Obama’s New Thoughtcrime: Edward Cline
http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2014/02/obamas-new-thoughtcrime.html
The quotations below say it all:
Fox News February 11th:
THOUGHT POLICE: FIRMS MUST SWEAR OBAMACARE NOT A FACTOR IN FIRINGS
Is the latest delay of ObamaCare regulations politically motivated? Consider what administration officials announcing the new exemption for medium-sized employers had to say about firms that might fire workers to get under the threshold and avoid hugely expensive new requirements of the law. Obama officials made clear in a press briefing that firms would not be allowed to lay off workers to get into the preferred class of those businesses with 50 to 99 employees. How will the feds know what employers were thinking when hiring and firing? Simple. Firms will be required to certify to the IRS – under penalty of perjury – that ObamaCare was not a motivating factor in their staffing decisions. To avoid ObamaCare costs you must swear that you are not trying to avoid ObamaCare costs. You can duck the law, but only if you promise not to say so.
As you know, the Regime recently delayed the implementation of the employer mandate for three years, until 2016. This means that employers who have a hundred or less employees will be subject to the mandate…..
The point of this is that this limit of 100 is a golden opportunity for businesses to, once again, fire people to get under that number of 100 so that they are eligible for the delay of the mandate. So what the Obama Regime has done, is said firms and businesses are going to be required to certify to the IRS — under penalty of perjury — that Obamacare was not a motivating factor in their staffing decisions….
You now have to certify to the IRS, under threat of perjury, that you didn’t do that to avoid Obamacare costs. I mean, you can duck the law, but then only if you promise not to say you’re doing that. Companies must now swear to the IRS that none of their layoffs are because of Obamacare. This must be in writing. It is made under threat of perjury charges. So what they’re trying to avoid here, obviously, is laying people off.
But more than that, they don’t want businesses saying that they’re laying people off or firing people because of Obamacare. That’s really what the rub is, and it boils down to they can do what they want but they better not say that they’re firing people because of Obamacare. Now, it’s been running around, going around here, that this is a banana republic. This is way beyond a banana republic now. This is Stalinism.
Or Nazism. Picture this: German employers – businesses, industries, universities – swearing that they didn’t fire or lay off their Jewish employees because of the Nazi government’s economic policies or campaign against Jews, because that wouldn’t look good to the international press. They’re required to swear on paper, under penalty of perjury and a turn in a concentration camp, that Jews just partied too much and too often came into work drunk or with a debilitating hangover. They are required to swear on a stack of Mein Kampfs that they never said a bad word about Nazism, the Führer, or the government’s command economy.
Syndicated political columnist Charles Krauthammer noted that the delay is the stuff “you do in a banana republic.”
Or a totalitarian one. Obama seems determined to replace the American eagle emblem with a long yellow thing that is rotten inside and is turning brown. It could be a banana or a plantain.
“All power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” wrote Lord Acton. And this is as good a time as any to introduce a longer quotation that perfectly describes Barack Obama’s policies and administration:
The more restrictions and compulsions he imposes on other persons, the greater the strain on his own morality. As his appetite for using force against people increases, he tends increasingly to surround himself with advisers who also seem to derive a peculiar pleasure from forcing others to obey their decrees. He appoints friends and supporters to easy jobs of questionable necessity. If there are not enough jobs to go around, he creates new ones. In some instances, jobs are sold to the highest bidder. The hard-earned money of those over whom he rules is loaned for questionable private endeavors or spent on grandiose public projects at home and abroad. If there is opposition, an emergency is declared or created to justify these actions.
That power can also corrupt its victims, in this instance, employers who will lie or fudge figures on their tax returns and other federally-required paperwork connected to Obamacare to avoid snap IRS audits and punishing penalties. How many employers would risk stating: “I fired these employees because the costs of retaining them are directly linked to your socialist policies and it is impossible to sustain those mandated costs and still remain in business.”
Very few. The new rule will encourage dishonesty and the faking of reality among the majority of business owners and employers. Call it “trickle-down corruption.”
The “certification” rule is a form of censorship and Obama’s brand of thoughtcrime. Telling the truth has been turned into a liability.
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Edward Cline
Williamsburg, VA
February 2014
Links:
ü Fox News on Obamacare costs, employer “certification”:
ü Krauthammer on banana republic politics on Obamacare:
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