I'm a solo practitioner, and the burdens that would come with potentially hiring a bit of clerical help would give me pause. However, at the mega-corporate level, isn't the "fear" of spending to create jobs because of burdensome regulation a bit of a pose, a hostage taking, a taking of one's ball and going home, a holding of corporate breath and turning blue to get one's way?

Yeah, it probably has nothing to do with health care for that job hire costing $22,000 per year, on average. Must be the unknown potential of that new hire costing $22.50 in possible regulatory expenses per employee. Yeah, that's it.

I'm just curious because I don't know.....how much more is that than when unemployment was in the mid 5% range 3 years ago or so? I really don't know....an increase of 10%? 50%?

$22,000? Here is what I found. Not even close.

Anybody else paying attention to what's going on in Libya today? Quite a bit going on. Who'd have thought, all these years later, we'd STILL be talking about Kadaffi? (giving up on attempts to spell it...)

I'm all for deposing dictators. However I fear that all that is going to happen is exchanging a secular dictator for an Islamic dictator. Is one better than the other?

I imagine it would depend on the specific dictator. And who you're asking, I imagine the government and corporations would prefer whichever dictator will most do whatever they're told. We all tend to like dictators, just so long as we're not under their umbrella of power.

But regardless of whether it just results eventually in another dictator, quite possibly worse than the previous one, my default position is to be in favor of the people in a nation at least spasmodically making the effort to choose their government. It may fail to make things better, the historical record kind of argues that the odds are against them. But kind of like terrorism it generally only needs to succeed once.

We sort of choose our own government here in the States, but it rarely makes things better. Doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying.

We pay almost $9600 a year for health insurance - and that's with the employer paying part.

We didn't pay quite that much at his previous job- $8400 a year.

Family of 4.

It's our next highest expense after housing.

I hope Beelzebub's got enough diesel to run those backup heaters, 'cause hell's about to get frosty.... I totally agree with Karl Rove