Showing posts with label Tom Harkin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tom Harkin. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Hey! Twenty three Democratic Senators can do minimum wage math!

Shocking. Why have they hidden their light under a bushel for all these years?
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Tuesday delayed action on legislation raising the minimum wage, the centerpiece of the Democrats’ 2014 agenda.
[snip]
Reid has not yet unified his caucus on the issue, which is a constant in the Democrats’ election-year playbook. Of the 55 senators who caucus with the Democrats, only 32 have signed on as official co-sponsors of Sen. Tom Harkin’s (D-Iowa) bill.
(H/T: Hot Air) The ostensible problem was a CBO (a org that the Left can never decide is good or bad these days) report promising that this measure would lose half a million jobs. But the real problem is that Democratic politicians have never been able to gently explain to their more activist members that business owners do not have Scrooge McDuck swimming pools full of gold coins. I know that this sounds unbelievable, but trust me: many progressives really do think that prices are high simply because capitalists take ‘too much’ profits. That a business like, say, oil production could be seeing most of its revenues go out in overhead (ESPECIALLY taxes) seems to be absolutely alien to them, as a whole.
But you have to understand: many of the Left’s theoreticians lack critical educational or life experiences that would help them properly understand economics. Very few of them have owned a business, worked directly for a small business owner, and/or experienced what we in this country laughingly call ‘poverty.’ The closest most of them have come are a variety of retail jobs that were abandoned the moment something better came along – or, more likely, they got boring. Couple that with the usual lack of empathy* and you get this kind of failure to communicate.
Oh, well. Back to the drawing board! …Which is going to be a little bare on the Democrats’ side, given that it’s an election year, but such is life.

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Harkin: Americans are ‘hungry’ for ObamaCare

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) touted the number of people who have visited the new ObamaCare exchange website, saying the public is “hungry” for health insurance.

“The American people are hungry to get covered with health insurance,” Harkin said on the Senate floor Wednesday. “The Affordable Care Act is up and running and people all over the country are flocking to it.”

Harkin, who serves as chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said nearly 5 million people visited healthcare.gov within the first 24 hours of it launching Tuesday.

Harkin admitted that the website experienced “glitches,” but said that was because the administration didn’t expect so many people to visit the website on the first day — Oct. 1. 

Lawmakers also failed to reach a deal Tuesday to keep the government funded — Harkin blamed that on Republicans.

“Republican still want to hold the government hostage and defund the Affordable Care Act,” Harkin said. “Republicans are still trying to stop [ObamaCare].”

House Republicans have tried to attach riders to defund and delay ObamaCare, but Senate Democrats have said they will only accept a “clean” CR.

It's unclear where the fight will go from here, with both sides digging in for the first government shutdown since 1996. 


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