Ken Berwitz
What you are about to read is true. I will not mention where it came from, to protect the person who told it to us, so you\’ll have to take this on faith.
My wife and I, with another couple, were at a restaurant last night. We were surprised at how long it took for its staff to service our table…and by how many tables our waiter was handling…not just to serve food, but to change tablecloths and settings; the kind of thing a waiter in this type of restaurant usually does not do.
One of us (not me) mentioned that he was really working hard tonight. In answer, he apologized profusely and told us that the reason was because the restaurant had culled its staff down to 49 people in total, and the lower-end people were mostly gone, so he had to do the things they would have done in addition to waiting on tables.
He told us that the reason for this was, in one word (one name, actually): Obama. If the restaurant had 50 or more employees everyone would have to be paid health insurance.
He did not profess to be an accountant, and did not try to detail how much more money the restaurant would need to spend in overhead, how much higher the food bills would be to cover it, and how much business would be lost because of those higher bills (maybe enough to close altogether). But we didn\’t need him to.
After he left the table, I wondered out loud how many other places of business had become “49ers”: i.e. how many others were doing exactly the same thing……at the cost of jobs, and, more specifically, at the cost of lower-end jobs.
I declined to also wonder out loud how many of those jobs were being filled by off-the-books illegals, not because the business owners wanted to break the law, but because it was the only way to stay competitive, thus stay in business. But I assure you I thought about it to myself.
I have often written that ObamaCare, as constructed, is an unworkable monstrosity. This is one of the many reasons why.
