allies like the AP are concerned, the former number is &#8220;official.&#8221; The latter number is unofficial&#8211;or perhaps &#8220;anecdotal.&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">One suspects the more than 47 million Americans on food stamps, along with every other American enduring the slowest &#8220;recovery&#8221; since WWII have little interest in statistics. They want jobs, and dubious government employment numbers and empty rhetoric, courtesy of the president and his party, are not viable substitutes.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Attack on Workers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/obamas-attack-on-low-income-workers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-attack-on-low-income-workers</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 07 Jan 2014 05:19:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Obama's pivot to raising the minimum wage -- and destroying jobs for the marginalized. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/2055669-300x202.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214737" alt="2055669-300x202" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/2055669-300x202.jpg" width="270" height="182" /></a>Democrats and President Obama aim to make raising the minimum wage and focusing on growing inequality their main agenda for the 2014 mid-term election campaign. The <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/30/us/politics/democrats-turn-to-minimum-wage-as-2014-strategy.html?partner=rss&amp;emc=rss&amp;_r=3&amp;">strategy</a> behind the effort is two-fold: make Republicans defend their opposition to a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/29/business/on-registers-other-side-little-money-to-spend.html">policy</a> favored by a majority of the public, and increase the turnout of youth and minority voters who lean Democrat, but typically stay way from mid-term elections. Unfortunately, the effort amounts to little more than feel-good populism supported by a host of dubious actors, even as it masks the true nature of the problem.</p>
<p>The dubious actors have familiar names. They include ACORN, the community organizer group that was <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/09/17/congress-votes-strip-acorn-federal-funding/">defunded</a> by Congress in 2009, following a tax fraud scandal, Industrial Areas Foundation, which was <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/01/minimum-wage-politics-democratic-party-101764.html#.Usr9M_YjH1y">founded</a> by radical strategist Saul Alinsky, labor unions such as the SEIU, and other progressive entities like Americans United for Change and the National Employment Law Project. “It puts Republicans on the wrong side of an important value issue when it comes to fairness,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the president’s senior adviser. “You can make a very strong case that this will be a helpful issue for Democrats in 2014. But the goal here is to actually get it done. That’s why the president put it on the agenda.”</p>
<p>The agenda consists of Democrats in Congress and the president getting behind an initiative that raises the minimum wage from the current $7.25 per hour to $10.10 per hour by 2015, and <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/23/raise-minimum-wage_n_4493673.html">indexes</a> it to inflation. The president is also planning to make a series of speeches on the issue across the nation timed to coincide with minimum wage votes in Congress, undoubtedly led by the Democratically-controlled Senate. In addition, Democrats and their supporters aim to put minimum wage increases on the ballot in several states, including Arkansas, Alaska and South Dakota and New Mexico. The win-win scenario they envision is rousing their base, and just as importantly, shifting the conversation away from the disastrous rollout of ObamaCare, especially in those states where Democratic candidates for office will undoubtedly be put on the defensive because of it. “The more Republicans obsess on repealing the Affordable Care Act and the more we focus on rebuilding the middle class with a minimum-wage increase, the more voters will support our candidates,” said Representative Steve Israel (D-NY), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.</p>
<p>That may be wishful thinking. While it remains difficult at the present time to determine how much ObamaCare will impact lower-income, or minimum wage voters, Americans who shopped for insurance in the individual market will endure premium <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/11/04/49-state-analysis-obamacare-to-increase-individual-market-premiums-by-avg-of-41-subsidies-flow-to-elderly/">hikes</a> in 41 states and the District of Columbia. Those hikes are approximately 41 percent in the average state. Moreover, the brunt of them will be borne by the healthy, young male voters that comprise a substantial part of the aforementioned youth vote Democrats see as critical to their success. That would be the same youth vote whose currently <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-04/youth-break-with-president-on-obamacare-support-in-poll.html">cratering</a> support for Obama (and likely other Democrats by extension) is tied directly to the healthcare bill.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the individual insurance market is only part of the equation. Despite Obama&#8217;s unconstitutional delay of the business mandate until after the 2014 election, Americans who get their insurance through their employers will likely get their notification of policy cancellations prior to it, since insurance companies must have time to prepare. According to the the administration&#8217;s calculations&#8211;made in 2010&#8211;as many as 100 million Americans will lose policies provided by small and large businesses. Thus, despite Democrats&#8217; best efforts, it remains to be seen whether the American voter is more attuned to rewarding Democrats for their efforts on the minimum wage and income inequality front, or hammering them for a healthcare bill whose premium hikes could more than offset <i>any</i> wage increases, minimum or otherwise.</p>
<p>The Heritage Foundation <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/11/impact-of-obamacare-and-minimum-wage-hike-on-workers-and-jobs">illuminates</a> this particular reality with regard to employers. Despite the president&#8217;s desire to raise the minimum wage to over $10 per hour for workers, they note that the federal government has already raised the cost of hiring those workers to that level. If the president pushes through his raise to $10.10?  &#8220;Coupled with the employer penalty and existing taxes, this would raise the minimum cost of hiring a full-time worker to $12.71 per hour. Employers would respond by eliminating jobs and cutting workers to part-time status, making it significantly more difficult for unskilled workers to get ahead,&#8221; concludes authors James Sherk and Patrick Tyrrell.</p>
<p>The American left remains undaunted by such realities. Their arguments revolve around the idea of what a &#8220;living wage,&#8221; should be, and they have successfully pushed that initiative for decades in cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. Their attitude is <a href="http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2013/09/17/minimum-wage-madness-part-ii-n1701833/page/full">informed</a> by what they believe a worker needs or “deserves” to make, irrespective of a worker&#8217;s skill level, experience or productivity. They cite a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/02/1010-minimum-wage_n_4532723.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003">study</a> by University of Massachusetts-Amherst economist Arindrajit Dube, who claims that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour could help to raise 4.6 million Americans above the poverty line directly, and thin the ranks of the nation&#8217;s poor by 6.8 million, over the long term longer-term effects.</p>
<p>Yet even Dube himself was forced to concede that raising the minimum wage wouldn&#8217;t be nearly as effective as policies like the Earned Income Tax Credit, food stamps and others aimed at reducing the unemployment rate among those referred to as &#8220;high-risk&#8221; groups of Americans. “We have to remember that many families in poverty have very little or no connection to the labor market, so of course we can’t expect a wage-based policy like a minimum wage increase to have a very large effect on the poverty,” he noted. “But nonetheless, we find it has a moderate-sized impact.”</p>
<p>It is precisely those people who have very little or no connection to the labor market that may never develop one. Since about 60 percent of Americans living in poverty don&#8217;t work at all, raising the minimum wage will make it <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/williamdunkelberg/2012/12/31/why-raising-the-minimum-wage-kills-jobs/">harder</a> for them to find employment. Even when minimum wages are raised, less than 15 percent of the overall increase will go to people below the poverty line, and less than 33 percent of those receiving minimum wage are families below the poverty line. A majority of families are above the poverty line, meaning a so-called anti-poverty program is largely missing its mark. In fact, <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/02/who-earns-the-minimum-wage-suburban-teenagers-not-single-parents">data</a> from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Census Bureau show that most minimum wage workers are overwhelmingly young and part-time, and that their average family income is over $53,00 per year.</p>
<p>Moreover, only <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/07/19/who-makes-minimum-wage/">2.9 percent</a> of American workers earn minimum wage. That number is considerably lower than the 4.7 percent of minimum wage workers tallied in 1979, when the BLS began a regular study of minimum wage workers.</p>
<p>And despite Dube&#8217;s contentions, when Congress raised the minimum wage 10.6 percent in July of 2009, the ensuing six months saw 600,000 teenagers lose their jobs. The reason for this is simple common sense. Money spent on any wage increase either comes out of the employer&#8217;s pocket, that of his customer, or an employee who must be terminated to maintain the status quo. As Forbes Magazine&#8217;s William Dunkelberg <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/williamdunkelberg/2012/12/31/why-raising-the-minimum-wage-kills-jobs/">explains,</a> poorly done studies by agenda-driven research groups can&#8217;t obscure basic economics. &#8220;The Law of Demand always works: the higher the price of anything, the less that will be taken, and this includes labor,&#8221; he writes.</p>
<p>If that were not the case, then why wouldn&#8217;t the American left advocate for a minimum wage of $50 per hour, or $100 per hour? Because even they know prices would have to rise commensurately to make such a scheme viable.  Even if one talks about the smaller increments Democrats champion, only the numbers change, not the reasoning. That so many Americans fail to grasp this is a testament to the reality that populist rhetoric is no match for basic economics&#8211;which brings us to the other part of the left&#8217;s agenda, bemoaning income inequality. A single <a href="http://townhall.com/columnists/kevinglass/2014/01/04/5-ways-the-liberal-obsession-with-income-inequality-hurts-the-poor-n1771728/page/full">paragraph</a> by Townhall columnist John Hawkins destroys the credibility of those whose central argument revolves around the &#8220;zero sum&#8221; idea that the rich are richer, because the poor are poorer:</p>
<blockquote><p>Getting beyond [capitalist policies], shouldn&#8217;t there be massive income inequality between someone with rare skills who works 70 hours a week and an unskilled part time worker? Most people say &#8220;yes&#8221; and even liberals who talk obsessively about income inequality behave as if there should be a difference. Do you see Michael Moore, Barack Obama, or Al Gore refusing to work for more than $20 an hour because they want to show solidarity with poor workers? No, they believe they deserve their money, but those &#8220;other people&#8221; should have more of their money taken away for the common good. If a CEO should have his pay limited, why shouldn&#8217;t Michael Moore make $20 an hour? If Barack Obama thinks fast food workers are so vitally important to the economy, why doesn&#8217;t he reduce his salary to the point where he only makes as much as they do? If Al Gore really believes in fighting for income inequality, why doesn&#8217;t he refuse to make more than the guy who spends 8 hours a day saying, &#8220;Welcome to Wal-Mart?&#8217;&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>The answer to Hawkins&#8217; question is simple. Progressivism is about talking the talk of &#8220;compassion,&#8221; not walking the walk. There has never been a society in the history of the world where wealth redistribution has obviated the need for a cabal of wealthy elitists and their (often bloodthirsty) enforcers who must ensure the so-called equality of the masses, even as they enrich themselves in the process. Despite all protests to the contrary “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs&#8221; is, and alway has been, for the little people.</p>
<p>The Obama administration and Democrats might have an iota of credibility regarding income inequality were it not for their embrace of the Federal Reserve&#8217;s Quantitative Easing (QE) and Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP). QE has been described by one of its <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303763804579183680751473884">implementers</a> as the &#8220;greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time,&#8221; and ZIRP has decimated the ability of Main Street Americans to earn a decent return on their savings. The inability to get decent returns, even as prices for items such as food and fuel increase, amounts to a de facto tax on those who can least afford it.</p>
<p>Nothing fuels the so-called income gap more than this atrocity. Yet Democrats and their Keynesian economic allies remain wedded to this &#8220;New Normal&#8221; of the weakest recovery since WWII, and 75 percent of all new jobs created in 2013 being part-time and low wage. Add the continuous binge of government spending and <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/03/happy-new-year-feds-list-141-new-regulations-in-only-3-days/">regulations</a> to the mix and it become obvious that Democrats exacerbate every problem with wages and income inequality they are ostensibly trying to correct. If voters still buy into the Democrats’ redistributionist economic agenda next November, even as they are expected to forget ObamaCare&#8211;which is nothing less than the ultimate realization of it&#8211;they deserve everything they get.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Economic Stagnation Named &#8216;Recovery&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/the-economic-stagnation-named-recovery/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-economic-stagnation-named-recovery</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 09 Sep 2013 04:39:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Explaining the newest "drop" in unemployment.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/unemployment-economy.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-203438" alt="CUNY Big Apple Job Fair at the Jacob Javitz Center in New York City for all CUNY Students and Alumni on Friday, March 20, 2009." src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/unemployment-economy.jpg" width="299" height="223" /></a>While most of America remained focused on the Obama administration&#8217;s machinations regarding Syria, another set of underwhelming economic statistics were released Friday. Those stats reinforced the ongoing reality that America remains <a href="http://www.thenewamerican.com/economy/commentary/item/15614-obamanomics-to-blame-for-worst-recession-since-the-great-depression">mired</a> in the worst recovery since the Great Depression</p>
<p>Once again, the 169,000 jobs created in the month of August was &#8220;unexpected,&#8221; trailing the median number of 180,000 jobs forecast by 96 economists <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-06/payrolls-in-u-s-rose-less-than-forecast-jobless-rate-at-7-3-.html">surveyed</a> by Bloomberg News. The unemployment rate dipped from 7.4 percent to 7.3 percent, but also once again, it was due to the reality that the workforce participation rate dropped from 63.4 percent in July to 63.2 percent in August. This represents the <a href="http://fox4kc.com/2013/09/06/labor-participation-at-lowest-rate-since-1978/">lowest rate</a> since 1978, and while some of it is attributable to retiring Baby Boomers, Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, painted the gloomy &#8212; but realistic &#8212; picture. “We know there’s a lot of hardworking people that want to be productive, we just don’t have work for them to do,” she said.</p>
<p>That is an understatement. Currently, 90.5 million Americans considered job-eligible don&#8217;t work and aren&#8217;t considered part of the workforce. Those under the age of 16, as well as non-civilians, such as those in the military or prison, are excluded from the total. In addition, many people are retired or in school. Nonetheless, at least 40 million have given up looking for work for a variety of reasons. Schierholz notes the workforce participation rate would be going down regardless, due to retiring Baby Boomers. But she believes that two-thirds to three-quarters of the decline since the beginning of recession is due to a bad job market. “We’re operating way below potential,” she concludes.</p>
<p>That is also an understatement. Last February, a <a href="http://ht.ly/i6hbj">presentation</a> by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco revealed that while the vast majority of jobs lost during the recession were of the middle class variety, since 2010 they have been replaced by low-wage occupations paying less than $13.83 per hour. Forty percent of those replacement jobs have been in the food services, retail, and employment services (such as sales clerks and office workers) sectors of the economy. Furthermore, median incomes in the United States have <a href="http://www.bizjournals.com/albuquerque/blog/morning-edition/2013/08/americans-buying-power-declining.html">fallen</a> 4.4 percent, since the beginning of the <i>recovery</i> in 2009.</p>
<p>In addition to the mediocre job numbers for August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), as is often the case, <a href="http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/mikeshedlock/2013/09/07/everything-you-need-to-now-about-the-jobs-report-n1693723">revised</a> the jobs numbers for previous months. For the second consecutive month, the original estimates were lowered. July&#8217;s jobs number was revised downward by 58,000 from 162,000 jobs created to only 104,000, while June was lowered in from 188,000, and down to 172,000. The BLS methodology, based on the number of jobs they believe &#8212; but can&#8217;t prove &#8212; are being created, is the reason these revisions must be made. Thus it stands to reason that the August number will also be revised in the future, due to the reality that the BLS <a href="http://nypost.com/2013/09/07/1619391/">added</a> 90,000 &#8220;theoretical&#8221; jobs to its total in August.</p>
<p>This puts the three-month average at 148,000 jobs. Yet even at August&#8217;s rate of 169,000 jobs created, it would take the nation another 9 years and 10 months to reach pre-Great Recession employment levels &#8212; if there are no additional recessions in the interim. Thus, when Obama economic advisor Jason Furman <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/09/06/employment-situation-august">touts</a> the success of this administration in creating jobs, it must be remembered the nation needs almost another decade to get back to where we were five years ago.</p>
<p>Such happy talk also ignores the reality of this &#8220;recovery&#8221; in comparison to every other that has occurred since the Great Depression. According to the records <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2013/06/02/economically-could-obama-be-americas-worst-president/">kept</a> by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, in the 10 recessions prior to this one, it took an average of 25 months to completely recover all the jobs lost from the peak employment that occurs just before a recession begins. Yet<i> </i>by April 2013, <i>64 months</i> after the prior jobs peak in January 2008, the records revealed that the nation was still down more than 2 percent, or 2.6 million jobs from its 2008 peak. By comparison, 64 months after the 1981 recession, engendered by President Reagan&#8217;s monetary policies needed to stop the inflationary spiral of the Carter years, job growth was 9.5 percent higher that it was at the beginning of the recession, or 10 million jobs higher.</p>
<p>The <i>Wall Street Journal&#8217;s</i> Stephen Moore <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323324904579042830303535934.html">reveals</a> the bitter irony of Obama&#8217;s economic approach in comparison to Reagan&#8217;s and its effect on Obama&#8217;s core constituency. After noting that Obama&#8217;s reelection was largely engendered by five demographic groups&#8211;young voters, single women, those with only a high-school diploma or less, blacks and Hispanics&#8211;he explains that those groups &#8220;have suffered the steepest economic declines.&#8221;</p>
<p>Moore, who cites numbers taken from the Census Bureau&#8217;s Current Population Survey and analyzed by Sentier research, reveals that households headed by single women, with and without children present, experienced a 7 percent decline in their income. Those under age 25 lost 9.6 percent, black American and Hispanic heads-of-households lost 10.9 percent and 4.5 percent, respectively, and workers with a high-school diploma or less lost about about 8 percent of their income.</p>
<p>The same groups bore a far higher brunt of unemployment than the national average as well, with black Americans at 12.6 percent, Hispanics at 9.4 percent, those with less than a high-school diploma at 11 percent, and teens at a whopping 23.7 percent.</p>
<p>By comparison, beginning with the Reagan economic boom in 1981 and running through 2008, black women had the largest income <i>gains</i> at 81 percent, followed by white women at 67 percent, black men at 31 percent, and white men at 8 percent. &#8220;What all of this means,&#8221; writes Moore, &#8220;is that the stimulus-led economic revival that began officially in June 2009&#8211;Vice President Joe Biden&#8217;s famous &#8216;summer of recovery’&#8211;has only resulted in lower incomes for at least half of Americans, the very ones who were instrumental in electing Mr. Obama twice.&#8221;</p>
<p>Nor is it likely to get any better. The sobering reality is that we are rapidly <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/07/25/a_nation_of_part-timers_119356.html">becoming</a> a nation of part-time workers. According to the Labor Department&#8217;s household survey, almost three-quarters of the new jobs created this year have been part-time.</p>
<p>The likely culprit? Obamacare. And despite evidence <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/07/31/who-can-deny-it-obamacare-is-accelerating-u-s-towards-a-part-time-nation/">presented</a> by researchers at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) that workers losing hours due to the healthcare law is &#8220;anecdotal,&#8221; there is a mountain of such anecdotal evidence offered by employers in the restaurant and fast-food businesses who have moved their workers to a 29-hour work week to avoid the Obamacare mandate, several colleges that now rely on part-time instructors, and state and local governments who have reduced employee hours as well. This goes a long way towards explaining why the ratio of 4.3 part-time jobs for every full-time job being added to the economy is a historical anomaly.</p>
<p>Thus, it stands to reason that the healthcare bill is at least partially to blame. Even the AFL-CIO, one of the Obama administration’s staunchest supporters, <a href="http://www.pottsmerc.com/article/20130908/OPINION03/130909604/op-ed-workers-will-lose-under-obamacare">believes</a> this to be the case. Its Nevada Chapter released a resolution to that effect. “The unintended consequences of the (Affordable Care Act) will lead to the destruction of the 40-hour work week, higher taxes, and force union members onto more costly plans&#8211;eventually destroying (union health plans) completely.”</p>
<p>Then there is also the potential impact of so-called comprehensive immigration reform. In June, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/06/18/CBO-releases-report-on-immigration-bill-s-costs">predicted</a> that the Gang of Eight bill would reduce the federal budget deficit by $875 billion over 20 years. Yet the same report <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/06/18/CBO-Immigration-bill-would-drive-down-American-workers-wages?utm_source=e_breitbart_com&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_content=Breitbart+News+Roundup,+June+19,+2013&amp;utm_campaign=20130619_m116392690_Breitbart+News+Roundup,+June+19,+2013&amp;utm_term=More">predicted</a> that the legislation would also drive down the wages of <i>American</i> workers and make it more difficult for them to find a job. For anyone but the politicians looking for votes, and businesses looking for cheaper labor, that&#8217;s a lousy tradeoff.</p>
<p>Another lousy tradeoff is the distorted relationship between Wall Street and the Federal Reserve. The market was actually hoping the economic numbers would be <i>worse</i>, so that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke would continue pursuing his money printing program known as &#8220;quantitative easing&#8221; (QE). It is QE that has driven Wall Street to record highs even as million of Americans on Main Street languish in the economic malaise known as the &#8220;new normal.&#8221; This unseemly catering to Wall Street bankers and brokers is something worth remembering the next time the president insists he is a champion of the middle class.</p>
<p>It is a middle class, much like the economy itself that remains mired in stagnation. And unless there is a radical change in the administration&#8217;s economic agenda, stagnation may be the best Americans can hope for.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Rubio: No Friend to Immigrants and the Working Class</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mary-grabar/rubio-no-friend-to-immigrants-and-the-working-class/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rubio-no-friend-to-immigrants-and-the-working-class</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 09 Sep 2013 04:20:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mary Grabar]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=203434</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The path to ending the conservative movement -- and prosperity for the poor -- begins with amnesty. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Sen.-Marco-Rubio_immigration-cropped-proto-custom_28.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-203435" alt="John McCain, Charles Schumer, Marco Rubio, Robert Menendez" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Sen.-Marco-Rubio_immigration-cropped-proto-custom_28-431x350.jpg" width="259" height="210" /></a>When it comes to immigration, our terms have been redefined in an Orwellian sleight of hand.  Today, the one who comes over the border illegally is called the same thing as the one who waits to come over legally, as those of my parents’ generation did.</p>
<p>Back in the late 1950s when my parents and aunts and uncles escaped from communist Yugoslavia being an immigrant meant staying off the government dole and having “sponsors” guaranteeing that you would.  My relatives spent years as refugees in Austria, where they worked on farms, often living in barracks.  Once here, they were greeted by sponsors who guaranteed housing, food, and medical care until the new immigrants could find jobs.  It was a mark of shame to receive public assistance.  Immigrants skimped and saved.  They struggled to learn English and what they could not learn they demanded their children learn.  When I and my cousins went to public school, we were inculcated with American values and strove to become Americanized.</p>
<p>This is not true today where government-paid workers search out immigrants, offering them government assistance.  In schools, immigrant and illegal alien children get anti-American lessons, and often in their own language.</p>
<p>Now Republicans are embracing the same ideas.  They even use the language of the Marxists who have been behind the push to legalize millions of illegal aliens in order to gain Democratic voters.</p>
<p>As New Zealand blogger and researcher Trevor Loudon documents in his <a href="http://www.trevorloudon.com/2013/08/trevor-loudon-presents-his-new-book-the-enemies-within-tues-aug-27th-in-columbia-sc/">new book</a>, <i>The Enemies Within</i>, the push for amnesty for new Democratic voters began in 1995 when the unions, that had previously fought amnesty to protect jobs, were taken over by Marxists who then infiltrated the Democratic Party.</p>
<p>A key player is SEIU leader, and Honorary Chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, Elisco Medina.  In 1999, he convinced the AFL-CIO convention that U.S. immigration policy was “broken and needs to be fixed.”  In 2000, the AFL-CIO called for a new amnesty and the repeal of the 1986 law that criminalized hiring illegal aliens.</p>
<p>In 2009, Medina spoke about the need for “’comprehensive immigration reform’” at America’s Future Now! conference in Washington, D.C.   Noting that two out of three Latino voters voted for Barack Obama, he presented a two-part strategy:</p>
<p>In order to expand their power, he said progressives need to be “solidly on the side of immigrants,” who would remember “who was there with you.”</p>
<p>Second, with “reform of immigration laws,” 12 million people would be put on “the path to citizenship, and eventually voters.”  Medina asked attendees to imagine the gain in voters even if only two out of three voted Democrat.</p>
<p>But if one does not believe Loudon that Democrats/Marxists are using the case of “immigration” for vote harvesting, one should listen to esteemed political science professor Alan Abramowitz, author of <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Polarized_Public.html?id=JhLSygAACAAJ"><i>The Polarized Public</i></a><i>: Why American Government Is So Dysfunctional</i>.  A year ago, at our annual Labor Day book festival in Decatur, Georgia, he told an Obama-pumped audience that the demographics were on their side.  Abramowitz is known for his accuracy in predicting election outcomes.  But it’s not rocket science.  Abramowitz<i> </i>simply looked at the demographics and correctly predicted a Democratic victory.  (Political polarization was attributed to conservative “extremism” on the part of conservatives, which would disappear once they were outnumbered.)</p>
<p>As Abramowitz showed the charts and graphs, as well as photos of multihued Obama rallies, I thought of how sad it was that he would brag that the gains in Democratic voters was not due to the appeal of ideas but to racial and ethnic pandering. It was a celebration of vote-buying.</p>
<p>This Labor Day weekend, at the Americans for Prosperity Foundation conference, I heard hecklers interrupt Senator Marco Rubio’s speech with chants of “no amnesty.” Rubio has used rhetoric about the “broken system” to sell the “Gang of Eight’s” senate bill 744.  Many in the audience were annoyed by the hecklers, still seeing Rubio as a shining star, an old-fashioned immigrant success story.  “He’s right on most of the issues,” a woman told me.</p>
<p>Yes, Rubio did hit all the talking points about economic freedom.  But these were the same canned lines that I had heard in the summer of 2008 at the first Red State conference in Atlanta.</p>
<p>In 2013, in front of nearly 2,000 activists he became flustered as he tried to ignore calls of “traitor.”</p>
<p>As I left the room, I saw three individuals in bright pink t-shirts emblazoned with “Pink Slip Rubio.com” standing in the hall.  One was Jack Oliver, legislative director for Floridians for Immigration Enforcement, a decade-old group.  Oliver feels betrayed by Rubio, who had shaken his hand and promised that he would never support comprehensive reform, legalization, or the Dream Act.  According to his group’s <a href="http://www.flimen.org/">website</a>, Senate Bill 744 gives work permits and legalization to over 11 million illegal aliens, doubles authorized immigration to 22 million over the next decade, and adds millions to welfare and entitlement rolls.  Oliver calls it “amnesty first and a promise for enforcement lager,” and contends that the bill never would have gotten through the Senate without Rubio acting as the immigrant “poster child” of the sponsoring “Gang of Eight.”</p>
<p>Oliver began his career in construction as a plasterer laborer in 1968, a time when such a trade could support a family.  He got involved in the immigration fight when he heard George W. Bush claim that illegal aliens were needed to do the jobs Americans wouldn’t do.  He saw his wages drop 30 percent under Bush’s lax policies.  He had left Florida in 1986 and returned in 2002.  As a field superintendant he saw that construction workers were making less in actual dollars than what they had been making in 1986.</p>
<p>“I saw how devastating illegal labor is to the domestic labor market,” he says, citing the millions of young people who aren’t going to college.  “If they’re not going to make a living in the trades we’re going to have to subsidize those families.  It’s an expansion of the welfare state.”  Especially hard hit is the black community.  He estimates that 75 percent of the construction laborers with whom he worked in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C., were black.</p>
<p>The immigration bill will change demographics forever, he contends, with Democrats fast-tracking the newly legalized immigrants to citizenship and voting rolls.   It will end the conservative movement.</p>
<p>Post-election quarterbacks attributed Mitt Romney’s loss to a “conscious decision to blow off Hispanic voters.” Republicans sounded like a party that “hates brown people,” said <a href="http://www.redstate.com/2012/11/07/status-quo-ante/">Erick Erickson</a>. Others made similar analyses until the real numbers came in, showing that the deciding factor in the Republican loss was the abandonment by white working class voters—like Oliver.  Furthermore, as <a href="http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/11/07/gop-outreach-to-hispanics-wont-work/">J. Christian Adams</a> pointed out, going back to the George W. Bush administration, the policies of the left don’t work with conservative Hispanics, the only ones the GOP can realistically count on.</p>
<p>I am reminded by Jack’s story about my immigrant family, about an uncle who was a bricklayer, about my father who was a welder.  Other legal immigrants I knew worked in manufacturing or such skilled labor jobs.  Today they would not have a chance.</p>
<p>So Rubio, despite the rhetoric from the powerful large business interests in the Republican Party, is no friend of the middle class or of legal immigrants.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The U.S. Jobs That Went to Immigrants</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/volpe/the-u-s-jobs-that-went-to-immigrants/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-u-s-jobs-that-went-to-immigrants</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Jul 2013 04:35:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michael Volpe]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=195940</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A devastating new report casts serious doubts on immigration reform.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/iStock_000018164382Medium.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-195984" alt="iStock_000018164382Medium" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/iStock_000018164382Medium-450x311.jpg" width="315" height="218" /></a>A new report concludes that immigrants accounted for all the employment gains in the US labor market from 2000-2013. The report challenges the notion that immigration helps the economy, a common argument by those who favor comprehensive immigration reform, and S. 744, the recently passed Senate immigration bill, specifically.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.cis.org/immigrant-gains-native-losses-in-the-job-market-2000-to-2013?utm_source=E-mail+Updates&amp;utm_campaign=a781f22ea4-Immigrants+Gain%2C+Natives+Lose&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_term=0_7dc4c5d977-a781f22ea4-44724005">The report was commission by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and it was written by Steven A. Camarota, the director of research at CIS, and Karen Zeigler, a demographer</a>. It concluded that the native-born population accounted for two-thirds of overall growth in the working-age population (16 to 65), but none of the net growth in employment among the working-age has gone to natives. As the report stated:</p>
<blockquote><p>While jobs are always being created and lost, and the number of workers rises and falls with the economy, a new analysis of government data shows that all of the net gain in employment over the last 13 years has gone to immigrants (legal and illegal). From the first quarter of 2000 to the first quarter of 2013, the number of natives working actually fell by 1.3 million while the overall size of the working-age (16 to 65) native population increased by 16.4 million. Over the same time period, the number of immigrants working (legal and illegal) increased by 5.3 million.</p></blockquote>
<p>The study also found that the native percentage of the working population has decreased by nearly 15% in the last decade.</p>
<blockquote><p>Even before the recession, when the economy was expanding (2000 to 2007), 60 percent of the net increase in employment among the working-age went to immigrants, even though they accounted for just 38 percent of population growth among the working-age population.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/3/immigrants-account-for-all-job-gains-since-2000/">Speaking with the Washington Times, Alex Nowrash, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute, challenged the findings of the CIS study</a>. Mr. Nowrash concluded that immigrants and natives rarely compete for the same jobs because both groups end up specializing in different niches.</p>
<p>In April, Florida Senator Marco Rubio sent a letter to David Addington of the Heritage Foundation in which he stated that his current immigration <a href="http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/RubioLetter.pdf">reform plan would be an economic boon by shifting the immigration population to include more skilled workers</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>As I consider the potential impact of immigration reform, I am keenly aware that there will be budgetary impacts when illegal immigrants begin to access citizenship beginning 13 years after immigration reform is enacted. However, I also believe that immigration reform that shifts the mix of legal immigration away from family-based toward highly-skilled/merit based combined with bringing millions of undocumented aliens out of the underground economy will improve the labor market, increase entrepreneurship and create jobs, leading to a net increase in economic growth and reducing the deficit.</p></blockquote>
<p>The CIS study comes as the fate of immigration reform remains up in the air even as S. 744 passed the US Senate in June. Immigration reform now moves to the US House of Representatives which is currently considering a number of immigration reform bills, all of which are currently much less ambitious.</p>
<p>At roughly the same time the Senate was passing S. 744, the Judiciary Committee for the US House of Representatives passed the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/06/19/house-panel-approves-controversial-immigration-bill/">Strengthen and Fortify Enforcement Act (SAFE).</a> SAFE is an enforcement-only bill that not only makes being in the country illegally a federal crime (it’s currently only an administrative violation), but would provide more authority to local and state officials to make immigration-related arrests.</p>
<p>SAFE is one of four immigration-related bills making its way through the House of Representatives. All four are significantly less ambitious than what has passed in the Senate.</p>
<p>Media reports claimed that a House counterpart to the Senate&#8217;s &#8220;Gang of 8&#8243; was close to agreeing to their own version of comprehensive immigration reform, but that has yet to materialize.</p>
<p>If any of the four bills currently making their way in the House passes, the House and Senate would conference. In that case, the ambitious Senate bill would have to be reconciled with the much less ambitious bill from the House. If nothing passes in the House, immigration reform will die.</p>
<p>The current Senate version of immigration reform is more than one thousand pages long. Despite what Nancy Pelosi once said, it’s much better if the public knows what’s in the bill before any bill passes. Now that immigration reform has reached the House of Representatives, it’s important that the issues be fully debated and analyzed. The true nature of benefits from immigration are chief among the issues that should be discussed and debated.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Sen. Jeff Sessions&#8217; Heroic Stand Against Amnesty</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/sen-jeff-sessions-heroic-stand-against-amnesty/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=sen-jeff-sessions-heroic-stand-against-amnesty</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 28 Jun 2013 04:59:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=194860</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Conservative senator fights back against a legislative monstrosity.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/large_Sessions-made-up-mind.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-194862" alt="large_Sessions made up mind" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/large_Sessions-made-up-mind.jpg" width="271" height="214" /></a>The Democrat-dominated U.S. Senate rammed through an immigration overhaul bill yesterday over the heroic objections of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) whose principled opposition to the legislative monstrosity have earned him a national following.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/sessions-bill-must-never-become-law_738008.html">a statement</a> released after the vote, Sessions savaged the so-called comprehensive immigration reform bill.</p>
<blockquote><p>We can create a lawful immigration system that makes us proud. But for that to happen, this bill must never become law. We must return to the drawing board and produce legislation that serves the just and legitimate interests of the nation, its people, and all who wish to call America home.</p></blockquote>
<p>Despite months of propaganda and media hype, in the end the proposal advanced by the so-called Gang of 8, a bipartisan group of senators whose most visible member is Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), fell two votes short of the 70-vote target set by proponents Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). They had reasoned that attaining 70 &#8220;yes&#8221; votes would give the measure enough momentum to get through the other chamber. The Senate passed the legislation, 68 to 32, after a new version of the massive bill was substituted Friday. Senators had only the weekend to read the revamped bill.</p>
<p>“Sponsors of this legislation—despite the array of financial, establishment and special interest support—failed to hit their target of 70 votes,&#8221; Sessions said. &#8220;The more people learned about the bill the more uneasy they became. Failure to reach 70 votes is significant, and ensures the House has plenty of space to chart an opposite course and reject this fatally flawed proposal.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Senate-approved immigration amnesty legislation provides for a phony &#8220;border surge&#8221; that would beef up enforcement efforts &#8212; but which will never actually be carried out. The bill also perversely rewards employers for hiring illegal aliens over those legally allowed to work. Another provision would <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/06/26/Enforcement-Holiday-Immigration-Bill-Allows-Criminal-illegals-2-5-years-of-Safe-Harbor">stay</a> deportation efforts against criminal illegal aliens for two-and-a-half years to allow them to seek legal status. The legislation is also loaded with stimulus programs and political pork that has nothing to do with immigration. One provision would <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/06/25/Rubio-makes-factual-errors-in-attack-on-Breitbart-News-over-ObamaCars">set aside</a> $1.5 billion to provide low-income young people with taxpayer-funded vehicles such as cars, motorcycles, or scooters.</p>
<p>The measure &#8220;guarantees three things: immediate amnesty before security, permanent future illegal immigration, and a record surge in legal immigration that will reduce wages and increase unemployment,&#8221; Sessions said. &#8220;There will be no border fence, no border surge, nothing but the same tired illusory promises of future enforcement that will never occur. Americans have begged and pleaded time and again for Congress to end the lawlessness. But this amnesty-first bill is a surrender to lawlessness.&#8221;</p>
<p>If enacted, the bill will &#8220;decimate immigration enforcement and erode the constitutional rule of law upon which our national greatness depends,&#8221; he said. &#8220;And it remains unfair to the legal immigrants who put enormous time and expense into following the rules our nation has established.&#8221;</p>
<p>According to Sessions, the legislation provides that an additional 4.5 million illegals will be legalized over the following decade. At that point the nation&#8217;s intake of immigrants will grow by at least 50 percent per year over 10 years for a total of 1.5 million immigrants a year being placed on a path to citizenship, or 15 million more for 10 years.</p>
<p>In addition to these 30 million immigrants placed on a path to citizenship, the measure would also double the quantity of temporary workers who could come and stay in the U.S. for three years, Sessions said. The workers would have the option to &#8220;re-up&#8221; for another three years with their families.</p>
<p>The forceful arguments put forward by Sessions have <a href="http://blog.al.com/wire/2013/06/jeff_sessions_gets_national_sp.html">boosted</a> the junior Alabama senator&#8217;s image across the nation.</p>
<p>Jerry Kammer of the nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies, a group whose motto is &#8220;Low immigration, Pro-Immigrant,&#8221; <a href="http://cis.org/kammer/away-phony-surge-praise-durbin-and-sessions">praises</a> Sessions for his leadership.</p>
<p>Sessions &#8220;has emerged as a populist defender of unemployed Americans&#8221; by warning of the &#8220;grave damage&#8221; the legislation will do &#8220;by expanding the job competition not only from new temporary workers but also with those 11 million illegal immigrants whose liberation from &#8216;the shadows&#8217; will allow them to seek more desirable jobs.&#8221;</p>
<p>In the Thursday roll call, all 52 Democrats, as well as two Independents who caucus with the Democrats, voted in the affirmative. Emphasizing the importance of the issue to the Obama administration, Vice President Joe Biden personally presided over the Senate during the vote.</p>
<p>The 14 Republican senators who defied their party&#8217;s base and voted in favor of the bill are: Marco Rubio (Fla.); Lamar Alexander (Tenn.); Lisa Murkowski (Alaska); Kelly Ayotte (N.H.); Jeffrey Chiesa (N.J.); Susan Collins (Maine); Bob Corker (Tenn.); Jeff Flake (Ariz.); Lindsey Graham (S.C.); Orrin Hatch (Utah); Dean Heller (Nev.); John Hoeven (N.D.); Mark Kirk (Ill.); and John McCain (Ariz.).</p>
<p>Senate approval now sets the stage for a showdown with the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) says the House plans to write its own version of the legislation and won&#8217;t consider the Senate bill.</p>
<p>Conservatives are already <a href="http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/06/conservatives-threaten-depose-boehner-hastert-rule-immigration.php">firing warning shots</a> across the bow of House leadership.</p>
<p>They say they&#8217;re willing to take away Boehner&#8217;s gavel if he doesn&#8217;t play ball on immigration. Boehner garnered only 220 votes in the election for Speaker in January, barely mustering the 218 votes he needed to claim the post.</p>
<p>“There gets to be a point in time where there is the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back,” Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.) said the day before the Senate vote. If Boehner breaks the &#8220;Hastert Rule&#8221; again on the immigration issue, “I think that a lot of members in the conference would probably be frustrated to the point of looking for new leaders.”</p>
<p>The Hastert Rule, named after former Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), states that no bill will be brought up for a House vote unless a majority of Republican lawmakers in that chamber support it.</p>
<p>Boehner has repeatedly ignored the rule, bringing up &#8220;fiscal cliff&#8221; avoidance legislation, Hurricane Sandy aid, and the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, all of which then passed with Democratic support. But in recent days he has tried to reassure his House colleagues that he will abide by the rule on the immigration legislation.</p>
<p>There is “great unrest” among Republicans about violations of this majority-of-the-majority principle, Salmon said.</p>
<p>Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) was even more blunt. “The American people elected a Republican majority to the House of Representatives,” he said. “Were a leader of that majority to use his authority to circumvent that majority, that would be cause for removal in my judgment.”</p>
<p>Naive Republicans think that backing comprehensive immigration reform will somehow win their party Latino votes. But immigration is <a href="http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/01/29/why-immigration-reform-wont-be-enough-for-the-gop-to-win-latino-voters">not an important issue for most Latino voters</a> who are traditionally staunch, pro-big government Democrats.</p>
<p>Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) said Republicans are “running around like chickens with our heads cut off thinking that we have to do [immigration reform] for political reasons.” House leaders need to &#8220;stop negotiating with Democrats,” he said. “Start doing what is the right policy — the right conservative policy for America.”</p>
<p>Although amnesty remains unpopular among the American public at large, the activist Left wants the estimated 11 million illegal aliens present in the U.S. to be processed because they see them as future Democratic voters. In addition, many labor unions, such as SEIU see today&#8217;s illegals as future union members. Business lobbies favor amnesty because they crave the cheap, largely unskilled labor.</p>
<p>The Left&#8217;s goal with the current immigration bill is the same as with most of its major policy initiatives over the past half century. Left-wingers want to create new Democratic voters and flood the country with people who don&#8217;t share Americans&#8217; traditional philosophical commitment to the rule of law, limited government, and markets, in order to force changes in society.</p>
<p>An added benefit, from the Left&#8217;s perspective, is the proposed mass amnesty would destroy once and for all the Republican Party.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Only Jobs Obama is Creating Are Low Paying McJobs</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-only-jobs-obama-is-creating-are-low-paying-mcjobs/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-only-jobs-obama-is-creating-are-low-paying-mcjobs</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Jun 2013 16:19:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Jobs]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=192691</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Obama recovery is certainly creating plenty of jobs. Get 2 or 3 while you can.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ronald_mcdonald_jumping1.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-192693" alt="ronald_mcdonald_jumping1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ronald_mcdonald_jumping1-382x350.jpg" width="382" height="350" /></a></p>
<p>Good news everyone. There are plenty of new jobs being created. And <a href="http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/06/waiter-and-waitress-nation-may-payrolls-reports-shows-us-creating-jobs-just-not-very-many-good-ones/">by plenty, we mean hardly any</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>The headline numbers for the May jobs report are about what you would expect for a New Normal economy stuck in 2% growth mode: 175,000 net new jobs last month, the unemployment rate ticking up to 7.6%. No broad signs of acceleration; just the opposite.</p></blockquote>
<p>It&#8217;s a recovery. A recovery consisting of low end minimum jobs that the Gang of 8 Amnesty would swallow in less than 5 minutes.</p>
<blockquote><p>And what kind of jobs are being created? As economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research points out, job growth was again narrowly concentrated, with the restaurant sector (38,100 jobs), retail trade (27,700) and temporary employment (25,600) accounting for more than half of the job growth in May. Baker: “These are all low-paying sectors. It is worth noting that the job growth reported in these sectors is more an indication of the weakness of the labor market than the type of jobs being generated by the economy. The economy always creates bad jobs, but in a strong labor market workers don’t take them.”</p></blockquote>
<p>The Obama recovery is certainly creating plenty of jobs. Get 2 or 3 while you can.</p>
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		<title>Massive Job Growth Needed to Support Amnesty</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/volpe/massive-job-growth-needed-to-support-amnesty/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=massive-job-growth-needed-to-support-amnesty</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 09 May 2013 04:09:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michael Volpe]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[employment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gang of 8]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[growth]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jobs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reform]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=188539</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the unemployed in America will be the first to suffer from immigration "reform." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/RTR3D3KA.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-188845" alt="US senators attend news conference at Capitol on immigration reform." src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/RTR3D3KA-450x304.jpg" width="270" height="182" /></a>If the new Gang of 8 immigration bill, known as S.744, passes, the US economy will need to create 66% more jobs than it did in its best decade over the next ten years, and almost 60 million new legal resident aliens will be created in order to have a steadily growing economy, according to a new study by the immigration think tank the Center for Immigration Studies.</span></b></p>
<p>Steve Camarota, the chief author of the study, said that in his estimation the economy will need to create about 35 million new jobs over the next decade. Camarota also noted that the best decade on record was the 1990s, when 21 million jobs were created.</p>
<p>Camarota broke down the estimate this way. He said the economy already needs to create ten million new jobs to make up for those lost in the recession that started in 2008. He said that there will be about ten million more able-bodied people in the workforce over the next decade due to natural population growth. According to the study, here’s how 15 million new legal immigrants of working age will be created.</p>
<p>·         An estimated 2.5 million DREAM beneficiaries of any age (including those no longer living in the country) will be eligible for citizenship in five years.</p>
<p>·         DREAM beneficiaries will be able to bring in an unlimited number of parents, spouses, and children (not subject to any cap) and those spouses, children, and parents will get permanent legal status in five years and be eligible for citizenship in 10.</p>
<p>·         An estimated 800,000 illegal agricultural workers will become legal permanent residents (green card holders) in five years and will then be eligible to bring in an unlimited number of spouses and children.</p>
<p>·         An estimated 8 million additional illegal immigrants, including recent arrivals and millions of visa overstays, will receive legal status and work authorization. These 8 million will be able to bring in their relatives as soon as 10 years from now. Those relatives, over time, will be able to bring in spouses, children, and parents.</p>
<p>·         An estimated 4.5 million aliens awaiting employment and family-based visas under current cap limitations will be cleared in less than 10 years, not subject to the family-based annual cap (thus freeing up room for more family-based migration that is subject to the annual cap).</p>
<p>In total, 32 million new legal citizens will be created in ten years, according to the study. The bill also lifts caps on a number of visa programs and the study estimates that this will increase the number of approved visas from one million a year, where it is now, to between 2-2.5 million a year.</p>
<p>Senator Jeff Sessions noted in a press release that while supporters of S.744 had promised publicly that the bill would not significantly increase immigration into the United States and that it would move the economy from low-wage jobs to merit-based jobs, they’ve yet produced any figures that would back-up this assertion. As Sessions said,</p>
<blockquote><p>The Gang of Eight has stated, &#8220;this legislation does not significantly increase long-term, annual migration to the United States’ and has indicated the legislation shift the United States from low-skill and chain migration to high-skill merit-based.&#8221; Conspicuously, however, they have refused to provide an estimate of future flow.</p></blockquote>
<p>A <a href="http://miamiherald.typepad.com/nakedpolitics/2013/04/marco-rubio-immigration-myth-busting-shop-knocks-shark-tanks-marco-phone-rival-rand-paul-media.html">fact sheet put out by the office of Senator Marco Rubio</a> challenged these conclusions.</p>
<p>The legislation is in an important phase of the process. Currently, it is going through the mark-up process in the Senate. During this process, any Senator can add any amendment to fix any part of the bill that may have a problem. This process could last at least two more weeks before moving to the House of Representatives. It is during this process that constituent input can play an even bigger role.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Taxes Are Up and Entrepreneurship Is Plummeting</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ronn-torossian/taxes-are-up-and-entrepreneurship-is-plummeting/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=taxes-are-up-and-entrepreneurship-is-plummeting</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 07 May 2013 04:17:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[growth]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jobs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Small Business]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=188607</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The tragic new normal for small business under Obama. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/closed-business.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-188615" alt="closed-business" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/closed-business.jpg" width="262" height="188" /></a>The Obama Administration continues to punish the successful, so it is not surprising that according to a new study<a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/business/entrepreneurship-declines-job-market-improves-1C9420515"> by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation entrepreneurship is falling</a>. Small businesses, traditionally the biggest job creators, are being started at a lower rate than previously reported. In an environment where one is expected to take risks, but not receive rewards, it simply isn’t surprising.</span></b></p>
<p>Economist Tim Kane reviewed U.S. Department of Labor data and found the following number of startup jobs per 1000 Americans according to presidential administration:</p>
<p>Bush Sr.: 11.3</p>
<p>Clinton: 11.2</p>
<p>Bush Jr.: 10.8</p>
<p>Obama: 7.8</p>
<p>And as an entrepreneur who founded <a href="http://www.inc.com/profile/5w-public-relations">5WPR</a>, it&#8217;s no surprise that the number of people taking a risk to go out on their own is lower than ever before. As one who was raised in a single-parent household, I sacrifice many hours of family and personal time so I can provide my family – and future generations of my family – with wealth which I didn’t have growing up.  It isn’t so I can pay more taxes and help create bigger government. I don’t work 70-80-hour weeks so my <a href="http://www.5wpr.com/contactus/index.cfm">PR agency</a> can continue to grow so I can pay more than 50% in taxes as I currently do. I didn’t start a business so after I drop dead my heirs can pay a death tax because I was a great employer for many people – and sacrificed many hours with my family.</p>
<p>While the United States used to be a great place for business, today by reading the media we see regular disturbing news – like:</p>
<p>The Senate passed a bill for a new Internet sales tax, which will allow states tax more as they collect sales taxes for online purchases – and will allow Obama to continue creating a bigger government. The Marketplace Fairness Act (a great PR name) will make it much harder for small businesses and entrepreneurs to succeed – and will end up rising costs of products. Raising taxes in this manner is a simple redistribution of wealth where online retailers will now be required to collect sales taxes from consumers for the state where they ship goods. Ridiculous.</p>
<p>As a result of Obamacare, according to the Congressional Budget Office, between seven to twenty million Americans will lose their employer coverage because of Obamacare.  Unsurprisingly, costs for employers rise across the board due to Obama’s policies.  For example, Maryland&#8217;s biggest insurer, nonprofit CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, will raise rates 15% next year. Does anyone who actually owns a business believe that these policies are good for anyone? Or is someone simply standing around asking people if they want “free things”?</p>
<p>In New York City, the<a href="http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20130505/POLITICS/305059977"> labor-backed Working Families Party is demanding approval on new hotels</a> —anywhere in the five boroughs— from any candidate they endorse.  The city is overwhelmingly liberal Democrat, so this is expected in this city.  Undoubtedly, this news won’t resonate with a major client of ours, who has opened a dozen or so boutique hotels in the city.  But, he is about job creation – and not the union.  So forget the fact that he’s an immigrant who has succeeded in what he thought was the way of America. Instead, he’ll be expected to grovel to socialist unionists.</p>
<p>While liberals talk and raise taxes, President Obama’s policies hurt businesses and the economy.  Then again, as Jay Leno of the Tonight Show on NBC said: if Barack Obama really wanted to close down Guantanamo Bay, he should “do what he always does: declare it a small business and tax it out of existence.” It is sad but true.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Unions Angry at Capitalist Hollywood Hypocrites</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ben-shapiro/unions-angry-at-capitalist-hollywood-hypocrites/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=unions-angry-at-capitalist-hollywood-hypocrites</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Apr 2013 04:38:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[American Federation of Musicians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jobs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Marvel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[outsource]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tax breaks]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Union]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unions]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=187107</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Workers of the world -- you’re fired!]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/afm_picket_at_marvel_imag_2012.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-187184" alt="afm_picket_at_marvel_imag_2012" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/afm_picket_at_marvel_imag_2012-450x298.jpg" width="270" height="179" /></a>The American Federation of Musicians is fighting mad at their Hollywood paymasters. What could separate these two institutions of liberalism? Cash, of course. AFM is upset that Marvel’s <i>Iron Man 3</i> decided to go abroad to use foreign musicians for cheap. John Acosta, vice president of AFM Local 47, summed up the case against Marvel: “Marvel is unfair to musicians because they take tax breaks from states but when it comes to doing a score for their movies, they outsource the work overseas. We’ve been protesting and raising the alarm about this over two years since <i>Iron Man 1</i> and we feel those jobs belong in the US.”</p>
<p>For years, individual states have been reaching out to the film industry in an attempt to woo Hollywood dollars. Recognizing the business-hating climate of Los Angeles, even liberal governors are trying to outcompete the Hollywood locals by handing out tax breaks and incentives. While Gov. Jerry Brown has handed hundreds of millions in tax breaks to film and TV producers to keep them from fleeing to venues such as Vancouver, other states are chipping in to pitch woo. Maryland’s Governor Martin O’Malley has tripled Maryland’s film tax credit program to $25 million from $75 million. Massachusetts handed over $4 million in tax credits in 2011. Currently, 28 states give film tax credits, and a full 44 states have incentives for Hollywood. New York State recently passed a bill specifically designed to bring <i>The Tonight Show</i> back to the state – the bill actually had a provision that called for special incentives to seduce “a talk or variety program that filmed at least five seasons outside the state prior to its first relocated season in New York.” That show had to have a yearly budget over $30 million and a studio audience of 200 people to receive a tax credit worth about $10 million annually.</p>
<p>Do these tax credits help states? Of course not. According to Eileen Norcross of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, “From Massachusetts to North Carolina, Michigan and Iowa, a similar picture is emerging: Film tax credits don&#8217;t deliver to state economies what they cost to treasuries and taxpayers.” Massachusetts lost cash on their deal – two-thirds of the spending generated by the film credits went out of state, and a whopping 47% of the wages generated went to those evil one-percenters earning over $1 million.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, overall, Hollywood receives $1.5 billion in tax handouts every year. Glenn Reynolds wrote in the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>: “Of the nine ‘Best Picture’ nominees in 2012, for example, five were filmed on location in states where the production company received financial incentives, including ‘The Help’ [in Mississippi] and ‘Moneyball’ [in California].”</p>
<p>Now, however, the states can’t pull out. If they do, there are foreign governments willing to step in. China has enormous incentives for filmmakers, especially given access to China’s 1 billion citizens. Of course Hollywood may have to snip some outwardly pro-America material and trim around Chinese villains, but that’s a small price to pay when moolah is on the table.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Hollywood’s unions stew.</p>
<p>Unable to adjust to the new reality of free-flowing commerce, still enjoying the fruits of rich union contracts that end of disenfranchising thousands of would-be workers in Hollywood, members of the unions are the last of a dying breed. It’s still great to be a member of SAG-AFTRA. But it’s tough to use your card when jobs are rushing off to Europe and Asia.</p>
<p>Sooner or later, the union members themselves will get tired of holding a union card that actually means unemployment. All the liberals who run Hollywood are liberals up until the point when they have to sign a check. Then they take their checkbooks and run to the nearest bidder, leaving their friends in the unions crying on their doorstep.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Why Doesn&#8217;t New York City Government Focus on Real Issues?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ronn-torossian/new-york-city-focus-on-real-issues-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=new-york-city-focus-on-real-issues-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 27 Mar 2013 04:08:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bloomberg]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jobs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[regulations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sick days]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Business is hurting. New Yorkers are hurting. Why is the city pushing more anti-job regulations?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ronn-torossian/mayor-bloomberg-focus-on-new-yorks-real-issues-2/s-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-183192"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-183192" title="s" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/s-441x350.jpg" alt="" width="265" height="210" /></a>Business owners in New York City have plenty of real issues to worry about &#8211; global competition to America’s soft economy, high rents, and astronomical 50% taxes for entrepreneurs who live in the great Borough of Manhattan, and so much more.  There are real issues which business owners in NYC – and anywhere – need to be concerned with as I know first hand as founder of a <a href="http://www.5wpr.com/about5wpr/index.cfm">PR firm</a>.</p>
<p>For many, Mayor Bloomberg’s attempt to rid NYC of sugary drinks larger than 16-ounce portions was ridiculous. Now, comes something more ridiculous – which is actually dangerous for business &#8211; the NYC City Council has a “proposed paid-sick-days law.”</p>
<p>Under the proposed bill, the NYC Department of Health (DOH) would require small businesses to give their employees at least five sick days a year.  Business would be required, upon demand, to turn over their employment records to DOH investigators.  Imagine the shock of a consulting firm or foreign bank if the “Department of Health” knocked at their door? Sounds like a communist country or a bad drama movie.<em> </em>Indeed, if this bill passes that will be the fate of many New York business owners.</p>
<p>As if business owners don’t have enough to worry about, under this proposed law they’ll need to give multilingual written notice to all employees and post similar posters in a visible place in the office. If the Department of Health finds that an employer fired a worker for calling in sick too many times, they have the right to be compensated for at least $5,000 as well as receive benefits —&#8221;including reinstatement and promotion.&#8221; Has all of <a href="http://www.newyorksightseeing.com/">New York</a> State gone union and forgotten to notify us? Forced reinstatement and promotion?</p>
<p>Imagine staffers in President Obama’s office feign sickness the day of the State of the Union and other very busy days.  Will they be given promotions for not showing up? Employees will also be able to accumulate unused paid sick days into future years.</p>
<p>Naturally, the proposed rules don’t require employees to provide much besides their word.  An employer may not demand a physician&#8217;s note until the third day out – and of course, the employer cannot withhold pay if the worker fails to produce even such minimal documentation. Of course, then some other government office will come knocking.</p>
<p>Employees shouldn’t be taken advantage of – but nor should employers.  In America, people have the right to quit their jobs if not treated well. I have lived and worked in New York City my whole life. My mother raised my sister and I and never took a sick day because she needed to provide for us.  She didn’t take a vacation in 10 years – because the bills don’t stop coming and she wanted to advance at work.</p>
<p>From the age of 12, I worked in a local pizzeria for an Italian immigrant who worked 80 hours a week to put his kids through school – he didn’t take sick days.  There’s nothing wrong with being sick – but there’s also nothing which requires the law to mandate employers to offer sick days.  People always have the right to quit their jobs if they aren’t happy.  Why is this something government needs to be involved with?</p>
<p>For a state which already ranks at the very bottom of the “<a href="http://www.sbecouncil.org/news/display.cfm?ID=4689">Small Business Survival Index</a>” this is more activity that is bad for business. The Tax Foundation, a non-partisan Washington, D.C. tax research group ranked New York State as the worst place in the nation for establishing a business based on taxes. This move will damage business owners who already pay high taxes, and have to deal with strict regulations.</p>
<p>As owner of a white-collar <a href="http://www.5wpr.com/about5wpr/index.cfm">PR agency</a> which employs over 100 people in the heart of Manhattan, all our employees receive 2 weeks vacation, and a mixture of 5 sick/personal days.  They also receive many other holidays, federal and otherwise, like the day after Christmas, etc.  We treat them well and thankfully people stay a long time.  This bill won’t affect us – and at my business like any other, people unfortunately sometimes do quit.  But we treat them well, and it’s none of the governments business, as indeed people do have choices.</p>
<p>Building a small business in the once great city of New York has never been harder than today.  Absurd government regulations seek to tell entrepreneurs what to do.  The role of a business owner is to create wealth and jobs.  Entrepreneurs drive the economy and the global marketplace – they create jobs and so much more.</p>
<p>It is already hard enough to build a business – the government shouldn’t make it harder. It would be nice, if just once, business was helped and not hurt by government. Businesses in America aren’t the bad guys – don’t keep punishing and hurting business.  It harms the economy – and the people.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Obama Jobs Council Has Not Met for a Year</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obama-jobs-council-has-not-met-for-a-year/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-jobs-council-has-not-met-for-a-year</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Jan 2013 17:10:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jobs]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Barack Obama's Jobs Council hit a notable milestone on Thursday: one year without an official meeting. The 26-member panel is also set to expire at the end of the month, unless Obama extends its tenure.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obama-jobs-council-has-not-met-for-a-year/obama-golf-shhh/" rel="attachment wp-att-174032"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-174032" title="obama-golf-shhh" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/obama-golf-shhh-450x281.jpeg" alt="" width="450" height="281" /></a></p>
<p>But how can he find the time to focus on jobs, when he has more important things to worry about, like banning magazines with too many rounds, playing golf, promoting gay marriage, going on vacation, spending money, promoting abortion, playing golf, making a speech, illegally providing amnesty to illegal immigrants, going on vacation, giving out money to his billionaire supporters, playing golf and throwing another party.</p>
<p>Where do we expect Obama to find the time <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2013/01/obama-jobs-council-hits-year-without-official-meeting-154524.html">to meet with his own jobs council</a>?</p>
<blockquote><p>Barack Obama&#8217;s Jobs Council hit a notable milestone on Thursday: one year without an official meeting. The 26-member panel is also set to expire at the end of the month, unless Obama extends its tenure.</p>
<p>The group, formally known as the President&#8217;s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, last convened on Jan. 17, 2012 for a White House session where it presented formal recommendations to Obama. It was the panel&#8217;s fourth official meeting since it was created in early 2011.</p></blockquote>
<p>I guess we&#8217;re through with the whole &#8220;competitiveness&#8221; thing, which was only a post-election defeat, pre-election victory stunt that just isn&#8217;t needed anymore.</p>
<blockquote><p>Immelt&#8217;s spokesman, Gary Sheffer, said Thursday that the council has not been idle in the past year—despite the lack of a public meeting or a full group meeting with Obama. The GE spokesman pointed to a series of &#8220;listening and action&#8221; events across the country where members of the council—usually one or two of them—talked about the panel&#8217;s work and solicited ideas from the public.</p></blockquote>
<p>It&#8217;s action listening. The competitive liberal sport where progressives aggressively sit and just listen. Then they go play a few rounds of golf. It&#8217;s like a vacation but with listening. None of it requires Obama&#8217;s participation because he just can&#8217;t listen. But he can play golf.</p>
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		<title>Fairer Taxes in Russia Than America?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ronn-torossian/fairer-taxes-in-russia/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=fairer-taxes-in-russia</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ronn-torossian/fairer-taxes-in-russia/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 07 Jan 2013 04:03:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[1%]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[employment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fiscal cliff]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jobs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=172335</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the "fiscal cliff" deal will punish job producers. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ronn-torossian/fairer-taxes-in-russia/tax-3/" rel="attachment wp-att-172390"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-172390" title="Tax" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Tax.jpg" alt="" width="240" height="184" /></a>Isn’t it the 1 percent of America who is creating jobs and stirring the American economy more than anyone else? So how can it be that just because someone succeeds and makes it by earning more than $400,000 they should be demonized – or penalized for succeeding as the new tax laws delineate.</p>
<p>Growing up in the Bronx in the 1980s, I could have never imagined reading as I did today that Russia<strong> </strong>has a flat 13-percent <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/ronn-torossian/taxing-the-successful-to-death/">tax</a><strong> </strong>rate. Could one imagine? The successful in Russia are treated better than the 1 percent that the Obama administration and so many others in America today view as evil.</p>
<p>I grew up in the Bronx in a single-parent household, and attended (bad) New York City public schools. I traveled an hour and a half a day each way to attend the elite public Stuyvesant High School, leaving home at 6:30 every morning and returning often after 7 o’clock, following basketball games and practice. I was a “latch-key kid” because my mother had to work so my sister and I could eat and live. And I started working in a local pizzeria from the age of 12, often 50 hours a week.</p>
<p>We didn’t have money, and it was a struggle: I am a first-generation American, the grandson of Holocaust survivors, who grew up with few relatives or family because my family was wiped out in Europe. My mother always pushed me to make the most of myself, raising me to never take anything from anyone and to work hard.</p>
<p>Growing up, I always swore my children would never want for money, as I did. Today, not yet 40 years of age ten years after opening my <a href="http://www.5wpr.com/">PR agency</a>, I am blessed to employ more than 100 people. I worked damn hard to get here &#8211; drive, ambition, sacrifice and working long hours is what made my dream come true. I don’t owe a dime to anyone. And now I am being punished for succeeding?</p>
<p>And I am damn angry that I am now going to have to pay more taxes – the highest tax rate since 1979 &#8212; because of the ridiculous new fiscal cliff laws. I am not to blame for succeeding and should not be penalized for it.</p>
<p>My office lease for <a href="http://www.5wpr.com/">5WPR</a> runs out this summer in our uber-luxury building, where George Soros, Vornado Realty and other companies also have their headquarters. We have grown too large for this office space, and I now need to rent an office in midtown Manhattan for 35,000 square feet &#8211; an expensive proposition. But my taxes are going way up, thanks to the new laws. Is that good for business? What if it’s not? What would happen if I decided to sell or close up shop? What good would that do for my 100+ employees?</p>
<p>Owning a business is often a scary proposition – even today it has been less than 15 years since I was broke and working in a pizzeria. But I succeeded, and will continue succeeding, and creating jobs. My children have a better life and more opportunities than I did, and I will continue building for future generations of my family.</p>
<p>But it’s not my obligation to pay for anyone else’s family. That is surely not the greatness of what America is about.  And it should make every American shudder to realize that Russia has a much better tax program than America. Who’s leading whom?</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Are We Already in a New Recession?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/are-we-already-in-a-new-recession/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=are-we-already-in-a-new-recession</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 04 Jan 2013 04:31:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jobs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[labor force]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Recession]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=172217</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Much of the economic data say yes.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/are-we-already-in-a-new-recession/recession/" rel="attachment wp-att-172223"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-172223" title="Recession" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/recession.jpg" alt="" width="269" height="202" /></a>On Sunday, President Barack Obama <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2012/12/30/obama-congress-fiscal-cliff-taxes/1798687/">contended</a> that the nation is &#8220;poised to improve economic growth in 2013, but what&#8217;s been holding us back is the dysfunction here in Washington.&#8221; Obama is certainly correct about the dysfunction in our nation&#8217;s capital, but whether America&#8217;s economy will be heading in the right direction next year is beginning to resemble the &#8220;recovery summer&#8221; talk from a couple of years ago that turned out to be just that: talk. Furthermore, based on recent economic data, some economists believe the U.S. is <em>already</em> in another recession.</p>
<p>&#8220;The evidence is starting to mount a recession is already underway, and we&#8217;re a few months into it,&#8221; <a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/ignore-gdp-fiscal-cliff-u-already-recession-ecri-174612999.html">contends</a> Lakshman Achuthan, co-founder of the Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI). Despite economic growth of  2.7 percent in the third quarter, he believes July was the month when the new recession began. Achuthan bases that call on data released by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), noting that three of the four indicators NBER uses to forecast downturns&#8211;production, incomes and sales&#8211;all peaked in mid-summer. He characterizes the improving employment number as the &#8220;odd man out,&#8221; but insists that &#8220;jobs are going to turn down and join the other indicators in their downturns,&#8221; further noting that the slight increase in jobs and GDP is &#8220;not inconsistent&#8221; with historical patterns that show both indicators have often improved at the start of recessions.</p>
<p>Achuthan&#8217;s take on the jobs number is technically correct, but it omits one of the inconvenient realities that was glossed over during the presidential election campaign. Much of the media were more than willing to trumpet the <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/12/29/current-economic-recovery-is-fraud/?intcmp=obnetwork">drop</a> in the official unemployment rate to 7.7 percent in November, down from 7.9 percent in October. Less trumpeted was the drop in the labor force participation rate, which declined from 63.8 percent in October, to 63.6 percent in November. Since 2009, the labor force participation rate has declined by 3.5 million Americans, who have simply given up looking for jobs. As a result, they are no longer included as part of the unemployment rate. If they were counted, the unemployment rate would be 10.7 percent.</p>
<p>Furthermore, for those Americans who believe government is growing at an uncontrollable rate, there is more disheartening news. <a href="http://CNSNews.com/">CNSNews.com</a> <a href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/73-new-jobs-created-last-5-months-are-government">reports</a> that &#8220;621,000 new government jobs created in the last five months equal 73.3 percent of the 847,000 new jobs created overall,&#8221; citing numbers made available by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The BLS also <a href="http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm">reports</a> that &#8220;total nonfarm payroll employment for September was revised from +148,000 to +132,000, and the change for October was revised from +171,000 to +138,000. In other words, employment totals that figured prominently in the presidential election campaign during September and October were revised downward by 16,000 and 33,000 jobs respectively.</p>
<p>Then there&#8217;s manufacturing, which has <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-13/u-dot-s-dot-manufacturing-may-already-be-in-recession">outpaced</a> every other part of the economy since the recession officially ended in 2009, accounting for nearly 75 percent of the nation&#8217;s domestic growth in the form of capital expenditures and exports. Once again, the data that this upsurge created 500,000 new jobs in the last two years was promoted by the president during the election campaign, even as two facts were obscured in the process. First, a total of 1.8 million manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2007, meaning there are still 1.3 million fewer people employed in manufacturing since the recession began.</p>
<p>Second, as Bloomberg News characterizes it, manufacturing has &#8220;essentially flat-lined since the end of the first quarter of 2012.&#8221; Several indicators are cited for this, including a decline in manufacturing activity for the fourth time in six months, the loss of 24,000 jobs since July, including 7,000 in November, an &#8220;unexpected&#8221; drop in exports, and a decline in new defense and transportation equipment orders in October. Moreover, the Federal Reserve reports that industrial production is an anemic 63 percent of what it was in 2007.</p>
<p>Another indicator that portends a recession is inventory. The U.S. Census Bureau’s Advance Report on Durable Goods Manufacturers’ Shipments, Inventories and Orders for July 2012 <a href="http://www.redstate.com/willbridges/2012/10/02/recession-red-flag-excess-of-durable-goods-inventory-over-new-orders-nears-all-time-high/">revealed</a> that inventory stockpiles rose in July to $59.8 billion. That number represents the second-highest total on record, topped only by the $60.2 billion in stockpiles accumulated during the housing bust that led to the Great Recession. High inventories <a href="http://www.moneycrashers.com/leading-lagging-economic-indicators/">reflect</a> one of two realities: either companies are expecting a sales boom&#8211;or current demand is lacking.</p>
<p>Bet on the latter, as reflected by the reality that holiday spending was up only 0.7% over last year, <a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/story/are-we-already-in-a-recession-2012-12-28">according</a> to a report released by MasterCard. Other credit card spending totals are likely to be just as anemic, once again reflecting another erroneous prediction, courtesy of the National Retail Federation that expected a 4.1 percent increase in sales. Since consumer consumption still accounts for 70 percent of our economy, such numbers are alarming.</p>
<p>Yet there are far more alarming numbers. Food stamp usage continues to reach <a href="http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/food-stamp-usage-reaches-record-high-15-america-food-stamps">new highs</a>, with 47,102,780 Americans getting assistance in the month of August 2012, another statistic released three days after the election. That&#8217;s an <a href="http://government.brevardtimes.com/2012/11/record-high-food-stamps-data-released.html">increase</a> of 15 million Americans since Obama took office in 2009, and it further reveals the stark reality that 1 in 6.7 Americans are now on the program. Another record-breaking number includes Americans collecting Social Security disability payments, which has <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/12/26/Record-8-8-Million-Now-Receive-Disability-Benefits">soared</a> to 8.8 million, <a href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/social-security-ran-478b-deficit-fy-2012-disabled-workers-hit-new-record-december">resulting</a> in a $47.8 billion deficit for the Social Security program in fiscal 2012. This number reveals another staggering statistic: for every 1.67 Americans working full-time in the private sector in 2011, there is now 1 person collecting benefits from the Social Security administration.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, during the election season and now, Americans have remain blissfully unaware&#8211;or willfully oblivious&#8211;to such trends. Part of the reason stems from the fact that the data used by economists to determine the course of the economy must be collected and analyzed over the course of several months, leading to a time-lag between the actual beginning of a recession and when it gets reported to the public. Another part is due to the president&#8217;s highly successful class-warfare demagoguery: he has convinced a majority of Americans that taxing &#8220;the rich&#8221; is all that is necessary to get the economy humming again, and that we can &#8220;redistribute&#8221; our way to economic health and happiness.</p>
<p>Americans should note that all the statistics compiled here were amassed long before even the <em>parameters</em> of the &#8220;fiscal cliff&#8221; negotiations were outlined. Nothing agreed to earlier this week is likely to seriously alter the trajectory of our economy. We are either in a new recession, or we are in the &#8220;new normal,&#8221; of economic stagnation. That is the reality we are currently facing for the simplest of reasons: far too many Americans want big government, as long as &#8220;someone else&#8221; is paying for it. As long as that attitude persists, we&#8217;ll <em>all</em> be paying for it, one way or another.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Dem Senators Plead for Delay in ObamaCare Taxes</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/dem-senators-plead-for-delay-in-obamacare-taxes/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=dem-senators-plead-for-delay-in-obamacare-taxes</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Dec 2012 04:30:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Elizabeth Warren]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jobs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[medical device]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Senate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tax]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=169363</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Thousands of jobs and medical innovation are on the line.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/dem-senators-plead-for-delay-in-obamacare-taxes/xxx_job_hubs007_42329195-4_3_r560/" rel="attachment wp-att-169369"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-169369" title="xxx_job_hubs007_42329195-4_3_r560" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/xxx_job_hubs007_42329195-4_3_r560-450x344.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="206" /></a>The unintended consequences of the the Affordable Health Care Act, aka Obamacare, strike again. Seventeen Democratic Senators and one Senator-elect have <a href="http://www.atr.org/dems-delay-obamacare-med-device-tax-a7380">asked</a> for “a delay in the implementation” of the Obamacare medical device tax, scheduled to take effect on Jan. 1, 2013. The levy imposes a 2.3 percent tax on medical devices, aimed at raising nearly $30 billion over the next decade. In a <a href="http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/MedDeviceLetter12102012.pdf">letter</a> addressed to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the group notes that “the medical technology industry directly employs over 400,000 people in the United States and is responsible for a total of two million high-skilled jobs&#8230;In an environment focused on increasing exports, promoting small businesses and growing high-tech manufacturing jobs for the future, we must do all we can to ensure that our country maintains its global leadership position in the medical technology industry and keeps good jobs here at home.&#8221; In other words, 18 <em>Democrats</em> are concerned that raising taxes will cause job losses and stifle innovation.</p>
<p>Stephen J. Ubl, president of the Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed) <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/12/11/dems-join-in-calling-for-delay-to-obamacare-medical-device-tax/">illuminates</a> the correctness of these Democrats&#8217; newfound wisdom. &#8220;While Washington talks about a fiscal cliff, this tax could push us off an innovation cliff, costing as many as 43,000 jobs and hurting the ability of medical technology companies to find tomorrow&#8217;s treatments and cures. It should be repealed,&#8221; he said. Dozens of other CEOs have issued similar warnings, contending that the new tax could put some companies completely out of business.</p>
<p>Moreover, the 2.3 percent tax bite is misleading, because it is a tax on gross sales. An industry spokesman with Indiana-based Cook Medical estimated that the impact on a company&#8217;s actual earnings would be closer to 15 percent. Cook Medical revealed the consequences of such a bite earlier this year: it announced plans to open five new plants were being shelved.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the tax is being levied <a href="http://www.foxbusiness.com/industries/2012/11/28/800-companies-groups-demand-repeal-medical-device-tax/">on top</a> of what companies pay at the federal, state and local level, pushing many up against an effective tax rate of 50 percent in some states. A new study based on IRS data from AdvaMed, in conjunction with accountancy firm Ernst &amp; Young, reveals the tax could also add another 29 percent to that effective tax rate. This means the total effective tax rate on the profits of some companies could be a staggering 80 percent. Thus, an obvious questions arises: how many companies will be willing to forge ahead, when four-fifths of their profits get confiscated by the feds?</p>
<p>It gets worse. As three CEOs for medical technology companies <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83853_Page2.html">explain</a>, much of the cutting-edge technology that has transformed the medical landscape comes from small companies with few employees. Many of those companies operate at a loss in the beginning stages of business, when research and development take priority over making a profit. As it stands currently, the 2.3 percent tax is applied to sales, <em>regardless</em> of whether or not a company is making a profit. The CEOs contend that this onerous combination of start-up losses, coupled with the tax, may be the difference between staying in business&#8211;or shutting down.</p>
<p>Last summer, when the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted to repeal the tax, 37 Democrats joined their Republican colleagues in the spirit of compromise that has become the new mantra with respect to fiscal cliff negotiations. Yet the Democratically-controlled Senate has kept the legislation bottled up, and the White House has indicated it would veto the measure regardless. They argue that the provision of Obamacare that forces everyone to buy insurance will increase demand for more medical equipment, in turn boosting device makers&#8217; bottom lines. &#8220;Medical device companies are expected to enjoy trillions of dollars in growing sales over the next decade, with profit margins that would make Warren Buffett blush,&#8221; a Senate Finance Committee aide <a href="http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/11/15846903-democrats-seek-delay-in-one-obamacare-tax-increase?lite">told</a> NBC News. &#8220;Health reform is providing the medical device industry with 30 million new customers and Medicare is the industry&#8217;s largest paying customer. Particularly at a time when we&#8217;re all working to cut our debt, there&#8217;s no need to single out any industry for a special carve out.&#8221;</p>
<p>Eight hundred company executives disagree. In a <a href="http://www.azbio.org/pinniped/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/2012-11-13-device-tax-letter-to-senate-leadership.pdf">letter</a> sent to the Senate in November, they specifically addressed that contention, noting that &#8220;there is no evidence suggesting a device industry &#8216;windfall&#8217; from healthcare reform. Unlike other industries that may benefit from expanded coverage, the majority of device-intensive medical procedures are performed on patients that are older and already have private insurance or Medicare coverage. Where states have dramatically extended health coverage, such as in Massachusetts where they added 400,000 new covered lives, there is no evidence of a device &#8216;windfall.&#8217;”</p>
<p>Furthermore, the inflexibility with respect to so-called &#8220;carve outs&#8221; in the health care bill reeks of hypocrisy. Over 1,200 companies have received <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/202791-hhs-finalizes-more-than-1200-healthcare-waivers">waivers</a> for provisions in Obamacare. The majority of those waivers were <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2012/01/06/labor-unions-primary-recipients-of-obamacare-waivers/">granted</a> to labor unions. Americans might want to ask themselves whether exempting labor unions, but not medical device companies, from the additional costs associated with the bill makes any sense.</p>
<p>They&#8217;d better ask soon. Companies will be expected to pay their first installment of the tax to the federal government by April 30, 2013, for the months of January, February and March. According to rules <a href="http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/blog/BizNext/2012/12/irs-issues-final-ruling-on-medical.html">finalized</a> by the IRS on December 5, the tax will be imposed on medical device equipment “intended for humans,” excluding over-the-counter items such as eyeglasses, contacts and hearing aids, and items “<a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2012/06/04/the-medical-device-tax-killing-jobs-and-raising-premiums/">generally purchased</a> by the general public at retail for individual use.” What is included are such items as pacemakers, implanted defibrillators, hip and knee joint replacements, dental implants, as well as MRIs and X-ray machines. Since many of these products are covered by insurance plans, a price increase in the products will likely drive up insurance premiums.</p>
<p>Thus, 18 Democrats are behaving like fiscally responsible conservatives&#8211;now. With the exception of Elizabeth Warren, who was not in Congress at the time, every other Senator who signed the letter sent to Harry Reid voted in favor of the healthcare bill. Since the bill was more than 2,000 pages long, it is extremely likely that some of these Senators, if not all of them, did so without reading it.</p>
<p>In a better world, every Democrat in Congress would be required to have the exact same health care coverage&#8211;along with the same &#8220;unintended consequences&#8221;&#8211;they have so willingly imposed on the nation. Republicans should be subjected to the bill as well, as a reminder that political ineptitude has a price. If Obamacare is good enough for <em>every other American</em>, such a commitment is a no-brainer.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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