Break out the handkerchiefs. A CEO is about to cry.
When the Affordable Care Act takes full effect, Papa John’s Pizza will change in two ways.
First, it will be forced to do something it hasn’t done since its founding in 1984: Offer healthcare coverage to its 16,5000 employees or pay a penalty to the government.
Second, according to the company’s CEO, John Schnatter, the prices of his pizzas will go up.
John Schnatter
How far up?
By as much as eleven to fourteen cents price increase per pizza, or fifteen to twenty cents per order.
But Schnatter isn’t going to take this lying down. He’s determined to pass along those costs to his customers.
“If Obamacare is in fact not repealed,” Schnatter told Politico, “we will find tactics to shallow out any Obamacare costs and core strategies to pass that cost onto consumers in order to protect our shareholders’ best interests.”
After all, why should a multi-million-dollar company show any concern for those who make its profits a reality?
Consider:
- Papa John’s is the third-largest pizza takeout and delivery chain in the United States.
- Its 2012 revenues were $318.6 million, an 8.5 percent increase from 2011 revenues of $293.5 million.
- Its 2012 net income was $14.8 million, compared to its 2012 net income of $12.1 million.
Click here: Papa John’s turns in strong domestic and international Q2 | PizzaMarketPlace.com
Nor should anyone expect Schnatter to take a pay cut, just so his employees can obtain medical care when they need it.
Schnatter’s total calculated compensation for 2011 came to $2,745,219.
Click here: John Schnatter: Executive Profile & Biography – Businessweek
“We’re not supportive of Obamacare, like most businesses in our industry,” Schnatter–a supporter of Mitt Romney–admitted in an interview with Politico.
To demonstrate his opposition to providing medical insurance for all Americans, Schnatter hosted a fundraising event for Mitt Romney at his own Louisville, Kentucky mansion in May.
The luxurious setting for the fundraiser gave Romney a rush of pure, plutocratic ecstasy.
“What a home this is,” gushed Romney. “What grounds these are, the pool, the golf course.
“You know, if a Democrat were here he’d look around and say no one should live like this. Republicans come here and say everyone should live like this.”
John Schnatter’s estate
Of course, Romney conveniently ignored a brutally ugly fact:
For the vast majority of Papa John’s minimum-wage-earning employees–many of them working only part-time–the odds of their owning a comparable estate are non-existent.
John Schnatter is not the first pizza magnate to attack proposed changes to federal health care.
In 1993, Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain charged that President Bill Clinton’s proposed health care reform law would cost his company Godfather’s Pizza money and jobs.
“For many many businesses like mine, the cost of your plan is simply a cost that will cause us to eliminate jobs,” Cain told Clinton in a famous exchange.
In a typical demonstration of corporate thinking, Judy Nichols, a Papa John’s franchise owner in Beaumont, Texas, said:
“I have two options, I can stop offering coverage and pay the $2,000 fine, or I could keep my number of staff under 50 so the mandate doesn’t apply,” she told Legal Newsline.
In short: Defy the law, and employee healthcare needs be damned.
Nichols added that the the law might cost her $20,000 to $30,000 in taxes: “Obamacare is making me think about cutting jobs instead,” she said.
Translation: If you force me to behave responsibly, I’ll just have to take it out on willing-to-work Americans.
So how can America cope with behavior that destroys not only lives but the economy as well?
By passing–and vigorously enforcing–a nationwide Employers Responsibility Act.
Among its provisions:
Employers would be required to provide full medical and pension benefits for all employees, regardless of their full-time or part-time status.
Increasingly, employers are replacing full-time workers with part-time ones—solely to avoid paying medical and pension benefits. Requiring employers to act humanely and responsibly toward all their employees would encourage them to provide full-time positions—and hasten the death of this greed-based practice.
The seeking of “economic incentives” by companies in return for moving to or remaining in cities/states would be strictly forbidden.
Such “economic incentives” usually:
- allow employers to ignore existing laws protecting employees from unsafe working conditions;
- allow employers to ignore existing laws protecting the environment;
- allow employers to pay their employees the lowest acceptable wages, in return for the “privilege” of working at these companies; and/or
- allow employers to pay little or no business taxes, at the expense of communities who are required to make up for lost tax revenues.
Employers who continue to make such overtures would be prosecuted for attempted bribery or extortion:
- Bribery, if they offered to move to a city/state in return for “economic incentives,” or
- Extortion, if they threatened to move their companies from a city/state if they did not receive such “economic incentives.”
This would
- protect employees against artificially-depressed wages and unsafe working conditions;
- protect the environment in which these employees live; and
- protect cities/states from being pitted against one another at the expense of their economic prosperity.
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OBAMA FLUNKS, MACHIAVELLI REIGNS
In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Politics, Social commentary on July 10, 2013 at 10:00 pmBarack Obama is one of the most highly educated men to occupy the White House.
In 1988, he entered Harvard Law School, graduating in 1991. He was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review at the end of his first year, and president of the journal in his second year.
In 1991, he accepted a two-year position as Visiting Law and Government Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School to work on his first book, Dreams of My Father, published in 1995.
He then taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years—as a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996, and as a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004.
President Barack Obama
And yet, for all his experience as a scholar, there remains a truth about which he remains woefully ignorant.
It is a truth that Niccolo Machiavelli, the father of modern political science, understood all too well.
In his pamphlet, The Prince, Machiavelli laid out the qualities that a successful ruler must possess. There were some to be cultivated, and others to be avoided at all costs. For example:
He is rendered despicable by being thought changeable, frivolous, effeminate, timid and irresolute—which a prince must guard against as a rock of danger….
[He] must contrive that his actions show grandeur, spirit, gravity and fortitude. As to the government of his subjects, let his sentence be irrevocable, and let him adhere to his decisions so that no one may think of deceiving or cozening him.
Niccolo Machiavelli
So how has Obama fared by this standard?
Consider the July 2 press release from the Treasury Department on the signature achievement of his administration, the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as Obamacare:
“Over the past several months, the Administration has been engaging in a dialogue with businesses – many of which already provide health coverage for their workers – about the new employer and insurer reporting requirements under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
“We have heard concerns about the complexity of the requirements and the need for more time to implement them effectively….We have listened to your feedback. And we are taking action.
“The Administration is announcing that it will provide an additional year before the ACA mandatory employer and insurer reporting requirements begin.”
[Boldface in the original document.]
* * * * *
In short: The administration is delaying until 2015 the law’s requirement that medium and large companies provide coverage for their workers or face fines.
Now consider how Obama’s self-declared enemies reacted to this announcement.
Since 2011, right-wing Republicans in the House of Representatives have voted 37 times to repeal or defund all or parts of ObamaCare, most recently in May.
They can only be encouraged at this latest show of timidity on Obama’s part.
And thousands of employers bitterly resent having to provide medical coverage for the men and women whom they would prefer to own rather than pay at all.
This can only convince them to dig in their heels and evade or sabotage the law any way they can.
Susan Collins, the U.S. Senator from Maine, recently confessed as much:
“I’ve heard from countless employers…who say that the onerous penalties and provisions in ObamaCare provide perverse and powerful incentives to not hire new workers or to cut back on the hours that their employees are allowed to work.”
This comment points to a self-defeating part of the legislation:
The health care law requires companies with 50 or more employees to provide affordable insurance coverage to workers. For part-time employees, who work fewer than 30 hours, the company isn’t penalized for refusing to provide health insurance.
Thus, greed-fueled employers will move even more employees into part-time positions. They can dodge the requirement to provide health insurance and avoid paying a fine.
Obama’s enemies have called him a practitioner of hard-knuckled Chicago-style politics. But, in reality, he is precisely the sort of other-worldly political leader Machiavelli warned against:
Many have imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist in reality.
For how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather learn to bring about his own ruin rather than his preservation.
Long before he took the Presidential oath, Obama should have committed to memory this famous passage from Machiavelli:
From this arises the question whether it is better to be loved than feared, or feared more than loved.
The reply is, that one ought to be both feared and loved, but as it is difficult for the two to go together, it is much safer to be feared than loved….
I conclude, therefore, with regard to being loved and feared, that men love at their own free will, but fear at the will of the prince, and that a wise prince must rely on what is in his power and not on what is in the power of others….
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