Forces acting on Poor

2 Articles by Stossel:

The barriers against getting ahead have grown. 

"We've had an agreement in this country, kind of unwritten, for the last 50 years, that we would spend about 18 to 19 percent of GDP (gross domestic product) on the federal government. This is a tipping point. This takes us to 25 to 30 percent. And that money comes out of the private sector."

The effects of ObamaCare are being felt and they are not without concern for unemployment.

You would think a piece of legislation more than a thousand pages long would at least be clear about the specifics. But a lot of those pages say: "The secretary will determine ..." That means the secretary of health and human services will announce the rules sometime in the future. How can a business make plans in such a fog?
 

 

So the shift to welfare being administered by the State comes with a real cost that simply increases with time.

 

Stossel on barriers against betterment:  Link

 

There are many instances where fees and regulatory requirements have significantly reduced the upward mobility.

The city of Atlanta, for example, has turned all street vending over to a monopoly contractor. In feudalist fashion, all existing vendors were told they must work for the monopoly or not vend at all.
       
"Vendors who used to paying $250 a year for their vending site must now hand over $500 to $1,600 every month for the privilege of working for the monopoly," wrote Bob Ewing in The Freeman. Ewing works for the Institute for Justice, the libertarian public-interest law firm that defends victims of anticompetitive regulation.
       
IJ has sued the city on behalf of two popular vendors.
 

 

Stossel on ObamaCare: on unemployment being kept high  Link

 

Three successful businessmen explained to me how ObamaCare is a reason that unemployment stays high.  Its length and complexity make businessmen wary of expanding.
    
Mike Whalen, CEO of Heart of America Group, which runs hotels and restaurants, said that when he asked his company's health insurance experts to summarize the impact of ObamaCare, "the three of them kind of looked at each other and said, 'We've gone to seminar after seminar, and, Mike, we can't tell you.' I think that just kind of sums up the uncertainty."
   
Brad Anderson, CEO of Best Buy, added that ObamaCare makes it impossible to achieve even basic certainty about future personnel costs:
"If I was trying to get you to fund a new business I had started and you asked me what my payroll was going to be three years from now per employee, if I went to the deepest specialist in the industry, he can't tell me what it's actually going to cost, let alone what I'm going to be responsible for."
 
You would think a piece of legislation more than a thousand pages long would at least be clear about the specifics. But a lot of those pages say: "The secretary will determine ..." That means the secretary of health and human services will announce the rules sometime in the future. How can a business make plans in such a fog?
 
Whalen sees ObamaCare as a crossing of the Rubicon.
"We've had an agreement in this country, kind of unwritten, for the last 50 years, that we would spend about 18 to 19 percent of GDP (gross domestic product) on the federal government. This is a tipping point. This takes us to 25 to 30 percent. And that money comes out of the private sector. That means fewer jobs. This is a game-changer."

 

 

"We've had an agreement in this country, kind of unwritten, for the last 50 years, that we would spend about 18 to 19 percent of GDP (gross domestic product) on the federal government. This is a tipping point.
This takes us to 25 to 30 percent. And that money comes out of the private sector."