"What AT&T, Caterpillar, et al did was appropriate. It's earnings season, and they offered guidance about , um, their earnings."So once Obamacare passed, massive corporate write-downs were inevitable.
They were also bad publicity for Obamacare, and they seem to have come as an unpleasant shock to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who immediately scheduled congressional hearings for April 21, demanding that the chief executive officers of AT&T, John Deere, and Caterpillar, among others, come and explain themselves.
Obamacare was supposed to provide unicorns and rainbows: How can it possibly be hurting companies and killing jobs? Surely there's some sort of Republican conspiracy going on here!
More like a confederacy of dunces. Waxman and his colleagues in Congress can't possibly understand the health care market well enough to fix it. But what's more striking is that Waxman's outraged reaction revealed that they don't even understand their own area of responsibility - regulation -- well enough to predict the effect of changes in legislation.
2 comments:
I admit that I don't understand a lot of things but I do try to get up to speed. I see Congress do this a lot but do they have the power to do it? Is it in the commerce clause?
Do they have the power to demand private business to appear before them in a hearing? And does it extend to any old thing, like what they have reported to the media?
Good question, and I'm not sure. I know they 'request' and 'demand' people show up all the time, but I'm not sure exactly where the authority for that is. Have to try to find out
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