What’s interesting in the news today?

These first two shoot more holes in the meme from the Obama admin and Dems that there is no evidence to suggest that ObamaCare is causing employers to cut hours. It goes with the increased cost for insurance, and some who are losing what they currently have.

It’s also why about 75% of new jobs were part-time. This is not helping the economy to recover. Quite the opposite.

From HuffPo/Reuters  “U.S. businesses are hiring at  a robust rate. The only problem is that three out of four of  the nearly 1 million hires this year are part-time and many of  the jobs are low-paid.

Faltering economic growth at home and abroad and concern  that President Barack Obama’s signature health care law will  drive up business costs are behind the wariness about taking on  full-time staff, executives at staffing and payroll firms say.

Employers say part-timers offer them flexibility. If the  economy picks up, they can quickly offer full-time work. If  orders dry up, they know costs are under control. It also helps  them to curb costs they might face under the Affordable Care  Act, also known as Obamacare.

And there’s also a new study out on the issue of ObamaCare’s effects on coverage.

From CNBC  “Mid- and large-sized companies overwhelmingly expect health-care costs to increase under Obamacare—and most are eyeing possible changes to their health insurance offerings because of a looming excise tax for pricier plans under the health-care reform law, a new survey of employers finds.

In fact, 40 percent of 420 companies surveyed by Towers Watson said they will be changing their insurance plans’ designs in 2014 in light of the coming excise tax as well as to control employee-related health costs.

And nearly 60 percent of the companies view private health insurance exchanges as a possible way to control their health-care and administrative costs by shifting the work of insuring their workers off to those exchanges in the future.

But most of those companies—which collectively employ 8.7 million people—don’t have firm near-term plans to do so.”

Yet.

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We’re all aware of the numerous pitfalls, delays, and missed deadlines that have plagued ObamaCare. Looks like Dodd-Frank has the same problem with missed deadlines. The Obama admin isn’t real punctual with anything.

From NationalReview  “A Congressional Research Service report this week revealed that the Obama administration has missed precisely 50 percent of its deadlines in implementing Obamacare — and with the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law, they’re doing even worse. More than half of the law’s 279 deadlines so far — 61.6 percent — have been missed by July 15, according to a new report.

The law firm DavisPolk has been publishing reports on Dodd-Frank’s progress for a while now, and they explain “the pace of rulemaking has been remarkably consistent over the past three years” — but it’s been consistently far behind the pace actually set by the law. Since the deadlines are dispersed, some months have been particularly rough — April 2011 saw regulators hit a serious cold streak, missing 26 deadlines that month.  Dodd-Frank requires a variety of federal agencies — the SEC, the Fed, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, etc. — to actually write the new financial-market rules that Congress merely outlined in the 2010 law. 

Three years after the law was passed, not even half of the law’s rules have been finalized.”

🙄

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Next up, an interesting read, which is surprising considering it’s from Rolling Stone. I don’t agree with some of their ideas for solutions, but it’s a good read.

With a CONTENT WARNING!!! for some language.

From RollingStone  “Obama had already set himself up as a great champion of student rights by taking on banks and greedy lenders like Sallie Mae. Three years earlier, he’d scored what at the time looked like a major victory over the Republicans with a transformative plan to revamp the student-loan industry. The 2010 bill mostly eliminated private banks and lenders from the federal student-loan business. Henceforth, the government would lend college money directly to students, with no middlemen taking a cut. The president insisted the plan would eliminate waste and promised to pass the savings along to students in the form of more college and university loans, including $36 billion in new Pell grants over 10 years for low-income students. Republican senator and former Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander bashed the move as “another Washington takeover.”

The thing is, none of it – not last month’s deal, not Obama’s 2010 reforms – mattered that much. No doubt, seeing rates double permanently would genuinely have sucked for many students, so it was nice to avoid that. And yes, it was theoretically beneficial when Obama took banks and middlemen out of the federal student-loan game. But the dirty secret of American higher education is that student-loan interest rates are almost irrelevant. It’s not the cost of the loan that’s the problem, it’s the principal – the appallingly high tuition costs that have been soaring at two to three times the rate of inflation, an irrational upward trajectory eerily reminiscent of skyrocketing housing prices in the years before 2008.”

“Next up is the government itself. While it’s not commonly discussed on the Hill, the government actually stands to make an enormous profit on the president’s new federal student-loan system, an estimated $184 billion over 10 years, a boondoggle paid for by hyperinflated tuition costs and fueled by a government-sponsored predatory-lending program that makes even the most ruthless private credit-card company seem like a “Save the Panda” charity. Why is this happening? The answer lies in a sociopathic marriage of private-sector greed and government force that will make you shake your head in wonder at the way modern America sucks blood out of its young.”

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Last night Ichiro Suzuki singled to left for his 4,000th career hit. Although some came professionally in Japan, it’s an impressive accomplishment from a guy who’s been fun to watch for his entire career.

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