A mandate for layoffs
The White House has just made a damning admission about ObamaCare: Its employer mandate creates an incentive for businesses to lay off workers.
That’s not how the administration puts it, of course. But a new rule requiring certain businesses to certify — on pain of perjury — that layoffs they make are not ObamaCare-related rests on this assumption.
This new requirement is a byproduct of the decision to extend for yet another year the waiver of the health insurance mandate for businesses with 50-99 employees. Obviously this gives businesses an incentive to get out of the mandate by getting under the 100-employee threshold.
As Andrew McCarthy notes on National Review Online, there’s nothing illegal about laying off employees over tax-related consequences. And as Chief Justice John Roberts has ruled, ObamaCare is a tax.
Yet any business that won’t certify that its layoffs are due to “bona fide business reasons” won’t be eligible for what the IRS calls “transition relief” — i.e., the extra year of the mandate waiver. And the agency has set out a list of what it considers legitimate excuses. Basically, as long as it isn’t because of ObamaCare, a business can lay off as many people as it wants.
The list of what does and doesn’t qualify as a legitimate layoff suggests another danger here: an IRS readying itself to investigate businesses whose payrolls slip below the magic number. And you thought Lois Lerner was bad.
In short, after long denying ObamaCare would lead to job losses, the administration now has to threaten criminal sanctions and IRS investigations to make sure it doesn’t.
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