Pandering to Idiots

There are plenty of laws on the books which are there for no other reason than to pander to idiots. This article is about proposed legislation which will become another one of those laws (should it pass, which it will because we are increasingly becoming a larger nation of idiots). The morons in DC want to pass legislation requiring companies to pay for sick-days. I get paid sick-days at my job but apparently nearly half the nation does not (should you take this article for face value).

This law is pointless and will do nothing. Every employer puts a dollar value on the role your job provides to the company. That dollar value becomes the budget for your total compensation package. I say ‘package’ because that’s exactly what it is. Your salary is not your compensation package. It’s merely a component along with payroll taxes, insurances, costs, vacation time, or any other benefits they may provide. Paid sick-days will simply become part of that package and as anyone with basic math skills to tell you, when you add two things together, you get a bigger result.

Should this legislation pass and employers become required to offer paid sick-days then everyone impacted by this will suddenly find they no longer provide as much value to their company (monetarily speaking) as they did before. Do you think companies are going to sit idly by and “eat” this cost? Of course not, they have shareholders to please and dropping profits are not very pleasing.

So what happens? Employers will either cut salaries immediately or wait till annual review time comes around and give the employee nothing. Eventually things will level out as does everything. Equilibrium is a bitch, huh? The result being people are paid less but get these magical paid sick-days and politicians everywhere can run around saying, “Look what I did for you!”

And what did they do exactly? Nothing… other than use the power of the government to force make you like them better and keep them in office even longer … pandering to more idiots.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 1:07 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.