We have another example of a teacher being disciplined for an act of free speech in his private time. I have previously written about the increasing scrutiny given public school teachers in their use of social media sites. University of Kansas Associate Professor of Journalism David Guth has been placed on administrative leave after posting an anti-NRA tweet following the recent Navy Yard shootings that killed 12 people. Guth tweeted” “blood is on the hands of the #NRA. Next time, let it be YOUR sons and daughters. Shame on you. May God damn you.”
Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little issued the following statement after Guth was placed on administrative leave:
“In order to prevent disruptions to the learning environment for students, the School of Journalism and the university, I have directed Provost Jeffrey Vitter to place Associate Professor Guth on indefinite administrative leave pending a review of the entire situation. Professor Guth’s classes will be taught by other faculty members.”
While the statement is framed in terms of avoidance “disruptions,” it does not appear to be at the request of Guth. Free speech is often limited in the name of maintaining order and avoiding disruptions. Once again, I find the statement of Guth to be repulsive in wishing the death of the children of gun rights supporters. Yet, it was clearly a political statement made outside of the university.
Nevertheless, Kansas State Senator Greg Smith wants Guth to be fired for engaging in free speech. He is further promising to oppose any appropriations for the university. That sounds like threatening students in protest of a tweet deemed threatening to children of NRA members. A curious moral high ground.
Smith, a former law enforcement officer, however may feel such a threat particularly acutely. His website cites the kidnapping, sexual assault, and murder of his daughter, Kelsey, as his motivation to continue in public service. I can certainly understand why Guth’s words would be particularly hurtful to Smith. Yet, threatening an entire academic institution for the views of a single faculty member is excessive and wrong-headed.
Likewise, the Kansas State Rifle Association President Patricia Stoneking has pledged that it “will do everything possible to see to the removal of this man . . . He should be fired immediately. His statements are outrageous!. . . Is this who you want teaching your children? I certainly do not want him teaching mine.” Of course, these are not children but college students who are part of an academic community built on the exchange of different ideas and values.
For his part, Guth is not backing down. He is quoted as saying “I don’t apologize for it because I’m not saying in the tweet that I want anybody harmed, and I expanded on it in my blog.”
He is not getting a lot of public support from Ann Brill, dean of the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications. Brill wrote that “While the First Amendment allows anyone to express an opinion, that privilege is not absolute and must be balanced with the rights of others. That’s vital to civil discourse. Professor Guth’s views do not represent our school and we do not advocate violence directed against any group or individuals.” The reference to the limits of the first amendment by Brill would seem to encourage those who want Guth disciplined by suggesting that this case might fall within those limits. However, this is an expression of a teacher on a matter of great social and political debate. I do not believe that he actually wanted harm to come to NRA family members. He used injudicious and offensive words to convey his passion. Since some of his students are likely gun rights supporters, it was particularly disturbing. However, he was on a social media site expressing his anger in the aftermath of a great tragedy. I do not see how the “limits” of free speech would allow the discipline of a teacher for such a statement in such a circumstance. Notably, it is Brill’s”limits” point that was quoted by the Regents of the University.
Ironically, Guth specializes in public relations according to his resume. He has a M.A. in Journalism, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill (1990) and a B.A. in Radio, Television and Speech, University of Maryland at College Park, 1973.
Do you believe that a professor can or should be disciplined for such a posting on a social media site?
And Bron is so blinded by Objectivism that he thinks graft is a crime that requires only one party when by definition it requires two parties. The rule of law requires the enforcement of law and so long as there are those who would avoid enforcement, there are those who would pay to avoid enforcement. If we had one law on the book, some skev would be trying to bribe officials to avoid it. And what David said is plain ignorance. You don’t mitigate the problem of corruption by underfunding or defunding government – that’s a recipe to increase corruption. You take the corruption out of government by taking the money out of the campaign and lobby systems and make both taking and offering money in the political process a crime that has prison time and asset forfeiture attached to it for both pol and money man alike and make sure that law is enforced without exception. You give a pol money and expect a favor or take money and give a favor, you should go to prison and loose all your stuff you value so highly. That’d put and end to that grafty pay for play right out the box.
I swear, talking to you two is like talking to children most of the time.
Very dim children.
Gene,
It’s been funny to watch this exchange…. Some folks don’t have a clue…. I used to be for single party control… After seeing what the moral compass was under bush…. Not so much anymore… Term limits are a bad ideal as well…. Look at what it’s done for the states that have adopted it….
Gene H wrote: “You give a pol money and expect a favor or take money and give a favor, you should go to prison and loose all your stuff you value so highly.”
You think the way you do because you only have in mind bribes and graft. As long as the government has money to give corporations for services, there will be a cozy relationship between them. When the corporations do business with government, they don’t have to convince the public to buy their product. They only have to convince a politician that it is in his best interest to work with them. Government gets its revenue by force. When the politician gets out of office, he has people in the private sector who have benefited from him. Government needs to be shrunk to the minimum size necessary with the minimum amount of money necessary. The tax code needs to be simplified to stop cronyism. Such will never happen with our government, but that is a better ideal than what you express.
DavidM:
Gene thinks money from the private sector is the corrupting influence. Not that government is the entity with the favors to hand out [sell].
Get rid of most regulations and simplify the tax regulations and there is no more influence for corporate America to buy.
Gene H:
We differ on the means and the ends but not in our desire for a better life for all Americans.
I meant public as in government.
“Capitalism is a good tool for creating wealth, it has been abused by both the private and public sectors.”
Which is why it needs to be constrained and only a partially accurate statement, Bron. Capitalism has been abused by both sectors, but it has been abused by the public sector at the behest and paid for by the private sector. Again, the rot that is the root of the majority of our governmental and economic malfunction is revealed: campaign finance and the lobbying of narrow monied special interests. When government works for the People instead of just the wealthy and the corporate, you get entirely different results. Blankfein and Dimon and Bush/Cheney would all be in prison and Obama would be impeached for his claiming the right to assassinate American citizens without due process if the government worked for all the People instead of working for the MIC, Wall St., Big Oil, Big Pharma and Big Insurance (etc.).
Gene H wrote: “When government works for the People instead of just the wealthy and the corporate, you get entirely different results.”
This is an ideal that will never be achieved as long as there is big money in government. The love of money and power is what motivates all the players in both government and corporations. The only way to mitigate the problem is to take away the money from government. The more money government has, the more corrupt it becomes.
Elaine/OS:
That would be my model for a company, pay your people well, offer good benefits and dont work them to death. And make sure they have a good retirement.
As you both say, that is possible and I am all for it. Work should be fun and profitable for all.
I love free markets and companies like Costco and Winco should be the rule, they promote capitalism and encourage workers to excell.
Capitalism is a good tool for creating wealth, it has been abused by both the private and public sectors.
I shop at Costco and love the place, the people who work there are very good at customer service and the place just seems to hum. It isnt a gloomy place and has much positive energy.
Blouise,
I’ve never been in one that wasn’t highly competitive if not the winner on prices, clean and had helpful knowledgeable employees. I hope you find the same experience.
There was a time after I was forced to retire due to congestive heart failure, that I had to wait to be approved for disability. Money was tight because the loss of income was unexpected. I was forced to shop at Walmart. Besides the fact that the stores are dismal, the produce barely acceptable and the pricing deceptive was their shopping carts. I don’t know if this has changed, but at that point the carts were heavy affairs made from cast iron. The store was huge and I was fairly weak physically having dropped about forty pounds of weight and muscle. As I pushed those damned, heavy carts around the store I would have to pop nitro after nitro to let me continue. The entire Walmart shopping experience was quite depressing. Fortunately my income bounced back. For so many Americans today they are stuck in a bad economy with wages stagnant. The forced to go to places like Walmart which treat their customers in the same lousy way they treat their employees.
Elaine,
Thanks for the info on WinCo … sadly, no stores within a hundred miles of my residence.
There is a Costco close by and I’ve never visited the store … think I’ll drop by this weekend.
I agree, Mike. I love CostCo and having only a Sam’s Club/Walmart (and a tiny Target) in my area now is simply not an option. But if a CostCo opened here tomorrow? I wouldn’t shop anyplace else except for veggies and the odd specialty items (which I have local options on). As it is, I am occasionally forced to go to Walmart, which needless to say is not pleasant for anyone involved. It usually involves my BP rising and having to tell someone to piss off.
Mike,
I have never stepped foot inside a Walmart store. I won’t give the greedy owners a penny of my money.
*****
NOT Made in America: Top 10 Ways Walmart Destroys US Manufacturing Jobs
Amy Traub
July 2, 2012
http://www.demos.org/publication/not-made-america-top-10-ways-walmart-destroys-us-manufacturing-jobs
Excerpt:
Why is it that America no longer makes things the way we used to? Between 1980 and 2011, the United States lost 7 million manufacturing jobs,[i] many of them middle-class positions that enabled workers to support their families with dignity. Today, the nation’s largest employer is not a manufacturer, but mega-retailer Walmart – which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this week. Walmart pays its associates just $8.81 an hour on average.[ii] In this economy, a quarter of full-time working-age American adults are not earning enough money to meet their families’ economic needs.[iii] While the decline of American industry was caused by a variety of complex factors, the actions of the nation’s biggest corporation and largest retailer play an under-estimated role.
As America’s biggest company, Walmart wields tremendous market power. Walmart could use this might to help build up the American economy, offering good jobs to its own employees, encouraging contractors to do the same, and helping to strengthen U.S. manufacturing through its relationships with its suppliers. Instead, Walmart has wielded its market power to eliminate good-paying manufacturing jobs and lower labor standards in the retail sector and throughout its entire supply chain. On this Fourth of July, here are 10 ways Walmart has facilitated America’s industrial decline:
1. Buying billions of goods that weren’t made in America.
The vast majority of merchandise Walmart sells in the U.S. is manufactured abroad. The company searches the world for the cheapest goods possible, and this usually means buying from low-wage factories overseas. Walmart boasts of direct relationships with nearly 20,000 Chinese suppliers,[iv] and purchased $27 billion worth of Chinese-made goods in 2006.[v] According to the Economic Policy Institute, Walmart’s trade with China alone eliminated 133,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs between 2001 and 2006 and accounted for 11.2 percent of the nation’s total job loss due to trade.[vi] But China is hardly the only source of Walmart goods: the company also imports from Bangladesh, Honduras, Cambodia, and a host of other countries.
2. Pushing U.S. companies to move their factories overseas.
With $419 billion in annual net sales, Walmart’s market power is so immense that the even the largest suppliers must comply with its demands for lower and lower prices because they cannot afford to have their goods taken off its shelves. Companies that used to manufacture products in the United States, from Levi’s jeans to lock maker Master Lock, were pressured to shut their U.S. factories and moved manufacturing abroad to meet Walmart’s demand for low prices.[vii]
3. Making it easier for other U.S. retailers to buy from foreign factories.
Walmart was a leader in sourcing goods overseas, establishing a centralized purchasing system, technological infrastructure, and linkages to foreign factories that other companies imitated and built on. While researchers find that Walmart still imports disproportionately more goods than other apparel retailers,[viii] its innovations accelerated the use of offshore suppliers by its competitors, speeding the loss of American manufacturing jobs.
4. Forcing layoffs among its U.S. suppliers.
Even when Walmart products are made in the United States, manufacturing jobs still get eliminated as suppliers cut costs to meet Walmart’s demands for low prices. A spokesman for the National Knitwear and Sportswear Association noted that producing goods for Walmart “forces domestic manufacturers to compete, often unrealistically, with foreign suppliers who pay their help pennies on the hour.”[ix] A Walmart spokesperson admitted that this was the point of the company’s efforts to buy domestic goods: “one of our big objectives was to put the heat on American manufacturers to lower prices.”[x] Even as manufacturing costs increase, Walmart demands that suppliers’ prices go even lower, a dynamic that helped push Kraft Foods to plan the closure of 39 factories and lay off 13,500 workers. [xi]
5. Promoting domestic sweatshops.
Layoffs aren’t the only way manufacturers contrive to meet the low prices Walmart demands. Walmart’s domestic suppliers lower wages, cut benefits, aggressively fight employee efforts to unionize and bargain collectively, and skimp on worker comfort and safety. For example, Louisiana seafood processor C.J.’s Seafood, which sells an estimated 85 percent of its processed crawfish to Walmart, has recently come under scrutiny for allegedly abusing employees working in the U.S. on temporary immigrant visas (known as guestworker visas).[xii] A complaint to the U.S. Department of Labor claims that the Walmart supplier “engaged in extremely coercive employment related actions, including forcing guestworkers to work up to 24-hour shifts with no overtime pay, locking guestworkers in the plant to force them to continue to work, threatening the guestworkers with beatings to make them work faster, and threatening violence against the guestworkers’ families in Mexico after workers contacted law enforcement for assistance.”[xiii]
6. Squeezing U.S. manufacturers out of business.
Walmart’s unrelenting push for low prices eats into the profit margins of its U.S. suppliers, often weakening companies in the process. Journalist Charles Fishman provides a vivid example: Walmart provided 30 percent of Vlasic Pickles’ overall business and insisted that if the company did not allow Walmart to sell a gallon jar of pickles for the ruinously low price of $2.97, they would stop buying Vlasic’s other products. “The pickle maker had spent decades convincing consumers that they should pay a premium for its brand. Now Walmart was practically giving them away.”[xiv] According to Fishman, Vlasic’s profit margin from pickles shrunk 25 percent or more. Nor is Vlasic alone in seeing its business cannibalized by Walmart: of the top ten companies supplying Walmart in 1994, four sought bankruptcy protection by 2006.[xv]
Otteray,
It’s the sense of entitlement of these greedy corporate executives that I find particularly offensive. I read an article about Dennis Kozlowski, the former head of Tyco, recently.
*****
Ex-Tyco executives released from prison as they await parole hearings
Dennis Kozlowski and Mark Swartz were convicted in 2005 for headline-grabbing $134m corporate fraud charges
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/23/tyco-executives-released-prison-parole
Excerpt:
The Parole Board concluded in April 2012 that Kozlowski’s release would undermine respect for the law. He got an early hearing because he had accrued merit time in prison.
Kozlowski told the parole officials he’d turned down an informal offer to plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of two to six years, saying he rationalized that he wasn’t guilty. Jurors heard about Kozlowski’s $6,000 gold-threaded shower curtain and a $2m birthday party he threw for his wife on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia.
“I knew I was doing something wrong at some level when I did it. My conscience told me one thing, but my sense of entitlement allowed me to rationalize what I did,” Kozlowski told the board. “After I was in prison for a bit and thinking hard about what I did, I recognized my rationalizations were just that.”
Kozlowski and Swartz were accused of giving themselves as much as $150m in illegal bonuses and forgiving millions of dollars in loans to themselves, while also manipulating the price of the security systems company’s stock by lying about the state of its finances. The executives said at trial the payments had, in fact, been authorized.
“My conscience told me one thing, but my sense of entitlement allowed me to rationalize what I did,”
What happens with these “titans of industry” and “masters of the world” is that when they achieve power they begin to internally rationalize how much they deserve it. They develop a “sense of entitlement”, if it already wasn’t there due to there own innate sociopathy/narcissism. With a sense of entitlement everything seems possible and more than just “acceptable behavior” for them.
Elaine,
I think if I watched my budget carefully, I could struggle and get by on $650K without having to resort to food stamps.
On the other hand the CEO of one of the regional Blue Cross Blue Shield made $13.7 million as I reported here some time back. That’s not even nationwide, but IIRC, just the Chicago based district. 🙁
Costco CEO Craig Jelinek Leads the Cheapest, Happiest Company in the World
By Brad Stone
June 06, 2013
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-06/costco-ceo-craig-jelinek-leads-the-cheapest-happiest-company-in-the-world
Excerpt:
Joe Carcello has a great job. The 59-year-old has an annual salary of $52,700, gets five weeks of vacation a year, and is looking forward to retiring on the sizable nest egg in his 401(k), which his employer augments with matching funds. After 26 years at his company, he’s not worried about layoffs. In 2009, as the recession deepened, his bosses handed out raises. “I’m just grateful to come here to work every day,” he says.
This wouldn’t be remarkable except that Carcello works in retail, one of the stingiest industries in America, with some of the most dissatisfied workers. On May 29, Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) employees in Miami, Boston, and the San Francisco Bay Area began a weeklong strike. (A Walmart spokesman told MSNBC the strike was a “publicity stunt.”) Workers at an Amazon.com (AMZN) fulfillment center in Leipzig, Germany, also recently held strikes to demand higher pay and better benefits. (An Amazon spokesman says its employees earn more than the average warehouse worker.) In its 30-year history, Carcello’s employer, Costco, has never had significant labor troubles.
Costco Wholesale (COST), the second-largest retailer in the U.S. behind Walmart, is an anomaly in an age marked by turmoil and downsizing. Known for its $55-a-year membership fee and its massive, austere warehouses stocked floor to ceiling with indulgent portions of everything from tilapia to toilet paper, Costco has thrived over the last five years. While competitors lost customers to the Internet and weathered a wave of investor pessimism, Costco’s sales have grown 39 percent and its stock price has doubled since 2009. The hot streak continued through last year’s retirement of widely admired co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jim Sinegal. The share price is up 30 percent under the leadership of its new, plain-spoken CEO, Craig Jelinek.
Despite the sagging economy and challenges to the industry, Costco pays its hourly workers an average of $20.89 an hour, not including overtime (vs. the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour). By comparison, Walmart said its average wage for full-time employees in the U.S. is $12.67 an hour, according to a letter it sent in April to activist Ralph Nader. Eighty-eight percent of Costco employees have company-sponsored health insurance; Walmart says that “more than half” of its do. Costco workers with coverage pay premiums that amount to less than 10 percent of the overall cost of their plans. It treats its employees well in the belief that a happier work environment will result in a more profitable company. “I just think people need to make a living wage with health benefits,” says Jelinek. “It also puts more money back into the economy and creates a healthier country. It’s really that simple.”…
The Issaquah (Wash.) headquarters of Costco, 20 miles from Seattle, radiate frugality. The floor of the executive wing is covered in faded blue carpet, and in the boardroom, six faux-wood tables—which would look at home in a public school teachers’ lounge—are jammed together. On the walls are several Van Gogh and Picasso prints (less than $15 at Art.com), along with two badly staged photographs of the company’s board of directors. In one, a picture of Jelinek’s head has been awkwardly taped onto the frame, hovering above a Weber grill.
Jelinek earned $650,000 in 2012, plus a $200,000 bonus and stock options worth about $4 million, based on the company’s performance. That’s more than Sinegal, who made $325,000 a year. By contrast, Walmart CEO Mike Duke’s 2012 base salary was $1.3 million; he was also awarded a $4.4 million cash bonus and $13.6 million in stock grants.
The Company With Lower Prices And Better Benefits Than Walmart
By Bryce Covert
August 9, 2013
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/08/09/2444571/the-company-with-lower-prices-and-better-benefits-than-walmart/
WinCo, a small, employee-owned grocery store chain based in Boise, Idaho, is able to beat Walmart’s prices on goods while providing its employees with good benefits.
The company, which will soon have close to 100 stores with the latest openings in Texas, has almost 15,000 employees. Those who work at the store long enough qualify for a pension plan into which the company puts an amount equal to 20 percent of their yearly pay. More than 400 “front-line” workers — clerks, cashiers, and others who are not at the executive level — have retirement accounts that are worth at least $1 million, according to a company spokesman.
It also provides full health benefits for those who work at least 24 hours a week, beyond the requirements in the Affordable Care Act. While the company is private and hasn’t made wage information available, Glassdoor reports that cashiers and clerks make more than $11 an hour. Thanks to these benefits and wages, the company has low turnover. An industry analyst estimated that the average hourly worker stays with the company for more than eight years.
The same level workers can expect $8 an hour at Walmart and part-time workers won’t get health care coverage. Even half of full-time workers aren’t covered because the costs are so high. Thanks to its low pay and few benefits, workers rely on $1 million worth of public benefits in a single store just to get by.
Yet WinCo’s prices are often lower than Walmart’s. To drive them down, the company doesn’t rely on distributors to get products and instead sends its own trucks to get food and other goods in bulk, which can amount to a 10 to 50 percent discount. It requires that customers bag their own groceries to cut down on the cost of a worker doing it for them. It doesn’t take credit cards to eliminate the processing fees. And its stands and displays are “pragmatic” and “lack frills.”
Other rivals are also able to offer cheap goods and good working conditions. Costco, which competes with Walmart’s Sam’s Club, pays employees $21.96 on average and nearly all of the workers who are eligible for benefits are enrolled. Its bottom line is strong, with profits up 19 percent in the first quarter of the year. It also gets much more revenue and profit per employee and generates a higher return for investors than Walmart.
Meanwhile, Walmart’s sales have been hurt by its inability to keep shelves stocked and offer good customer service. That’s because it doesn’t hire enough employees to get product on the floor and workers with such low wages and hours aren’t offering a good customer experience. The company ranked at the bottom of the American Customer Satisfaction Index in February.
Elaine,
I could only hope that WinCo comes to my area soon. In my house I do all the food shopping and have for thirty two years. Since there were tough times early on financially I always would do my shopping in more than one store to take advantage of the sales that different stores ran. Walmart is a terrible place to shop, besides the fact that it treats its workers like serfs. Beyond that though you have to be very careful there because some items are cheap, while others are actually more expensive. I don’t shop there anymore because I cannot support their employment policies. I also stopped using Home Depot for the same reason. Good employers make good employees who make the customer’s experience pleasant. Google the history of Circuit City to see what happens when corporate greed trumps good management.
Straining at gnats David. Oh, he of logic challenged. Once again digging at irrelevancies. I will keep this simple and not use any big words. Costco is one of several big box stores that have chosen to treat employees well, not as if they were a liability. It works.
Who will have the most loyal employees? An employer who has good benefits or the employer who does everything possible to prevent benefits? That corporate behaviour reminds me of the IT character in the comic strip Dilbert, “Mordoc, Preventer of Information Services.”
David wrote: “A common example in ethology class would be a person stopping his car and helping a turtle get across the road. There is a slight risk of danger to him, sacrifice of his time too, and no benefit expected in return.”
______________
Some biologist you are! You wouldn’t expect any benefit from that turtle fulfilling its role in the ecosystem, limiting bugs and aquatic pests, creating soil disturbance? You’re a pinhead. (And that’s ad hominem)
RTC – In the context of Ethology class, we are talking about direct evolutionary benefit to the individual doing the action. How does the behavior cause him to be more successful in leaving more of his genes to future generations in contrast to his contemporaries. Measurable effects would be negative to the individual, but positive to the turtle and ecosystem.
David,
Costco’s model gives the lie to the weaseling of Walmart, Home Depot and other employee abusers like them. Costco has one of the best employee benefit packages in the big box retail industry, which is one of the reasons they have satisfied and motivated employees. Which, of course, helps their bottom line.
http://www.costco.com/benefits.html
OS wrote: “Costco’s model gives the lie to the weaseling of Walmart, Home Depot and other employee abusers like them.”
What are you talking about? “Give the lie”?
First of all, you are comparing apples and oranges. Home Depot is open to everyone and the poor often shop there. In contrast, Costco is a members only club where people have to pay in advance to join. The general public does not have the privilege of shopping there. Criticized for not accepting food stamps, Costco claimed that the poor do not shop there.
Even disregarding all that, just visit Home Depot’s benefits site and it looks much better for employees. They have an entire website devoted to it, not just a page of benefits. Employees can log into the site and manage their benefits portfolio. Looking at the summary, part-time employees are eligible after only 90 days compared to Costco’s 180 day waiting period.
https://secure.livethehealthyorangelife.com/files/2013_USPT_SPD_Final.pdf
Your claim that Costco’s model “gives the lie” to Home Depot and your epithet that Home Depot is an employee abuser have no basis in evidence. It is entirely a bigoted statement fostered by your favorite propaganda websites espousing your favorite political dogma.
Concerning the article you referenced previously, the change for part-time employees to use the exchanges under the ACA is deemed by Home Depot to be better for employees because it gives them more options. That is not abuse. That is good business management.
Citing Grover Norquist’s group is comedy that just writes itself, David.
Lee & Gene:
Who said diamonds were the hardest substance? We have proof positive on this very blog there is denser matter.
OS,
You can lead a horse to facts, but you can’t make them think.
David, the idea of all social support services being supported by charity has been floated here before. It is a nutty idea, and totally unworkable. There are too many people and institutions in need, and way too few charitable people. How much do you think the obscenely rich got that way? For the vast majority of them I daresay it was not by being charitable.
I see that Bernie Marcus, founder of Home Depot, has just told approximately 20,000 of his employees he is taking away their health benefits. He is placing the blame on the Affordable Care Act. He already keeps the vast majority of employes on a part time basis for rather obvious reason. David, gonna ask Bernie to pony up to help feed the hungry, clothe the naked and tend the sick? Good luck with that.
Bernie complains about the ACA driving small business out of business. If Home Depot is a small business, then I am a circus acrobat.
http://www.bizjournals.com/jacksonville/blog/morning-edition/2013/09/home-depot-cutting-coverage-for-20000.html
OS wrote: “… the idea of all social support services being supported by charity has been floated here before.”
Hold on. Who said anything about *ALL* Social Support services being by non-governmental agencies? That would be just as nutty an idea as saying that *ALL* Social Support services should be by governmental agencies.
Your example of Home Depot is exactly why too much government intrusion is bad. It causes private entities to back off and let government do that job. Why shouldn’t Home Depot cut benefits and let these employees get their coverage under the ACA? It’s just common sense. If government is paying your doctor, are you going to also offer to reach into your pocket and pay him too? Of course not. You would accept the government’s help and spend your money on something else. That is what Home Depot is doing.
David you don’t understand the ACA. Government will not be paying your doctor. The exchanges are done thru private insurance companies. That the government is paying is one of those right wing lies about the ACA.
leejcaroll wrote:
“David you don’t understand the ACA. Government will not be paying your doctor. The exchanges are done thru private insurance companies. That the government is paying is one of those right wing lies about the ACA.”
LOL. It’s not a lie. You don’t understand ACA. That’s okay. Few people do. Obama sold it as something free — as not having tax consequences. It was all rhetoric. Some might say Obama’s tale about ACA were left wing lies. ACA is among the largest tax increases ever when examining the raw dollar amount of tax increases. The right wing said it would be, the left denied it, well… the right wing was right!
http://www.atr.org/full-list-obamacare-tax-hikes-a6996
Business owners have to plan what is the smartest financial way to offer health benefits for their employees, so they are going to know a little bit more than the armchair quarterbacks who criticize their economic maneuvering. With the huge expansion of Medicaid under ACA, some individuals in entry level jobs will qualify for free health care, at least for the first three years. By 2020, federal subsidies will drop to 90% rather than 100%. Someone with a family of four earning $30,000 a year will qualify. Income based subsidies will be offered for individuals earning up to $44,000 and a family of four earning up to $92,000. It only makes sense for businesses to offload what they pay for benefits to the government program that is suppose to make sure everyone has health care.