Health Care Bill Causing Job Loses

By Good Ole Boy/Jim

Caterpillar will lose 100 million the first year and just announced 2,000 jobs will be cut all due to the health care bill. The solidly Democratic union members losing their jobs may be rethinking their support for Obama now. In a letter Thursday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Minority Leader John Boehner, and provided to FoxNews.com, the Peoria, Ill.-based company urged lawmakers to vote against the bill, citing provisions in it — such as new coverage mandates and the taxation of Medicare subsidies for prescription drugs — that would drive up its health care costs by more than 20 percent.

Ryan Ellis, director of tax policy at American’s for Tax Reform, told the Business & Media Institute it is a mistake to call this a “Medicare tax.” “It has only the faintest of connections to Medicare, no matter what they want to call it.”

Ellis also explained that the “most destructive” element of the tax increase is the hike on capital gains.

“It would rise from 15 percent today, to 20 percent next year, to 24 percent in 2013,” Ellis said. “That’s a 60 percent increase in that rate. The stock market will have to price in this lower after-tax rate of return on stocks. That will lower the value of everyone’s 401(k) and IRA. Even if you never pay the capital gains tax, you’re going to get hit by this in a big way.”

This tax will also hurt the struggling economy, according to the Wall Street Journal which explained the economic impact of an investment tax when the original 2.9 percent increase was proposed in February.

This “is another tax on job creation, though Democrats claim they want more jobs. The devious 2.9% hike on investment income will raise the cost of capital, though Democrats claim to want more capital investment. Sometimes we wonder if Democrats even listen to their own rhetoric, or if they assume voters are too dumb to notice their contradictions,” the Journal warned on Feb. 24.

The tax on medical devices will hurt businesses like Zoll Medical Corporation which employs 1,600 people in the U.S. The tax hikes could mean job cuts for the company as Byron York wrote on March 23.

“We believe that the tax will cost us somewhere between $5 million and $10 million a year,” Richard Packer, Zoll’s chairman and chief executive officer told York. “Our profit in 2009 was $9.5 million.”

York explained that the company will have three options: pass the cost increase to customers (hospitals/ambulances), cut R&D or “shift jobs” to cheaper places – perhaps outside the U.S.

Obama said he wouldn’t raise taxes on the middle class. We now see the inveterate liar lied. Every bill he pushes has cost jobs and he is talking about getting Cap And Trade through congress which will cause an estimated two million jobs to be lost. The stimulus bill has not gained a fraction of the jobs lost that Obama has caused. Is Obama out to destroy America?