Perhaps This Wasn't The Brightest Idea

In the wake of the Enron scandal, Congress passed new regulations that required public corporations to alter their methods of accounting and reporting their financial information.  One of those regulations requires corporations to immediately estimate costs associated with new taxes and/or regulations.

Those Congressional mandated reports of the costs associated with the recent health care "reform" bill have started rolling in. 

• AT&T, $1 billion
• Deere & Co., $150 million
• Caterpillar, $100 million
• AK Steel, $31 million
• 3M, $90 million
• Valero Energy, up to $20 million

Verizon has also warned its employees about its new higher health-care costs, and there will be many more in the coming days and weeks.

The response from Congress?  They want to haul those running these companies in for a Congressional inquiry as to why they are complying with a law passed by Congress to report that another law passed by Congress will have such a negative effect on their operations.

I suppose that in the land of the sugarplum faeries, new laws need not have any impact.  Simply wishing for things to different is enough to cause them to be different.

Here in the real world, gravity still attracts objects, and new government programs result in much thinner corporate bottom lines.

The Congressional response isn't surprising.  They don't understand why everyone doesn't think their latest bright idea isn't all that bright.

Well, this is par for the course: a complete disregard for the consequences of their own handiwork, the bullying of private enterprise, and the determination to politicize what were once economic and legal judgments. One can see in the Democrats’ fury the desperate attempt to conceal the implications of their monstrous legislation, to maintain as long as possible the fiction that ObamaCare is a great cost-saver, and boon to employers. It’s going to be hard to keep up the charade, for as the editors note, ObamaCare “was such a shoddy, jerry-rigged piece of work that the damage is coming sooner than even some critics expected.”