George Rebane
We are all familiar with the ineptness and incompetence with which government operates programs that were sold with the familiar refrain ‘we’re from the government, and we’re here to help.’ The news on the ability of government to do anything right, beyond its constitutional mandate of protecting the nation, just keeps getting worse. To much of all this we have developed a tin ear, and at least half of us don’t even know what’s going on.
Fox News revisited the growing debacle of benefits for wounded veterans. Seatbelts on? Upon discharge from military hospitals veterans must apply for continuing benefits. On the average, a disabled veteran must fill out 613 separate forms from 18 different (and overalapping) agencies to get the process going. Every year these applications take 43,000,000 hours to process by government workers (I expect that at $100 per burdened hour). Today the broken system has an 833,000 claim backlog in which claims take an average of 260 days to work through, and some up to three years.
Onto such demonstrated bureaucratic incompetence our IRS has been mandated by Obamacare to administer this legislative late-term abortion. And it’s clear that no one really knows what to do to implement the core function of the law which is comprised of the employer and individual mandates to purchase state-designated health insurance. The approaching Obamacare “train wreck” has now become so obvious that it is necessary to grant exceptions, deferrals, and delay its implementation part by noxious part. The employer mandate has been quietly pushed back from its legislated start of 2014 to 2015, after the mid-term elections. The administration scumbags don’t want to saddle the entire Democratic party with the inevitable bad news that will become a torrent during an election year as application of the mandate is attempted.
Meanwhile businesses have already begun insulating themselves the best they can. The so-called ‘49ers’ are jumping through hoops by not hiring, reducing jobs, sharing jobs, etc to keep under the 50 FTE threshold where fines get levied and extra reporting kicks in if they don’t provide government prescribed healthcare to their workers. (All businesses must still file a new monthly report to the IRS on the hourly breakdown of each employee’s work.)
But the real screamer is that the feds (Treasury Department) are neither ready nor have a clue about how to process the claims and information that will roll in from America’s 5.7 million businesses – their data management systems are not up to handling the work, and the actual processes to shuffle the reports etc are beyond their ken. Montana senator Max Baucus, an author of this legislative cow pie, knew of what he spoke when he uttered the now famous assessment of what is coming at us down the rails. The only thing working without a hitch is the big Lie Factory at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that has now perfected the Congressional End-run as it fundamentally transforms the nation.
[update] To make the impact of the described train wreck more clear, we should also take a closer look at this year’s job reports that are making a thrill go down the legs of the people at National Propaganda Radio. The up reports culminated with the Labor Dept dubious report that in June employers increased the total non-farm payrolls by 195K. Most people just take this number as the number of regular jobs added. But the jobs report is another squirrely statistic that comes out of the Beltway (details here http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm ). In what we consider normal full time jobs, the 195K is reduced considerably. Overall, June’s contribution brings the year’s total to 687K jobs added in 2013.
But all jobs are not created equal, and even less equal when the feds declare that they have lowered the full time work week to 30 hours from the usual accounting of 35 hours or more. When we break down the year’s total new jobs, we find that only 130K full time jobs have been created this year. The remaining 557K jobs are part time, and mostly in the hospitality industry – ‘… and would like fries with that?’ When the June job situation is examined more closely (see graphic from Zero Hedge), we find that according to the June Household Survey the full time job count actually plunged. The positive report was made up by a sizeable part time hiring as employers attempt to minimize Obamacare damage to their businesses by attempting to game their employee counts as the fed’s wallow in indecision, misinformation, and just plain incompetence in getting this version of nationalized healthcare going.
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