Here in Colorado, there are almost no employers offering health insurance since 2012 when the 2nd phase of Obamacare kicked in. Starting in March this year (2014) any company that has 50+ employees of more than 32 hours per week has to pay health insurance for them: as you can imagine, the employment of full-timers has taken a major dive this year from that one. All over the country, there is now a "new" tracking number called "semi-employed", who used to have 40-hour/week jobs, now don't. It's a staggering number, too, being more than 55% of the workforce as of June 1 this year. In the last 7 years of tracking, the "new jobs created" number, which historically has always had to be AT LEAST 240,000 per month to make it a 0% growth number, has not once made it that high since Obama's economic plan hit. In December and January last, it hit less than 68,000 total jobs, and this administration actually blamed it on a major snowstorm that hit New York (no place else, just there...).
My favorite story under it all: in 2007 August I was part of a 320-person Engineering team that was opening up both the Pinedale natural gas field (HUGE) in Wyoming and re-opening the world's largest, richest, molybdenum mine in Colorado. In November 2008, when Obama won that election, the next week there was called a big Press conference at the firm, with the local newspaper and 2 TV channels coming to show it to the country. It wasn't quite what they had expected: instead of moving forward with all the designs and plans we were all finished with, and had started implementing, the financiers announced, "Due to the declining price of moly around the world, we are closing the mine" (that we were just 2 days from opening!). We were stunned. The Press left, and some of us Engineers went to the bankers to ask "WTF"? Moly was/is skyrocketing, as is/was natural gas. Two of the financiers took a few of us off to the side and said, quietly, "Look. This guy who won the election is a raging liberal supported by "green" billionaires who want to create a whole industry of solar and wind power with tax monies. We are not going to even try to operate in that environment, because they will sic the EPA on everything we do." This has become completely true, too. Three weeks later, the company laid off 300 of the 400 engineers, including me, because all the contracts were suddenly closed.
The next day after the Press conference, the brand-new giant Mill we had just finished manufacturing for the mine arrived at the brand-new building in Fremont Pass (near Leadville), and the workers backed the specially-built flatbed truck into the brand-new building, unloaded the new Mill onto the brand-new floor in a convenient place, pulled out the truck and locked the brand-new doors after turning off the lights. Today, there is still a brand-new facility there with 3 people inside (security guards) who patrol the area. I saw it just a few weeks ago. Totally idle.
The gas field in Wyoming is all shut down, except for the privateers who operate a few sites here and there and truck their gas out. The pipelines we built are all shut off, waiting for another day.
"Pissed off" doesn't even begin to describe how I feel about THIS, either...
