[VIDEO] Un-Affordable Care Act: The High Cost of Obamacare for One Texas Business

American businesses are in a holding period of uncertainty because of Obamacare.

That’s the message Larry Patterson, owner of a glass-repair franchise in Dallas, delivered at The Heritage Foundation earlier this week.

Speaking on a panel about rising insurance costs under Obamacare, Patterson explained how his business is facing the prospect of a huge hit. If he renews with his current provider, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas, in February, Patterson will face a 72 percent increase in his insurance premium. If he renews before the end of the year, the increase will be 23 percent.

“When you compound that with the fact that our insurance has gone up a lot since 2010, the increase is somewhere around 200 percent when you kick into what the 2014 premium will be,” Patterson explained. “How many increases can we sustain?”

Patterson is not alone. According to new research from Drew Gonshorowski of Heritage’s Center for Data Analysis, Obamacare exchange premiums are rising in all but five states. In some cases, costs are skyrocketing.

“With the data we have, it is putting it mildly to say that the Obamacare exchanges are in for troubling times,” Gonshorowski said at Heritage’s event.

Via: The Foundry

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Eight TSA Workers Arrested in Dallas in Stolen Parking Pass Scam

Eight U.S. Transportation Security Administration employees were among nine people arrested in connection with stolen parking passes at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, police said today.

Airport police found stolen airline employee-parking placards had been sold for $100 each to TSA workers. The passes would normally cost $34 a month or $400 a year, according to a police statement.

The passes were among 129 that went missing from an American Eagle Airlines Inc. office inside an airport terminal in March. An airline employee has been arrested on a felony charge involving the theft of the passes, police said. The carrier is a unit of American Airlines parent AMR Corp.

TSA misconduct, and the agency’s handling of it, has been a concern in Congress. The Government Accountability Office said in a July 31 report the agency hasn’t been consistent in meting out discipline for infractions ranging from sleeping on the job to stealing travelers’ laptops from security lines.

One TSA employee faces a felony charge of theft for selling the placards to colleagues, police said. The other six government workers face misdemeanor charges for using the stolen passes. The airport didn’t release names of the arrested employees, saying the investigation was continuing.
Via: NewsMax

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New $100 bills stolen en route to Fed facility

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Unknown thieves stole a "large amount" of newly-designed $100 bills bound for a Federal Reserve facility in New Jersey on Thursday, the FBI said.

Frank Burton, Jr., spokesman for the FBI's Philadelphia division, said the theft occurred at some point between when the shipment of bills landed at the Philadelphia airport on a commercial flight from Dallas at 10:20 Thursday morning, and when the shipment reached its New Jersey destination around 2:00 p.m., when the courier service transporting the bills reported some missing.

Via:CNN Money

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U.S. 'DROWNING IN UNEMPLOYMENT,' SAYS FEDERAL RESERVE MEMBER

On Friday, Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher said the U.S. is "drowning in unemployment" and that the Fed's monetary easing was not the solution; certainty on taxes and regulation are what's needed to jump start hiring. 

Mr. Fisher's comments, delivered during a speech at the University of Texas at Dallas, highlighted the intractable nature of unemployment over the last few years and the folly of so-called "quantitative easing" by the Federal Reserve.

"A short-term fix to the fiscal cliff will do nothing but push out the envelope of indecision and we will continue to be plagued by high unemployment,"  Fisher said.  "We've had a recovery that is quite disappointing....We've never been here before so none of us know how we're going to navigate out of this particular quadrant of the liquidity pool in this ocean of money. And what I'm concerned about is that we may be painting ourselves into a corner," he said.

Mr. Fisher says the sluggish economy and unemployment picture are not the result of the Fed's lack of trying.  Indeed, as Reuters notes, the Fed has held interests rates at zero and bought up over $2.3 trillion in long-term securities to tamp down borrowing costs.  And yet, long-term unemployment remains at historic highs, with one in five American men now out of a job and record high 88,921,000 Americans no longer in the U.S. labor force. 

"We've done a lot," says Fisher. "It's not clear to me despite our theoretical ability to understand the tools very well, in practice, how we are going to get out of this."

Via: Breitbart

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