How to hurt the poor Obama-style

Why are the poor poor?  There are many reasons, health, substance abuse, prison, mean dad, you name it.  Those are the root causes and they will be with us until the end of time.  But the proximate reason most of the poor are poor is because they don't work very much.  Some do work full time, earning low wages and living alone, but only 21 percent of minimum wage workers are poor. It's long been recognized that if a poor person can get a real job, and stick with it for more than a year then their odds of remaining poor fall radically.  And working delivers order, self esteem, opportunity and connectedness that can help heal the root causes of their original poverty. Productive gainful employment no matter how modest is the one thing that can dramatically transform a poor person's life.

So if that's the case, it stands to reason that the most disastrous thing to happen to a poor person is to be unable to find full time work in the formal economy (informal pharmaceutical distribution doesn't count).  And that means that the most important people to the poor aren't their case workers but those that employ low skill labor.  Tragically these employers are in an historically deep funk. Not since the Great Depression has a poor person's employment prospects been so.....poor.

Which brings us to the current era of "Hope 'n Change" and specifically the case of one B. Obama and his eponymous but ironically 'verbed' (is that a word?  Google says no, but they're evil) signature initiative Obamacare along with a grab bag of other collectivist elixirs.  It is my considered opinion that the 'signature' policies of this administration are the greatest contributor to the poor's growing distress. Indeed  the Obami are putting on an 8 year long expert level clinic on how to frighten the jobs out of employers.  Here are the 14 easy steps to hurt the poor Obama-style:

Set the 'right' tone: The moment you are in office communicate your visceral hostility and lack of sympathy for employers by telling them 'you didn't build that', pushing for higher taxes on the 'rich', and in general communicate in a way that says they are part of 'the problem', not your solution.  Tell them that your goal is to 'fundamentally transform America' and that the nation isn't really 'exceptional' This makes employers nervous, particularly the small and mid-sized ones who don't really have the deep pockets needed to play big league crony-ball.

Impose massive new mandates on employers. Pass a law that targets small and midsize employers of large numbers of low wage workers for a new entitlement that will raise their cost of employment substantially.  This frightens low wage employers because higher costs mean lower profits or even losses.

Make the law an absolute crap factory of complexity and coercion.  Thousands of pages of statutes and tens of thousands of pages of regulations with hundreds of new ways for prosecutors to screw you means that no businessman can ever understand its implications well enough to be sure they won't be punished.  Which is very scary.

Shove it down the nation's throat. Pass the law against the considered and repeatedly expressed preferences of a majority of the nation's electorate on a party line vote using 'novel' parliamentary procedures and a significant number of dubious claims, including outright accounting fraud and lying to consumers about what the law would do to them. This upsets employers because they wonder that if the administration is willing lie, cheat, steal and ignore public opinion on this, what won't they do to get their way?

Start implementation with a heavy crony round:  Give waivers from the law (notwithstanding no legal authority to do so) to almost 2000 of the biggest and best connected low wage employers like McDonalds.  That way small employers can be certain that the deck is stacked against them.  Which maximizes optimism and faith in the 'system'.

Make the only way you can avoid the law's requirements is by either staying small or shrinking.  You've just given low wage employers a huge cost jump when they hit 50 total employees or 30 FTEs, employers near those limits either way are going to shrink employment.  Because if they don't, their smaller competitors will be much more competitive with their new found labor cost advantage.  Probably the first time in American history where whole sectors are rewarded so much for shrinking their business.  Astounding and astoundingly effective in reducing employment.

Streeeeetch out the agony.  It's been 5 years since President Obama was elected to (in his typically grandiose phrasing): fundamentally transform America and our healthcare system.  Yet Obamacare will take at least two more years to be fully implemented.  This freezes employers because due to it's complexity employers really don't understand it and won't get the full implications until it's fully baked,  So the Biblical seven lean years followed by seven even leaner years?

Mess with the "law" over and over and over. Decide not to implement some provisions, decide to ignore some prohibitions, change some commas to periods some ands to ors or buts, change implementation dates and otherwise behave as if the law that was passed is no more than what the Administration says it is at any point in time.  Employers just love politicized legal unpredictability.

Explicitly politicize implementation.  Schedule implementation dates after elections, put tasks on hiatus if they look like they will hit an electoral window (imagine of Lincoln or Roosevelt had done this).  Once again, this leaches trust and certainty from employers:  'what won't these cats do?"

'Nationalize' an entire complex health insurance distribution channel for 30 million Americans and do it really badly so that millions of people are hurt by the loss of health insurance or it's exploding costs and up to 100 million other Americans begin wondering if they're next.  The key here is to maximize visible incompetence.  Because there is nothing more reassuring to hirers than realizing that they must rely on the numbskulls and knuckleheads who have already screwed it up and can't be fired.

Who Moi? React with shock and anger to discover the emerging disaster that the legislation that you were responsible for implementing has become.  Improvise, spin and in general fly by the seat of your pollster's pants.  Employers really respect incompetence buttressed by inattention, cynicism and random lashing out.  It gives them warm and fuzzies all over.  Either that or they begin to itch uncontrollably.

Sic the EPA pit bulls on hundreds of thousands of previously exempt businesses. To do this have the EPA expand their jurisdiction to gases that come out of both ends of every American (and dog or cat for that matter).  Do so even though you don't have explicit legal authority because a few short years ago a Democrat controlled Congress declined to give it to you.  Then announce that you are going to expand the number of businesses subject to EPA regulation by 1000%.  EPA has such a sterling reputation that this by itself will stop huge numbers of projects until the green miasma clears and employers can stop going WTF? WTFF? in stunned disbelief.  Over and over and over again.

Start a class war.  Then, when the amount of uncertainty, fear, chaos and confusion hits a spectacular Wagnerian crescendo, replete with fat chicks in pigtails and viking helmets, pivot to massive political push to 'reduce income inequality' with your signature initiative being substantially increasing the minimum wage on top of the Obamacare costs.  Make sure you set the new minimum at levels that are common in high nominal income cities like NYC, SFO, BOS, where there are no Federal minimum wage workers anyway.  By doing this you will impose huge new costs on minimum wage employers in poor areas like CA central valley or TX Rio Grande valley (I mean who gives a damn about Mexicans anyway?).  Oh and of course don't forget to bash the 'rich' over and over again.  Employers once again note your contempt and add these costs to their retrenchment business plan spreadsheet.

So let's tot up the butcher's bill, shall we?  We've basically done everything that we can think of to increase low wage employers perception of the business risk in employing workers.  We've explicitly increased their key cost substantially and are trying to do it again. We've lied and manipulated the written provisions in duly enacted law in a transparently political way ensuring employers won't trust any commitment we make.   We've given them an easy way to rescue their profitability:  fire workers.  On top of all that we've demonstrated that they can't possibly predict how this will affect their business except badly and that the administration has no more of an idea of what it is doing than they do.

So what does a prudent, hard nosed, operationally focused business 'man about town' do (there ain't very many dreamers or innovators employing large numbers of low income workers)?  Hmmmm, what to do? what to do?  Tricky.  One the one hand employment costs are going up, on the other hand the minimum wage is going up, on the third hand the government doesn't....wait, these are all the same hand!

Employers are doing the only rational thing they can:  if you drive my core input costs up in an open ended and unpredictable way then I'm going to reduce my exposure to your shenanigans by reducing my utilization of said input: hiring less, automating more, pushing people to part time status, and concentrating skills investments and career paths upon a small core team - in a nutshell taking fewer employment risks on the poor and young lest they be converted to a Federal bomb that blows up in my face.

Finally, Don't forget the Double Tap. Thus far you've done the employment equivalent of putting a round in the chest of the poor's employment prospects.  But the experienced hope killer remembers that second 'tap' to head.  Unilaterally - without benefit of any stuffy legality (because once again a Democrat controlled Congress declined to give it to you) amnesty a significant number of illegal immigrants. Push for the amnestying of another 13 million illegals and demand a doubling of legal immigration to 2 million per annum.  Because nothing improves the employment prospects of the native American poor on the first rung of the formal sector employment ladder than huge numbers of newly legal competitors.

So put on your asbestos suit, Mr. John Q. Poor because your 'savior' is sending you to hell.  For his greater progressive glory (St. Obama healed the sick and made the planet cool!) and 13 million more Democrat votes.