Lying Should Have Consequences

After looking through several dictionaries I settled for this definition of  lying: “the deliberate act of deviating from the truth.”

Some people in the position of authority don’t realize that their lies can set the wheels of motion  that might have devastating consequences for their subordinates.

A friend of mine told me a story that had me seething yesterday. He said that his premium increase in his health care coverage will cause him to withdraw from his 401k and use that money to pay off his mortgage.

The friend said that his old company had been bought out by another company. The new company representative said that their company had to raise their premiums because of Obamacare and that they should have considered that when voting for Obama. You see what happened? The representative knew that the employees would start grumbling about the higher health care premiums, so he defused that by getting them to start blaming their fellow coworkers for voting for Obama. As the meeting went on, the representative told them the new company would not match their 401k contributions like their old company did.

My friend is a reactionary, and he does not leave anything to chance. He immediately removed all of his family members from his health-care plan and created a new budget for the rest of the year, which included the complete withdraw of his 401k. He is not 59 ½ years old, so he will have a 10% penalty and have to pay the taxes on his 401k withdraw at ordinary income tax rates. He will have a mortgage free house but his savings plan will have to start all over and will have to wait until he can afford to put his family members back on his plan, even thou he makes $75,000 a year.

I don’t know if the company approved of what the representative told the new employees, but I sort of doubt that he did on his own. The company probably has plausible deniability, which is another form of lying. I believe that the healthcare premiums' increase had more to do with their insurance company than anything else. It wasn’t as if Mitt Romney or the GOP, for that matter, had this great new health care solution that would have prevented the increase. According to my friend, this is not an isolated incident. He told me that his cousin in Lubbock was told the same thing under similar circumstances.

So what happened here? The new company has just convinced most of their employees to vote Republican, and only then will they have a chance to see their premiums go down. That is on the very edge of lying to their employees. Something tells me that the company will later shift to Health Savings Accounts; making it even harder for their employees who live paycheck to paycheck.

Later during the day as I was watching the George Zimmerman trial, I saw witness after witness swearing that the screams for help were coming from their friend George Zimmerman. Last week, I saw testimony where the witness said the complete opposite. Either someone is lying or they all have convinced themselves that they are telling the truth. Why not, there’s no penalty for opinions and we hardly ever punish anyone for perjury. We never punished the major league baseball players for lying in a congressional hearing, by saying that they never took performance enchantment drugs. Former Atty. General Alberto Gonzales lied to both congressional chambers under oath. Just recently, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper apologized to Congress for lying to them, so that’s about the best we can hope for.