Why You Might Only Be Able to Get Part-Time Work in 2013

							Why You Might Only Be Able to Get
Part-Time Work in 2013
Robert Wenzel
economicpolicyjournal.com
December 3, 2012




Operators of small businesses are going to be cutting full time employees throughout 2013 to under 50,
to stay under the Obamacare tax.
Here’s the thinking of one small business owner:
     Here is what I am doing for the rest of the year — working with every manager in my
     company so that as of January 1, 2013, none of our employees are working more than 28
     hours a week. I think most readers know the reason — we have got to get our company
     under 50 full time employees or else I am facing a bill from Obamacare in 2014 that will be
     several times larger than my annual profit. I love my workers. They make me a success.
      But most of my competitors are small businesses that are exempt from the Obamacare
     hammer. To compete, I must make sure my company is exempt as well. This means that
     our 400+ full time employees will have to be less than 50 in 2013, so that when the Feds
     look at me at the start of 2014, I am exempt. We will have more employees working fewer
     hours, with more training costs, but the Obamacare bill looks like about $800,000 a year for
     us, at least, and I am pretty sure the cost of more training will be less than that.

     This will be unpopular but tolerable to most of my employees. The vast majority of them
     are retired and our company is merely an excuse to stay busy, work outdoors, and get a
     little extra money.
But this is going to be an ENORMOUS change in the
rest of the service sector. I have talked to a lot of owners
of restaurants and restaurant chains, and the 40-hour
work week is a thing of the past in that business. One of
my employees said that in Hawaii, it was all the hotel
employees could talk about. Many chains are working
on mutli-team systems where two teams of people
working part-time replace the former group of full-time
employees. 2013 is going to see a lot of people (who are
not paid very well to begin with) getting their hours and
pay cut by 25%. At the same time that they are required,
likely for the first time since many are relatively young,
to purchase health insurance.

It is really going to get crazy, as the owner above
speculates:
 It will be interesting to see what solutions emerge. My bet is that it will become standard for
people in the service sector to work two different jobs for 20-25 hours each with two different
                                           companies. This will be a pain for them, but allow them
                                           to keep their income up. The hard part may be
                                           coordinating shifts between companies. For example, a
                                           company that divides their shifts into mon-tue-wed vs.
                                           thu-fri-sat cannot share employees with one who divides
                                           their shifts between morning and afternoon. If given
                                           time, I would guess that just as the mon-fri workweek
                                           emerged as a standard, companies may adopt standard
                                           ways of dividing up the work weeks for part-timers,
                                           making it easier for schedules to mesh.




“Future Generations Have To Deal With
The Financial Carnage”
testosteronepit.com
December 4, 2012

During the off-hours on Sunday, when few people
were willing to ruin whatever remained of their
weekend and when even astute observers weren’t
supposed to pay attention, the National Association
of Insurance Commissioners approved new rules
that would allow life insurance companies to lower
their reserves for future claims.
Executives claimed that they could put that capital to “more productive uses,” such as blowing it on
stock buybacks and acquisitions or plowing it into subprime-based CDOs or Greek sovereign debt, or
whatever, to goose their paper returns—having already forgotten all about the financial crisis.
“The insurance industry weathered the financial crisis well precisely because of the careful reserving
state regulators have historically required,” said Benjamin Lawsky, superintendent of the New York
Department of Financial Services. “To ignore the lessons of the financial crisis and deregulate the
industry, allowing them to keep less in reserves, is unwise.”
Others were less sanguine. Joseph Belth, Insurance Forum editor and professor emeritus of insurance at
Indiana University, worried that “future generations of executives, regulators, and consumers will have
to deal with the financial carnage.”
There are salient precedents. The Glass-Steagall Act, after decades of being reinterpreted and watered
down—and finally gutted by Citibank’s foray into investment banking and insurance—was repealed in
1999. The business of finance boomed, banks ballooned, Wall Street printed paper profits, and bonuses
skyrocketed. Less than a decade later, the financial crisis laid waste to the world economy. Before it,
there was the S&L crisis, brought on by a series of challenges that culminated in the deeply troubled
industry’s deregulation in the early 1980s. With disastrous consequences.
The Insurance industry had lobbied for the change for almost a decade. The existing rules used
formulas that were “far too conservative,” life insurers maintained, according to the Wall Street
Journal. Instead, the industry would implement a “principles-based” system that would use computer
models—algos and “fat fingers” come to mind—to figure out how large the reserves would have to be;
or rather, just how small they could be. Because rationalizing “lower reserves in the aggregate”—as
Lawsky’s deputy Robert Easton called it—had after all been the goal of the lobbying campaign.
California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones fretted about the “very complicated black-box
models”—that their mathematics might be impenetrable for state regulators who then would not be
capable of overseeing that “principles-based” system. Whether or not that was one of the underlying
motivations for the industry remains to be seen.
Granted, it’s been tough for life insurers. Their investment returns have gotten hammered by the evil
twins of a lumpy economy and the Fed’s Zero Interest Rate Policy. Initially classified as “exceptional,”
ZIRP has now been in effect for four years, and its expiration date keeps getting kicked further into the
future. It has brought down bond yields across the spectrum to where returns on all but junk are
negligible, a process that has been draining the reserves of life insurers—just like it has been fleecing
the Social Security trust fund and savers. So the thinking went, with lower reserve requirements,
insurers could divert some capital to speculate in riskier assets that might offer a greater return. It
would dope their paper profits and make Wall Street smile. For a while. We’ve seen this movie before.
But it’s not yet a done deal. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners, which is composed
of state regulators, sets solvency standards that states may then adopt in regulating insurers. The idea is
to come up with a common set of standards for all 50 states. However, states don’t have to follow the
decision. And it’s unlikely that all of them will. Of the 56 members, 43 voted to approve this change.
Regulators in California and New York voted against it. And in states where lawmakers refuse to adopt
the new reserving requirements, life insurers would establish subsidiaries whose reserves would
conform to the rules of that state.
While some life insurers might continue to be conservative under the new rules, others will venture out
towards the thin end of the limb to chase paper profits from quarter to quarter. And they’re doing it just
when the industry is staring at an unprecedented and brutal demographic reality: insured baby boomers
aren’t going to live forever, and life-insurance payouts are going to jump to historic records.
The temptation is huge to
tweak the math of the
“black-box models”—as
California Insurance
Commissioner Dave Jones
called it—to bury that
reality until the bitter end.
It took Wall Street less
than a decade to explode,
counting from the repeal
of the Glass-Steagall Act.
Home many years will it
take the life-insurance
industry after the new
rules go into effect? One
thing we know already: when it explodes, no one will be held responsible. Because everyone followed
the rules.
Every country in the Eurozone has its own collection of big fat lies that politicians and eurocrats have
served up in order to make the euro and subsequent bailouts or austerity measures less unappetizing.
Like in 1999: “Can Germany be held liable for the debts of other countries? A very clear No!” said the
CDU, the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel. Read.... Ten Big Fat Lies To Keep The Euro
Dream Alive.

Zeitgeist Addendum The Fraud of The U.S. Banking System VIDEO BELOW
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gKX9TWRyfs

Fiat Empire: Why The Federal Reserve Violates The U.S.VIDEO BELOW
Constitution VIDEO BELOW
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K41O2QfpjA

The Federal Reserve Fractional Reserve Banking Explained VIDEO BELOW
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWl7Mb49vSk

The Truth About Your Birth Certificate VIDEO BELOW
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfnJ1rOFK7o

America: Freedom to Fascism VIDEO BELOW
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6ayb02bwp0

Hey Banksters: We Are Fully Awake VIDEO BELOW
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEATp-xM7rU&feature=channel&list=UL

Banking with Hitler VIDEO BELOW
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YauM5dHLn1s


    http://www.infowars.com/