Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 09:59 pm
Jon Stewart hammered the so called job creators for using Obamacare as an excuse for layoffs. Stewart said, ‘Obamacare is just the latest excuse to rig the social contract.’
Part one of the video via Comedy Central:
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Part two of the video via Comedy Central:
Jon Stewart had a heart to heart with America’s “job creators,”
Guys, I get it. Providing healthcare benefits to employees costs money, and as a group you tend to prefer things that don’t cost that. I watch Undercover Boss. But own your layoffs, and your policies. Let’s stop pretending that with this election bosses have been transformed into reluctant a**holes. Obamacare is just the latest excuse to rig the social contract. For many years now, full time benefits like sick days, maternity leave, pensions, lunch hours, chairs have disappeared by magically transforming full time workers into independent contractors or part time twenty year temp help.
Want to avoid paying half of your employees’ Social Security tax? Reclassify them as independent contractors, so they pay it all themselves. Make them fill out a 1099. That’s not a full time busboy. That’s Juanco L.L.C. Don’t forget to invoice us, Juanco. So let’s cut the, I’d love to give employees, I just can’t. Let’s face the facts. Pizza and coal companies are just unlucky enough to have a labor force that can’t be outsourced. You happen to be in one of the few industries that still has to hire Americans. I’m sure if you could outsource your pizza making to China, Papa Johns would quickly become Papa Sans. Which is actually Japan, but for the joke, you understand. It’s your fault. You could have gone tech Papa John’s, founded Instagram and made a billion dollars. But instead, you make pizzas with a filter that makes them taste like their from 1979.
And Murray with the coal company, don’t pretend you’re not going to fire all of your human coal miners the minute you figure out how to train bats to carry coal up out of the ground. Not that you don’t have a legitimate gripe against this president. If Obama would have fought harder for single payer, business owners like you would never have to pay another premium in your lives. You could stuff your pizza crusts with money, and still sell them for ten dollars. And if Obama banned natural gas fracking, then coal wouldn’t be getting its ass kicked in the, what’s it called again, free market.
So maybe next time take all the millions you donated for partisan political purposes, and pump it back into the kind of healthcare advances that may ultimately increase business productivity. And then we can just finally keep pizza out of politics. Because at a certain point, it’s going to make children’s politics very uncomfortable.
Stewart was dead on except for two key points. Single payer was never going to pass because it didn’t have the votes in the Senate. The reason why it didn’t have the votes in the Senate is because these same “job creators” who are laying people off right now also pumped millions of dollars into AstroTurfing and lobbying efforts to oppose the “socialism” of single payer.
It must be nice to be a job creator. They opposed the original healthcare reform proposal that would have benefited them because it is “socialism” a.k.a they might have to pay for something. For a second act these same “job creators” lay off employees because the watered down compromise that they forced into law will also cost them money.
The point that Stewart missed was that the only healthcare position the “job creators” supported was the healthcare status quo, because the cost to them was zero.
Everything else The Daily Show host discussed was right on the money. Guys like Papa John and the War on Coal conservative Richie Riches are angry because they don’t want to spend a dime on their employees. It isn’t that they can’t afford to provide their employees with healthcare. It’s that they don’t want to, which is why these layoffs are nothing more than the post election sour grapes of a few wealthy men who thought they could buy themselves a president.
Here is the problem with their logic. Their competition is going to participate in Obamacare. The best employees will go to the companies that provide the best benefits. In short, these bastions of capitalism, these sacred human gods Republicans like to refer to as job creators are about to be defeated by the one thing that they claim to cherish most.
The free market.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
