Transcripts For FBC The Willis Report 20130224 : vimarsana.c

FBC The Willis Report February 24, 2013

Tom strange, like the pause because it is strange. Thanks t everybody that contacted the show this week. Keep your comments coming in. Were open for business 24 7. Check out Facebook Page. You can follow me on twitter. By the way, on the Facebook Page there is a little app if you want to listen the radio show, its right there. All the ways to contact us is the main website which is my name, tomsullivan. Com. We are many stations around the country and like said. You can click the button on my website. Its every weekday from 3 00 to 6 00 p. M. Eastern. Well have another great tv show for you next week on fox adam thats all that time we have. Melissa will be back monday. Gerri hello, everyone. Tonight on the willis report another unintended consequence of obamaca. Now your Health Insurance may not cover your spouse and more. And starting to get hit by the sales tax. One Economist Says the designers of the law were all wrong. And, to top tier weekend. We have you covered with the important things like what the stars are going to wear and what is really in those slight bags. The willis report is on the case. Gerri all of that and more coming up later in the show. First, our top story. Listen to this. Honey, you are uninsured. Yet another consequence of obamacare. You can add it to the list. More and more employers planning to drop Health Coverage for spouses. All in an effort to cut costs. Now, three years ago this was virtually nonexistent. Last year that number jumped. 6 percent of large employers excluded spouses on health plans in 2012. Experts say that number will continue to climb when the new Health Exchanges under obamacare are officially established next year. My first guest tonight sayshat will leave some of women with poor coverage or no coverage at all. Joining me now, ceo of vital springs technology. Welcome back to the show. What is going on . How is it that these companies are going to exclude spoes . Be they women are meant . You know, this is strike three. You cannot keep your plan, you can ftp doctor. You cant even keep your spouse. You know, the reality is is that it is a huge costs for employers in terms of coverin dependents. The number is increasing in terms of the employers that are saying that they are not going to provide coverage and more, and it is a real concern because it was not clearly defined within the Affordable Care act in terms of what was going to happen to spouses. Gerri it is my understanding that the law basically says you have to cover the case but says nothing about the spouse. Companies that are squeezed for doe are saying, well, maybe we will just of opera stop offering it to spouses. It is a big deal. In the making a lot of the Health Care Decisions in the family. More often women. Gerri women who cost more. Lets be clear. Thats exactly right. They cost more and end up getting more services. So we is a huge expense. And employers are basically giving them a few options. Either you pay a premium if you could cover is through your place of work and you still opt to go with your spouse, or theyre not going to cover them all. Gerri unbelievable. So when you come back to this whole notion of trying to coordinate care in this whole notion of the patient center, well, out you create a patients entered on . Gerri i saw that in your notes, and i dont know what that means hes a obamacare more difficult. Why . The whole premise behind obamacare is to coordinate care. They want to bring everybody together. How did you bring everybody together if the husband and wife could potentially not be seen this same doctors to back him is ludicrous. Because you completely fragmented what is sacred which is a family unit. Gerri so now care is haphazard. Notice more difficult to understand what is going on with each individual. You have the same doctor taking care of mom and pa kettle. They probably understand the dynamic in the family a whole lot better than if those two people go to two dferent doctors. Absolutely. In primary care. Takeout ob gyn. But a lot of primary care is going to be family centric. Its going to be coordinated. Then of a sudden if you have to go fend for yourself, you know, it completely is you know, flies in the face of all notion of trying to improve efficiencies and bring down costs. And the other ironic thing here is that on the one hand, employers have to make a decision now in terms of whether there are going to provide benefits. If you qualify for the subsidies in the exchange, the formula calls for factoring in the compensation of not just the individual, but the household. Gerri all right. Lets get back to what were talking here. I get confused easily on this topic. Obamacare is incredibly complicated. You know, here is what i dont care about what is going on in this country without care. We had a system in place that cost the federal government virtually nothing. That was sponsored by corporations, Companies Paying for insurance. Now we are dismantling that as fa as we can. This seems to me were going to have nothing left. No. What you will have left is teeseven s. A. This time and time again. As single payer system where the government is going to take over a lot of the responsibility. Gerri what a nightmare. The people who cannot deliver mail on saturday. You think of want to have my health care in hand . Not really. One womans opinion. All right. Thank you. Thanks so much for coming in tonight. I was just shocked by the story and i knew you would make sense of it. Thank you so much. Thank you. Gerri now we want to know what you think. Heres our question. Should companies be forced to cover spouses . Log onto gerriwillis. Com and vote on the right inside of the street and i will share the results of the end of the show. Well, obamacare is helping dig the u. S. Deeper into debt. Now our monstrous debt, 16 trillion, has people wondering if that is the real reason the u. S. Keeps talking tough but wont get tough with china. This is all over the numerous Cyber Attacks china is accused of waging against u. S. Companies and government agencies. A fox news contributor. Great to have you back on the show. It seems like the u. S. Government wants to talk a tough game. There is absolutely nothing behind it. How can there be something behind it when we hope china so much money . Talk with nothing behind it is unfortunately typical of the obama administration. The point youre making about the debt is significant. I think it has been a problem for the United States in the wrong way. It comes up when people say whenever we have an issue with china basically they say, well, we cant do anything about that. Then we dont do anything about it. You never challenge china you never forced them to use the debt as leverage, so they went for free. The conclusion in beijing is we might as well post a little bit harder. Point number two, i think the leverage that the debt of force china is greatly overstated because their economy is just as dependent on ours as ours is on them. Gerri we are there market for there goods. For one party or the other terrorist retaliation economically is a bag of the neighbor policy that i dont think gerri there are still people that think the federal that is our Biggest National security issues. Tune out . I think it is a huge nestle security issue and would like Nothing Better than for china to say, were not buying any more of your depth. Might force the status of fiscal discipline. You cannot have a strong presence internationally, especially militarily without a strong economy. To the extent that the deficit each year adds to the debt and saps our domestic economy, thus preventing it from recovering, absolutely. Gerri you make a great point. We are looting this report which said that the Chinese Government is involved in acting and stealing ideas, stealing memos, stealing emails, stealing a permission from our federal government, and they even name the unit of the chinese Peoples Liberation army, unit 61398. Unbelievable to me. I mean, if you had told me this story i would have said was that from john stuart . I cannot believe it is true. I am glad this of us but report is out. It is not the first time that we have concluded with the source of many of these attacks is. The pentagon as stuff for a long time is sicily every Major Corporation has been attacked by the Peoples Liberation army. So what the chinesere doing is looking for their asymmetric point advantage. They cannot match as in conventional forces and Nuclear Forces are made it naval forces, so theyre going after our vulnerability, reliance on information technology. Theyre way ahead of us in this area. Gerri the president put out an executive order. Some vines are something silly. Sillies exactly right. Look. Dealing with commercial espionage is apiece through legal means, we have to understand that for china, russia, other countries, this is a form of warfare. Im not suggesting that the government takeover information security, but i think there are areas where government privatesector cooperation here is important. How to create defenses and for the government, what kind of offense cyber capability we need to deter the chinese and others from doing this. Gerri there are all kinds of different levels. There is out endowed intellectual property theft. There is, you know, goofing off. Kids here in the u. S. To do this kind of thing. Then there is what is out and no warfare in your mind . We need conceptually a ladder of escalation like we have had for many years in the nuclear area. What has been us fits in there, and we need to know what are proper response. Right now we are just wondering. We are taking steps. I think we can catch up. Recently had the capability. We have not focused on this. Gerri al leader. Huckabee psibly be behind . Because we have not seen the vulnerability that thehinese have seen. That is why i welcome this report. People need to understand this. I am confident we can developed defenses and an offensive capability, but we have to get on it. That is why would not cut our defense budget. One more new front that we have to be prepared for. Gerri all right. Thank you for coming on. Always great to see you. Thank you so much. Well, the u. S. State department is trying to play down the conflict between the ceo of tighten international, maurice taylor, and the french government, calling a private matter. We talked about this last night. The exchange erupt after the french government leaked a letter written by mr. Taylor in which she describes workers at the french tire plant he was considering buying sleazy. In case you missed it yesterday, here is what he told me about the atmosphere of the french plant. You walkin. They get in now or for their lunch in their brakes. They work about three hours and then the other three, its like a beauty shop. Theyre socializing. The reason being, they would like you the union thinks she should hire more people. I mean, thats the unions mentality. Then what happens is appearances theyre closing the plant. I have nothing. So theyre not they will close it. The french minister, i will call up this tighten and have them come. I spent four years over there talking with these fools. And so he kept pounding. He thought that he would leave this out, that he could take the american, a foreigner, and my comments about the work, which was true, and twisted and get some heat off. Well, it is a fool. He knows i have a history that i dont walk away from any battle. Gerri unbelievable. Great interview. A lot more still to come this hour, including state governments starting to see some revenue from the online sales tax. Not anything like they thought. And it is taxes like that that are behind consumers getting squeezed just as the cost of everything keeps going up. We will break it down next three. Man we are rolling. All right, mamas gonna bring it home, mamas gonna bring it home. Oh, no man oh, mom aah announcer challenge your kids to be active and eat healthy. All right, lets see what you can do. Lets go. Announcer search we can for ideas on how to get healthy together. Gerri well, look, i know were supposed to be in a slowgrowth economy. Prices sure arent. First, rising food prices hard to miss the grocery store. According to the government, ground beef is up 13 and a half percent yearoveryear. Chicken of more than 12 . Here is what really stings, stake up 9 . Coffee up seven and a half . That is to of my three food groups. The third, in the butter, up more than 11 . I am stepping a little bit, but it is deadly serious. Consumer budgets stretched the limits. Wages stagnant or down for those with jobs, and for those on fixed incomes, well, there is not a lot of room for a tebow in the prices skyrocketing. We asked viewers on twitter and facebook if you are facing higher prices and the answer was a resounding yes. We are having a hard time making it. I stretch every meal, not a scrap of food is wasted. My meal plan to reach out. Solutions, eating a lot more fresh veggies from our garden, green bananas, all green such as the broccoli leaves. With not one not. And it is not just food. Gas prices are up almost 0. 50 a the last month alone. A strange and a quick jump that is stumping ecomists. The average for unleaded gas is that the highest we have ever seen, but the highest we have ever had for late february. Insiders say seasonal factors are work which is cold comfort for consumers. Three states and the district of columbia have gas prices above 4 per gallon. 4. News of inflation and gas and food prices lies under the radar because the government does not counted in its Consumer Price index, which is the main measure of consumer level inflation. They say prices of gas and food are too volatile to be put in the index. Isnt that the point, to measure price changes at every level . Even so, the rise in Consumer Prices is coming in a bad time because after the first of the year every working american got a tax hike in the form of the payroll tax which was restored to prerecession levels. This was a pay cut that most of us just were not anticipating. It is knocking two Percentage Points of takehome pay. According to the wall street journal in taking a total of 110 billion of consumers which could presumably be spent in the economy. For a household with an income of 65,000 it is at 1,300 haircut. Ouch. This week walmart announced the tax is hurting sales. Walmart joins others, including burger king, kraft foods. Theyre all lowering forecasts for sales and adjusting sales to marketing strategies. They know that higher prices will cost sales. The estion is just how much. Walmart stocks stores with cheaper goods and smaller packages well burger king cuts the price of its whopper junior to a dollar 29. Look, prices just keep going up and up and americans are adjusting spending and expectations. I will tell you, one potential Silver Lining here, the Agriculture Department says food inflation may ease later this year as the effects of last years drought began to wear off. Maybe this time the federal government will get its inflation right. They dont actually have a good record on that score. By the way, had to share this. Higher food prices equate to a more beans and rice at our hse, but our budget for air fresheners to skyrocket. Thank you for that. Appreciated. A tough topic. Coming up, it is not about who wins and loses but what they wear on oscar night. We will have a preview. Next, those behind the new online sales tax promise big things for state government. My guest says theyre wrong. Gerri at the same heading up an already hard at nation. How taxes could get slammed this there was a study in 2009 and it was full of muzzle logical errors. They assumed 100 compliance and our wrath of other simple mistakes. We went to i did a study with bob isaacs from the Brookings Institution and we showed that they were overestimating by about twothirds. Gerri unbelievable. This is just crazy talk. This is what you get when you get a bunch of politicians talking about taxes. The overestimate. Nine states that are collecting what is called the amazon sales tax. I say amazon sales tax, what it really is is a tax on all online sales. Arizona, california, as you can see, kansas, new york, north dakota, on and on. Now, senator dick durbin, democrat from illinois is pushing for a National Online sales tax. What do you make of that . Exactly. In the real battle here is not so much between online and offline as between big and small. So if youre if you are a big company like walmart and target you are already paying taxes on all the state because u. S. Stores and all the states. That is the rule. If you have a store in the state youre using, you have employees. Gerri that everybody does. If you dont then you are not using those resources and what his legislation would do would essentially overturn the 1992 Supreme Court decision that said, in order to pay taxes and estate you have to have some does go presence there. Gerri that is the big debate that went on between brick and mortar and online. So here is the estimate from the university of tennessee about how much a National Amazon tax to collect. Just under 11 and a half billion. Can i believe that . Know where close. We estimated about 4 billion per year. That is, by the way, a tiny fraction of state budgets or even sta deficits. So it would not solve the problem. I think we are going to turn out even to be overoptimistic, if you will, about the amount of tax revenues. Gerri why is that . Why . Well, several reasons. One is that Small Businesses are going to be exempted. And so at some level you are going to exempt small business, and the ones you dont exempt, lot of them, frankly, wont comply. The second reason, and the biggest one, they are ignoring the fact that most online sales are conducted by brick and mortar. So walmart, target, when you go online theyre counting as an online sale. Thirteen of the 15 Largest Online sellers are brick and Mortar Stores tt are already paying taxes and all the states. Gerri you know, the folks who would like to push this idea, theres a lot of sales moving, and that is not there today. There could be as

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