Free Republic

Minnesota lawmakers on Thursday approved a measure raising the state's minimum wage from one of the lowest in the nation to one of the highest. The measure to bump the hourly wage to $9.50, one of dozens of wage proposals debated by lawmakers around the country this year, passed the Democrat-controlled House by a vote of 71-60. The Democrat-run Senate approved the measure on Wednesday. It now goes to Democratic Governor Mark Dayton, who supports the bill.

Health Care: Republicans pushed a bill that would let small businesses continue to offer high-deductible plans to employees, despite ObamaCare. Sounds like a good idea. So why did the leadership try to hide it? The original plan for ObamaCare was to force every business with 50 or more employees to provide "affordable" coverage or pay a stiff fine, plus to sharply restrict the plans they could offer by, among other things, capping deductibles at $2,000 for workers. The cap was little more than a stealth attempt by Democrats to wreck Health Savings Accounts, which trade off high deductibles for tax-free...

A key feature of America’s ongoing oil and gas production renaissance is that the vast majority of the jobs created have not come from the “Big Oil” companies, but from small businesses. Manhattan Institute senior fellow Mark Mills shows the dramatic effect of small businesses on oil and gas production and vice versa in his new report, “Where the Jobs Are: Small Businesses Unleash Energy Employment Boom.” The five large oil companies operating in the United States (Exxon, BP, Chevron, Shell, Conoco) account for only ten percent of direct oil and gas jobs. The vast majority of jobs come from...

A nationwide minimum wage of $12 per hour would shrink government, aid families, curb illegal immigration, spur high-tech investment, and boost GOP support among working-class voters, says Ron Unz, the California libertarian entrepreneur who wiped out his state’s Spanish-only K-12 classes. The $12 wage would slash the huge taxpayer subsidies now given to companies that hire low-wage immigrants, and move tens of millions of Americans into the middle class and sharply reduce the 47 percent of the population who are now completely or partly dependent on federal handouts, Unz told The Daily Caller. “Politics would be completely different… what you’re...

In 2011 during his reelection campaign Barack Obama promised Americans who “get their insurance from the workplace” will see $3,000 in savings thanks to Obamacare.(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Not true. The National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB), a group representing 11,000 members and small businesses, has not had a single member report health-care savings under Obamacare. The New York Post reported: New York’s small-business owners, seniors and doctors are among the big losers as President Obama’s prescription for health-insurance reform takes effect. The National Federation of Independent Businesses, an organization that represents nearly 11,000 entrepreneurs across the state, says it has yet to find...

ObamaCare includes so many taxes that it's hard to keep track, but one of the worst takes effect on Jan. 1. This beaut is a levy on health insurance premiums that targets the small business and individual markets. At $8 billion in 2014 and $101 billion over the next decade, the insurance tax is larger than ObamaCare's taxes on medical devices and prescription drugs combined. The Internal Revenue Service classifies the tax as a "fee" but it functions like an excise tax on premiums. The IRS collects an annual flat amount specified by the Affordable Care Act to be allocated...

An Obamacare regulation issued by the Office of Personnel Management in October treats the U.S. Congress—which employs more than 11,000 staffers and which spent $4,329,000,000 on its own operations and $3,454,253,000,000 to fund the full government in fiscal 2013—as a “small business.” OPM did this so that the Treasury can pay federal subsidies of up to $11,378 per year to help members of the House and Senate and their staff buy health-insurance plans in the Obamacare “Small Business Health Options Program” (SHOP) Marketplace set up for “small employers” in Washington, D.C. The regulation treats this federal tax subsidy paid by...

Donna Baker of Adrian, Mich., owns an accounting firm, payroll company and retail store. Her husband, Kim, is the sixth generation owner of a dairy farm. While the four businesses are separate entities, they count as one employer under the health-care law due to a technicality — Mrs. Baker is a minority stakeholder in the 1,800-acre property that her husband’s farm sits on, plus she helps out with some of the farm’s bookkeeping. As a result, the Bakers are subject to aggregation rules in the U.S. tax code, which means they would be required to offer health-insurance benefits to their...

WASHINGTON, DC – House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) issued the following statement in response to the Obama administration’s announcement that it will not launch an online health care exchange for small businesses, delaying the feature a full year. “The president bit off more than he can chew with this health care law, and small businesses are now forced to bear the consequences. Business owners across this country are already having health care plans for their employees canceled by this law, and now they’re told they won’t have access to the system the president promised them to find them different coverage....

Mike Enzi: "I found they are going to aggregate the numbers so people think they are going to 29 hours employees are finding out that doesn’t get rid of employees for them....…so they can’t get under the 50 employee mark.

Imagine that you run a grocery store with your daughter, a store you have owned for thirty years. Imagine that just last year the IRS found no violations in an audit of your store. Now imagine that, despite continuing your sound business practices, you awake one day to find the IRS has seized your entire bank account. The IRS has used a technique called civil forfeiture against you and you find your Constitutional guarantee of innocence until proven guilty has been completely reversed. That is the nightmare that Terry Dehko and his daughter Sandy Thomas found themselves in on January...

Full title: Thousands Of Small Businesses Will Also Start Losing Their Current Health Policies Under Obamacare. Here's Why President Obama’s simple line “If you like your current health plan you can keep it” is haunting him amidst reports that 3.5 million Americans who purchase health plans on their own, in the “individual” market, have lost that coverage as a result of Obamacare. Very soon, small businesses will be faced with a similar fate. They will also see their health plans canceled as a result of Obamacare. Small businesses, with fewer than 50 employees, are not forced to provide coverage under...

Remember when Obama told Americans “You didn’t build that”?

President Obama’s simple line “If you like your current health plan you can keep it” is haunting him amidst reports that 3.5 million Americans who purchase health plans on their own, in the “individual” market, have lost that coverage as a result of Obamacare. Very soon, small businesses will be faced with a similar fate. They will also see their health plans canceled as a result of Obamacare. Small businesses, with fewer than 50 employees, are not forced to provide coverage under Obamacare. But when they do, policies sold in the small group market are subject to the same regulations...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Small companies with a worker or two who have the misfortune to require serious medical care know what happens at insurance-renewal time. Their premiums don’t just rise. They leap. Small employers don’t have that happen as often when they have young, healthy workforces. This is an old reality in the health insurance field, which until now correlated a policy’s price with a client’s risk and claims experience. Was an employee hospitalized recently? Is he at risk of cancer? The employer’s premiums were almost sure to spike. The Affordable Care Act is about to upend these old insurance...

As free enterprise is snuffed out by regulations, rules, taxes and Obamacare an increasing number of Americans are finding that the millions of jobs once created by small businesses are no longer available.

Democrats and the White House warn that a government shutdown over the budget impasse and the fight over ObamaCare will damage the economy. Those on the front lines of the economy seem ready to make that sacrifice, at least for a while. According to a poll last week from Pepperdine University, 48% of small-business owners back a government shutdown — some for as long as three months: Down to the final days of the nation’s current spending plan, with negotiations over a new one at a standstill, nearly half of small business owners are in favor of shutting the government...

Like an estimated 22 million other Americans, I am a self-employed small-business owner who buys health insurance for my family directly on the individual market. We have a high-deductible PPO plan that allows us to choose from a wide range of doctors. Or rather, we had such a plan. Last week, our family received notice from Anthem BlueCross BlueShield of Colorado that we can no longer keep the plan we like because of "changes from health care reform (also called the Affordable Care Act or ACA)." The letter informed us that "(t)o meet the requirements of the new laws, your...

The number of Hispanic-owned businesses in the U.S. is expected to nearly double this year from 2002. That’s the finding of a study released Friday by the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and Geoscape, a company that provides demographics data. …

<p>It’s well known that job growth has been lacking in this recovery. One reason for the disappointment is that small businesses aren’t adding workers like they used to.</p> <p>Economists at Goldman Sachs explored the shift in hiring by business size using the Labor Department‘s Business Employment Dynamics survey. Although the BED data lag, the Goldman economists found small firms (defined as businesses employing less than 1-49 workers) have indeed underperformed medium and large companies whether underperform is defined as “a slower rate of job growth during the recovery relative to other firm size classes or a failure to regain the absolute magnitude of job losses incurred during the recession.”</p>