President Obama lashed out against CEO’s and business leaders who have cut hours in response to costly Affordable Care Act mandates which would force them to provide insurance for employees working more than 30 hours a week.
More than 300 major businesses have made cutbacks in response to such mandates. While more than 5.6 million small businesses have incurred additional costs due to the ACA.
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“I haven’t looked at Staples stock lately or what the compensation of the CEO is, but I suspect that they could well afford to treat their workers favorably and give them some basic financial security and if they can’t, then they should be willing to allow those workers to get the Affordable Care Act without cutting wages,” Obama said.
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Staples fired back at the presidents remarks with this statement:
“The initial [BuzzFeed] story was misleading as our policy regarding hours for part-time employees is more than a decade old,” said Kirk Saville, a Staples spokesman.
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“It’s unfortunate that the president is attacking a company that provides more than 85,000 jobs and is a major taxpayer,” he added.
The price of Staples’ stock and the compensation their CEO’s make is not the point. The people who run Staples not only provide a service which Americans willfully exchange money for, they also provide jobs to communities.
Providing maximum service for the lowest possible cost is the prime motivation of any business. Regulations that attempt to tie more costs to employment will only succeed in reducing employment.
Obama may lecture CEO’s about their salaries and not providing their workers financial security, yet the hypocrisy is blatant as the White House is very dependent on its unpaid interns. Surely, if Staples can afford to pay its employees, so can the White House.
If there is one defining characteristic of President Obama’s economic policies it is a complete disregard for, if not an open hostility to private enterprise. Obama has continued to blame our economy’s most productive for unemployment and revenue shortages, while saddling businesses with onerous, costly regulations.
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in the industrial world. This obviously motivates the practice of tax inversion- companies moving their headquarters to other countries to avoid paying US taxes.
Instead of trying to make the United States more competitive in the world market by making it profitable for businesses to operate here, the president has been content to point fingers, blaming accountants and CEOs for the failures of liberal economic policies.
His calls for “economic patriotism” are nothing more than Orwellian pleas for businesses to sacrifice their own self-interest at the altar of the State.
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