Too Small To Matter

posted at 12:12 pm on May 19, 2010 by Mitch Berg
[ Economics ]   

I’ve got two teenagers.  Both are looking for work, more or less;  my daughter, 18, washes dishes at a restaurant one day a week, so she’s got sometihng, but it’s very, very hard to find anything much better.  My 17 year old son isn’t even having that much luck.

In other words, it’s as bad as 1980, when I was 17 and 18.

The problem is, by the time I was 21 jobs were everywhere, and the economy was on puree. I had more jobs that I knew what to do with by my junior year of college.

That’s just not going to happen with this recession.  White Castle’s CEO reports that just one provision in Obamacare is going to utterly gut low-income hiring:

Jamie Richardson, a White Castle executive, says, “We’ve been working on this internally from a number of different perspectives. One [provision] that has [us] the most concerned is the $3,000 penalty that kicks in when an employee’s portion of a premium exceeds 9.5% of Household Income.” Richardson elaborates, “In present form, this provision alone would lead to approximate increased costs equal to over 55% of what we earn annually in net income (based on [our] past 4-year average). Effectively cutting our net income in half would have [a] devastating impact on the business — cutting future expansion and more job creation at least in half. Sadly, it makes it difficult to justify growing where jobs are needed most — in lower income areas.” And that’s all from just a single provision in a 2,700-page act.

I love this next quote:

The Obama administration’s economic policy seems to involve dividing businesses into two categories: too big to fail, and too little to matter.

Alternately:  “too big to fail” and “future employees or wards of government”.

Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark.

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