WashPost Notes 'Small-Business Owners Dread' ObamaCare Tax; Paper Buries Story on A15

"Many small-business owners worry that a new tax on insurance providers in the health-care law will mean higher premiums for them, undermining the law's capacity to lower their health-care costs," Washington Post staff writer J.D. Harrison opened his 15-paragraph May 13 story, "Small-business owners dread impact of health insurance tax." The website headline was even starker: "Health insurance tax ‘scares the daylights’ out of some small-business owners."

Unfortunately for print edition, readers, Post editors buried this front-page-worthy article on page A15. Yes, today's front page was mostly populated with meaty, hard-news stories, but a large photo from last night's Capital-Rangers hockey game dominated the center of the page while London bureau chief Anthony Faiola's "Letter from Britain" feature, headlined, "Eurovision drought feels like a hard day's night," was published directly beneath that [see image following page break].

"Starting next year, the federal government will charge a new tax on health insurance firms based on the plans they sell to individuals and companies, known as the fully insured market," Harrison noted. "Meanwhile, the provision exempts health insurance plans that are set up and operated by businesses themselves (the self-insured market." Harrison went on to explain that "experts warn that insurance companies will pass the costs directly to small businesses, [t]he vast majority" of which "purchase coverage in the fully insured market," as opposed to many "large corporations" which self-insure and hence will avoid the tax.

In 2010, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said we had to pass ObamaCare to find out what's in it. As time goes on and full implementation nears, we're finding out more and more of what's in ObamaCare and the deleterious effects it's having on individuals, families, small businesses, and ultimately the American economy writ large. It isn't pretty, and for the most part it seems the national liberal media are doing their best to downplay the imminent train wreck.

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Rove: Dems must ‘stop scaring’ gun owners

GOP strategist and fundraiser Karl Rove on Sunday said Democrats needed to “stop scaring people” about gun control if they wanted to pass bipartisan measures to stem gun violence.

Rove pointed to the debate over instituting background checks and said that Democrats were overreaching and pushing away gun owners eager for a bipartisan solution.

“This was prompted by the Sandy Hook murders.  Those guns were legally purchased with a background check.  This would not have solved something like that,” said Rove in a panel discussion on ABC’s “This Week.” “Let's be very careful about quickly trampling on the rights of people who -- and look, you want to get something done?  Then stop scaring people.”

Rove said that there could be “mutual agreement” on many issues, including closing so-called gun show loopholes, but that heated Democratic rhetoric in the gun control debate had frightened many gun owners that confiscation was the next step.

“If you say should we keep the mentally ill and the -- and the criminals from getting guns, everybody would say yes.  But that's not what this is about,” said Rove. “We're talking about, in this instance, having a registry where if a grandfather wants to give a treasured shotgun to his grandson, or granddaughter, he has to register with the government and go and get approval as the government to give that gun to his grandchild.

“Sen. [Charles] Schumer [D-N.Y.] for some reason or another, insists upon keeping a registry of guns.  Now, if there's one thing that scares a lot of people who believe in the Second Amendment, is the federal government keeping a national registry of gun sales, and gun purchasers, and gun owners,” Rove continued.

Questioned on that stance by ABC reporter Terry Moran, who said the gun lobby was frightening its own supporters, Rove said such fears were “not paranoia.”

“People have a fear of this. Why do it? Why do you need it?,” said Rove.

The Senate is expected to vote on a gun control bill when lawmakers return form Easter recess in April. Included in that bill is a measure implement universal background checks on all private firearm sales. That legislation was introduced by Sen. Schumer after bipartisan talks on a background check bill collapsed. 

Republicans in negotiations objected to measures they felt could lead to the creation of a federal database of gun owners and language they feared could cover the transfer of weapons between family members.

Rove on Sunday suggested there was support for background check legislation, but that Democratic proposals reached too far.

“We could probably get agreement on a widespread basis of people saying, look you go to a gun show, you walk in, you get, you pass a check … you get your little stub that allows you to purchase a weapon, and that's it.  But this goes far beyond that,” he said.

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NFL Owners May Have Misled Players About Team Profits To Pay Them Less

Panthers owner Jerry Richardson

When National Football League owners locked out players before the 2011 season, they did so claiming that the league’s financial system was driving it down a path of unsustainability. Even though league revenues were growing steadily, many owners, including Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson, argued that they were destined for financial hardship because players were enjoying too large a share of the pie.

According to a team financial statement obtained by the Deadspin last week, however, Richardson wasn’t telling the truth. The Panthers, in fact, made more than $100 million in profits in 2011 and 2012, even as Richardson was claiming poverty:

The statement is for the years ending March 31, 2011, and March 31, 2012. Over the first period, as Richardson argued that the NFL’s business model was hopelessly broken and steered the owners toward a showdown to extract more money from the players, the Panthers recorded an operating profit of $78.7 million. The team had gone 2-14 on the field, but Richardson and his partners were able to pay themselves $12 million.

Over the following year, after the owners had won their lockout and reduced the players’ share of league revenue from 50 percent to 47 percent, the Panthers brought in $33.3 million in operating profit. Richardson began lobbying for public subsidies to renovate his 17-year-old stadium. The team went 6-10.

NFL teams, like franchises in other sports, aren’t required to disclose financial statements, and they refused to open their books when players asked during lockout negotiations. That allowed owners in a profitable league to claim poverty and hardship without any check into whether those claims were true. At the same time, tax breaks and special financing deals with the league allows NFL owners to make their financial pictures even more obscure.

As a result of that obscurity, labor disputes like the NFL’s become even more tilted away from players. Owners already hold leverage in such disputes, since the vast majority of players, unlike owners, depend on the game as their only source of income and players have short careers (the average NFL career is between three and six years long), so missing games or full seasons to negotiate more favorable bargaining agreements often isn’t palatable. The results, then, are predictable: owners are able to extract huge concessions from players to their direct financial advantage. In the NFL, NBA, and NHL, all of which locked out players in the last two years, players gave up substantial shares of revenue in their latest negotiations, and in the NFL, the salary cap is now growing at a far slower pace than it once was. While player salaries are still growing, the slowing growth of the salary cap means there will be less money to divide among them, even as the value of all 32 NFL teams continues to grow and league revenues continue to skyrocket.

This isn’t just a football story. The player-owner relationship is emblematic of the problems facing workers across America. Corporate profits have grown to record levels, but workers’ wages have stagnated. Companies like Caterpillar that are raking in record profits of their own are forcing workers off the job and demanding concessions on salaries and health and pension plans. Corporations are using built-in advantages to rig the game against the workers, padding their bottom lines but making workers worse for it. It may be hard to sympathize with million-dollar professional athletes, but the fights they’re having aren’t altogether different from the fights workers are facing across America.

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California Restaurant Owners Pocketed The Money Intended To Fund Their Employees’ Health Care

Over 50 San Francisco-based restaurant owners are under fire for prioritizing their own profits over their workers’ health care coverage. A city-wide investigation revealed that, after the restaurant industry collected a total of $14 million in worker health care surcharges in 2011, just a third of that money actually went toward providing low-wage workers with insurance.

Under a city-wide requirement, businesses in San Francisco are supposed to set aside some extra money — about $2 dollars an hour for each worker — to help their employees afford their insurance costs. When the rule first went into effect in 2008, some restaurant owners avoided raising the prices on their menu by tacking a surcharge onto the bottom of their bills and explaining to their customers that the fee would help fund workers’ health care.

But according to San Francisco Supervisor David Campos and Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, who helped conduct the investigation into the restaurant owners’ practices, those customers were being deceived. “I can’t say all of them, but for some of these restaurants it was a marketing ploy,” Campos said. And that marketing ploy came at the direct expense of their workers, some of whom didn’t have health insurance at all:

In some cases, not only did the surcharge money go back into owners’ pockets, but employees were denied health care altogether, Ammiano and Campos said.

The inconsistencies were caught after the health law was amended in 2011, requiring city audits of the surcharges. Last year, 3,652 restaurants turned in their paperwork to the labor office, which found oddities in the accounting. The documentation was then turned over to the city attorney for a full-fledged investigation. [...]

For Campos, it’s a consumer-trust issue. “These diners thought they were paying for workers’ health care. Instead these owners were gaming the system,” he said.

Low-wage workers like the employees in San Francisco’s restaurant industry typically don’t have access to health insurance — in fact, more than half of low-wage workers at small firms were uninsured in 2010. And workers’ health care costs are continuing to rise while their wages are stagnating, so it’s nearly impossible for them to afford their own insurance on the private market if their employers choose to deny them health coverage.

Obamacare will help address some of these issues in a similar way as San Francisco began doing in 2008. Starting in 2014, the health reform law will help ensure that employers can’t deny their workers health care simply to protect their own profits, and require businesses with more than 50 employees to offer basic health benefits. Nonetheless, profitable members of the restaurant industry like Olive Garden, Taco Bell, and Wendy’s are already using Obamacare as a convenient excuse to keep perpetrating their anti-worker labor practices and avoid giving their workers any benefits.

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Texas Attorney General Invites New York Gun Owners To Move To Texas

On Tuesday, New York became the first state to pass gun legislation in response to the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December. The measures include bans on assault weapons and magazines that hold more than 7 bullets, and a requirement that gun owners in homes with mentally ill people must properly lock up their firearms.

Though these new laws are immensely popular among New York voters, Texas attorney general Greg Abbott (R) has extended an open invitation to any New Yorkers who feel threatened by the new gun violence protection measure. Abbott launched an Internet ad campaign targeting New Yorkers shortly after Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) signed the law.

The provocative web ads, paid for with Abbott campaign funds, will appear as a pop-up on screens on a variety of media web sites, including that of The New York Times, for those accessing the sites in Manhattan and Albany.

“Is Gov. Cuomo looking to take your guns? Sick of the media outing law abiding gun owns? Are you a lawful NY gun owner seeking lower taxes?” reads one of two pop-up ads.

A second reads: “Wanted: Law abiding New York gun owns looking for lower taxes and greater opportunity.”

Click on either and you are directed to a Facebook second amendment petition page with the greeting: “You’ll fit right in here in Texas!”

The Facebook page boasts that New Yorkers who move to Texas will be able “to keep more of what you earn and use some of that extra money to buy more ammo.”

Abbott’s campaign may not attract many New York defectors. A new poll found that 73 percent of New York voters supported the ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. A full 91 percent support stricter penalties on purchasing illegal guns or using guns on school property. Even New York’s Republican state senators supported the new laws, passing it by a margin of 43 to 18.

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The Five Gun Safety Laws That Gun Owners Support

Vice President Joe Biden is slated to deliver his suggestions for a series of gun violence prevention measures to the President today. Most likely, stronger gun regulations will be among the measures Biden proposes. And while the gun lobby may argue that such laws are out of step with the opinions of gun owners, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that people who have a firearm in their home actually support a lot of gun safety measures.

Here are the top five gun laws that most gun owners would like to see:

1. Universal background checks. The poll found that a huge majority of gun owners — 86 percent — would like to see every single person who wants to purchase a firearm go through a background check. Currently, the so-called ‘gun show loophole’ allows some purchasers (those who buy used guns and those who buy at gun shows) to forgo a background check, setting up a system where criminals can easily purchase weapons.

2. Background checks for ammunition purchasing. As the law currently stands, ammunition can be purchased in bulk online with absolutely no background check. This is how mass murderer James Holmes was able to stockpile so much ammunition without anyone noticing. Seventy six percent of gun owners surveyed by the Washington Post want to see this law changed by instituting background checks for buying ammunition.

3. Ban on extended magazines. Extended magazine clips have been a focus of the recent gun law debate. Such clips, when used in mass killings, prove exceptionally deadly since, paired with an assault weapon, the gunman rarely has to stop and reload. Adam Lanza, the gunman responsible for the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, used extended clips, as did Holmes. There’s no reason why a clip with more than is necessary to hunt, or for self protection, and 55 percent of gun owners want to see them outlawed.

4. Gun database. The United States already has a database of those who cannot buy guns — the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, NICS — but has much weaker methods of tracking the guns sold in the United States. Sixty two percent of gun owners like the idea of a database of guns purchases, so that the government has some handle on how many guns are out there. There have been reports that such a database, and a database of gun violence, might be among Biden’s suggestions.

5. Assault weapons ban. There’s not quite a majority of gun owners who support an assault weapons ban, but at 45 percent popularity, it’s close to tied between those who support and those who oppose. An assault weapons ban would block military-grade weapons, like those used by Lanza and Holmes, from sale on the public market. There’s evidence that such bans reduce the number of firearms deaths.

The support for each of these measures demonstrates that the gun lobby is out of step with everyday gun owners. NRA representatives insist that Congress won’t pass ammunition clip bans, for example, and say that background checks are “unnecessary” and expensive. But even NRA members support more regulations on guns than the lobby would like to indicate.

And members of Congress will soon have an opportunity to stand with the gun owners who support these stronger gun laws. Eight bills have already been introduced in the House that deal with these issues, and more are likely to be introduced after Biden presents the findings of his task force to President Obama.

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