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I read that it was a subsidy with a tax credit which in effect zero'd out their tax liability.
More than zeroed out. The subsidy was (and still is) tax-free. But until HCR, the recipients could also list the subsidy as a tax deduction, knocking an additional $233 per covered employee off their tax bill.
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Originally Posted by HappyTexan
It was done so that those retirees would not flood the medicare system.
More correctly stated, so that corporations wouldn't all cut their plans and dump everyone into a brand new federal system all at once. Keep in mind there was no federal coverage for presripction drugs prior to 2003, so many companies offered it. When the government said they would start to, most companies planned to give it up. The subsidies were to convince most that keeping up their own plans -- at least for a while -- would be a good idea.
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Originally Posted by HappyTexan
They've been doing it since 2003..7 years and no one complained.
$650 to the company or spend $1200 to do it yourself.
A lot of people have complained. More and more as the years have gone by. But you certainly weren't going to see a Republican Congress do anything about it, and you certainly weren't going to get a Republican President to refrain from vetoing it. So you have to wait until you have a Democratic Congress and President willing to tackle not just this little bit, but health care as a whole in order to get it addressed.
The subsidy number for FY2011 is $665 (it goes up each year, usually by $45-50), but that is hardly the only expense to government, as presently the entire roughly $2700 per person cost is deductible. That's an additional loss of $945 in government revenues. As above, under HCR, companies would lose $233 of that $945 leaving $712 in foregone tax collections, but that plus the subsidy of $665 still comes to $1377. $1200 seems to go into that number pretty comfortably.
I need to read up on this. It's either a witch-hunt designed to excoriate businesses for embarrassing Democrats mere hours after the bill passed, or its meant to find out how bad Democrats' f*cked up with this piece of legislation.
Either way, it doesn't look good. But reality sucks sometimes. Democrats should have read the bill.
Should Of Could Of but they didn't. Figures though.
And the vast majority of those you speak of are covered by union contracts that do not expire until 2012. No change can be made before then, and any change made then will have to be negotiated through the union. Given that the actual costs to AT&T for these benefits are trivial, the union side is not so likely to be impressed by the company's crocodile tears.
Maybe you should be practicing that in front of a mirror.
You are correct about the union being part of the mix. That will definitely put a different spin on this meeting next month.
Costs & benefits will still be affected. AT&T will have to figure out what's best for them and their shareholders.
Well, unfortunately for you, your fetishes aren't broadcast on C-SPAN. But like I said, its free... unless you want to pay for your kind of show (and I bet you do
You are correct about the union being part of the mix. That will definitely put a different spin on this meeting next month.
There is nothing remarkable about the charges being taken. What's got people on the Hill stirred up is the size of some of them as against amounts estimated by independent analysts and some of the rhetoric that was dumped out along with the charges. Those are the things that will have to be explained.
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Originally Posted by DRob4JC
Costs & benefits will still be affected. AT&T will have to figure out what's best for them and their shareholders.
No question. But they've been doing that all along. As a group, companies have slowly been walking away from offering retirement benefits of pretty much every sort -- including prescription drug coverage -- for years, while still claiming to prospective recruits that their positions offer great salaries and benefits. But the estimates for gross cost here come in at a few hundredths of one percent of gross revenues. These amounts are simply not large enough by a long shot to be driving major corporate decision-making.
I trust coporations only a little more than I do the government for fairness and honest financial disclosure. We need to be hauling in both the CEOS AND our elected representatives to answer to US about the repercussions of this bill.
Start demanding more town hall meetings.
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Figures though.
