ObamaCare imposes taxes on companies with over 50 full-time employees that do not provide “acceptable” levels of health insurance coverage. The effect is anti-growth and anti-jobs, providing a clear disincentive for companies with fewer than 50 workers to expand and add new employees.
With healthcare costs projected to rise by 8 percent annually in the coming years, there can be little confidence among employers that the cost per employee of ObamaCare mandates won’t escalate out of control — and little confidence that the politicians will care if their mandates and taxes have the effect of forcing businesses into bankruptcy.
The message from central planning was clear: Go out of business if you can’t pay for our vision.
President Obama has expressed the same anti-business haughtiness. “What I've said is that we would put a cap and trade system in place that is as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than anybody else's out there,” said candidate Obama to the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle on January 17, 2008.
That means that “every unit of carbon or greenhouse gases emitted would be charged to the polluter,” he explained, and every year he hoped to escalate the burden on businesses as “ratched down caps that are being placed, imposed every year.”
The impact on jobs? Said Obama, “So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can — it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”
It’s that flawed economic thinking and anti-business stance, so common in the Democratic Party, that has increased uncertainty, reduced investment, and killed job creation.