Tag Archives: Contra Costa Times

Do They Know Something We Don’t?

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National Review posted a story today about the call centers being set up to help Americans work through the changes in their healthcare insurance that will occur on October 1. These call centers will be accessible 24 hours every day.

The article reports:

One branch of that call center will be located in California’s Contra Costa County, where, reportedly, 7,000 people applied for the 204 jobs. According to the Contra Costa Times, however, “about half the jobs are part-time, with no health benefits — a stinging disappointment to workers and local politicians who believed the positions would be full-time.” The county supervisor, Karen Mitchoff, called the hiring process “a comedy of errors” and said she “never dreamed [the jobs] would be part-time.”

ObamaCare is one piece of bad news after another. Even the people who will help Americans access health insurance will be working limited hours so that their employees do not have to provide health insurance. Amazing.

Hot Air reported today that the National Treasury Employees Union (the union of the Internal Revenue Service) has indicated that it does not want to be covered under ObamaCare. The IRS employees are covered under the same health insurance coverage as other government employees, and they do not want to go into ObamaCare.

The article reports:

This is the agency that will be collecting data on you and, if you’re not in compliance, levying the penalties and collecting them.  But under ObamaCare, they have the misfortune of having a “Cadillac plan”.  Currently their health care insurance is provided through the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, the same program which covers members of Congress.  Naturally Congress has exempted themselves from the law.

The first requirement of ObamaCare should be that politicians and federal employees should not be allowed to be exempt from it. If it is good enough for us average Americans, it should be good enough for the political class.

ObamaCare will not be repealed under President Obama no matter how unpopular it is. If you want to get rid of this awful law, the only way it will happen is if the Republicans control the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Presidency. Otherwise, like death and taxes–it is forever.

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Who Is Paying For This ?

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The Contra Costa Times reported on Friday that Solyndra has asked its bankruptcy judge to pay remaining employees up to $500,000 in bonuses.

The article points out:

Senior executives at Solyndra collected hefty quarterly bonuses — ranging from $37,000 to $60,000 apiece, with some executives receiving both rounds of bonuses — within six months of the company’s closure last August, when about 1,100 workers were laid off without severance.

According to the article, the bonuses requested would “go to workers lower on the food chain than the sizable bonuses handed out to key executives in the months before the company’s bankruptcy — 13 of the 21 possible recipients the Associated Press listed were equipment engineers and facilities workers.”

There are a few things at work here. What kind of responsible executive takes a huge bonus as the company is going under? What about taking the bonus and then laying off workers without severance? I am all in favor of people making money–I just think we need to bring the concept of ethics back into our business model.

The kind of abuses we have seen in the financial sector of our economy will not be fixed by increased regulation–they are indications of a lack of morality and accountability that is currently running rampant in our society. Until we get back to our national roots as a Judeo-Christian country, we are not going to solve our problems–financial or otherwise. The reason the Ten Commandments were posted in our schools was to let students know that at some point in their lives they would have to answer to a higher authority. When we removed the concept of a higher authority, we opened the door for the financial collapse that we have seen. When our financial moguls do not realize that they are accountable for their behavior, they don’t bother to play by the rules.

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