It's a Hiccup Not a Catastrophic Disease

Recently, the Obama Administration decided to put off making small businesses of 50 or more employees provide health care or pay penalties until the year 2015.  That decision made the GOP jubilant. They said  that it just proved that Obamacare is a train wreck about to happen.  Nothing could be further from the truth because this only affects about 6% of the companies in that category or to be more precise, 250,000 of them.

I agree with Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, making small companies of 50 employees or more provide health insurance will just cause the company to layoff  employees or cut their hours back so they don’t reach that magic number.  The larger companies already provide 100% health insurance to their employees and those companies that hire less than 50 employees were never affected by law.  It probably should be based on the company's revenues. I believe the 50 or employee mandate idea was provided by former Senator Olympia Snowe and it was one of many ideas from the GOP that was implemented in the new healthcare law.

Whether the White House admits it or not; it takes the issue off the table in the midterm elections.  The Republicans can't say that small businesses will definitely be hurt because the administration has another year to come up with a better plan.  You would think that this would be an opportune time for the Republicans to come up with an alternative plan for small businesses, but they don't have one.

The GOP has two main goals: wait until the midterms when they gain control of the house and senate and don't give Obama any victories.  That's the reason they won't come up with a plan to fix what's wrong with health care or vote on an infrastructure project that will bolster the 195,000 jobs that were created in June. The House immigration reform bill will only include border enforcements measures in piecemeal fashion and it WILL NEVER include a path to citizenship.

The Republican governors know that it's ludicrous to pass up Medicaid funding where the Federal government picks up most of the  tab for the first three years ,knowing that if they lose the midterms, they will only hurt their taxpayers for that short period.  They don't care if  hundreds of thousands of people will be hurt for their political decision because it’s not their constituents besides those states are enacting laws to keep them from voting in high numbers anyway. They haven’t figured out that the state  and taxpayers will still pick up the tab for the use of the emergency rooms.

Kathleen Sebelius,Secretary of Health and Human Service, recently wrote letters to the commissioners of professional sports, asking them to help explain to people how to sign up for the health care exchanges and  to point out other parts of the new health care law. Mitch McConnell immediately wrote the NFL Commissioner and advised him against it and the commissioner declined the offer of the secretary. I've seen professional sports make public health announcements all the time but now it's political.

I understood from the very beginning that it would be difficult to persuade the 90% of the people who had health insurance, that we needed to insure many more in order to bring down costs.  It would be especially hard to convince those who were very skeptical and didn't trust government to get anything right.  Some thought they were going to lose some what they had to distribute it to others who had none.  I didn't expect the exaggerations such as death panels, or as much obstructions as I've seen ,on the right.  The speaker said it was a law of the land; yet he allowed votes to repeal the law knowing  it would be the dead-on arrival in the Senate.

I used to think good jobs numbers were  what the Americans wanted to hear, but not according to one source at Politico. The writer said the decent jobs figures was a bitter pill to swallow for Democrats because that meant that the fed chairman would stop trying to stimulate the economy.  It used to be that good job numbers meant  our economy was improving; not a political win for one party and a defeat for the other. 

You can’t stop to gloat

This morning's job numbers ruined the celebration party for the GOP. It's as it's as someone turned off the juke box as they were still celebrating Romney's debate victory. Romney surrogate, former governor of New Hampshire, John Sunnu, told Andrea Mitchell,"What people saw last night, I think, was a president that revealed his incompetence, how lazy and detached he is, and how he has absolutely no idea how serious the economic problems of the country are, and how he has failed to even begin to address them,” Sununu — a top Romney surrogate — said on MSNBC Thursday. Those views are shared by people who think that this president is a product of affirmative action. They themselves could never make the grades to get into Harvard, or have what it takes to win the presidency, so they can't see how President Obama could accomplish all this.

This morning's job numbers show that we created when 114,000 jobs last month but most importantly it dropped the unemployment rate from an 8.1% to 7.8%. The 7.8% is what will be the headlines in tomorrow's newspapers because that's what it is on today's online versions. The conservatives have already cracked up their spin machine to create another government and liberal media conspiracy theory. We can argue the accuracy of those numbers, but we can't deny it's the same metric that has been used since we've been using the data. The numbers are good, but we would need another 10,000 jobs, in order to keep up with a population growth. We also have to remember that 7,600 people turn age 60 everyday and just give up being part of the workforce. It's a known fact that those with a college degree have an unemployment rate of around 4%. We also know that the most important statistic is how the voter feels on November 6th. As I've said all along, we have a consumer-driven economy, so when consumers start spending, inventories will drop and no matter what party of affiliation a business owner subscribes to, they will have to hire to keep up. The June and July job numbers have been revised upward. The housing market is starting to pick up; manufacturing is up slightly and so is consumer confidence.

We Democrats can't gloat because there will be one more job's numbers before the election but it is my opinion that the undecided will have made up  their mind by then. Recent voter suppression may have been overturned by federal judges but some voters may not be aware of that. It’s no time to get complacent or take time out to “smell the roses.”

I'm just saying that if we sit back and try to imagine lady justice balancing that scale. On one hand, we have a debate victory and on the other, we have an optimistic job number. It's my opinion that the job numbers will weigh so heavily in the president's favor that it will throw the debate victor off the scale. The Romney camp will have to go back revise their stump speeches where they say that unemployment has never been below 8%. They will make it the point that it's not good enough and the administration will admit that but touting Romney 12,000,000 jobs without specifics is not a good counter argument. I don't think the job numbers will get below 6% for another two or three years, no matter whom the president is.

Mitt Romney is dismissing the recent job numbers, but he threw those ardent supporters who agreed with his 47% comment under the bus, by admitting that those comments were wrong. That's what he would've said if Obama would have pressed him on it the other night. I think the reason for Mitt Romney's new found confidence is that he finally got out of that shell the hard-right conservatives put him in. He will now be the moderate Republican he's always been; he'll agree with the group he's talking to at the moment. The conservatives have no choice, but to sit back and hope that Paul Ryan will influence him. If you're a Romney supporter, you best not plant your feet in cement on what he says because there's video evidence to show that's not a good idea.