ObamaCare Causes Huffington Post Parent Company to Cut Benefits
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On February 6, 2014 @ 7:13 pm In The Point | 5 Comments
99 percent!
Considering that AOL now only exists to dump Huffington Post spam on the web, I don’t think it’s unfair to describe Tim Armstrong’s boondoggle as HuffPo’s parent company.
Ironically, AOL chief exec Armstrong blames ObamaCare for the 401k cuts even though he stupidly paid $315 million for a publishing platform for unpaid bloggers and lefty activists to promote ObamaCare and lie about its benefits.
AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong on Tuesday offered a number of unusual explanations for why his company pulled back its 401(k) benefits for employees this year. The first reason: Obamacare. The second: two women at the company who had “distressed babies” in 2012.
The stock, which started off strong this morning because of a good earnings release by AOL, has now fallen nearly three percent today.
How did this mess begin? The Washington Post reported Tuesday that AOL quietly made a major change to its 401(k) plan by switching its match to a lump sum at the end of the year, rather than contributing with every paycheck. The benefit is only available to employees who are still active on Dec. 31.
Retirement experts widely agree that the change hurts all employees–not just those who leave mid-year–since savers miss out on the benefits of investing more money throughout the year, a strategy known as “dollar cost averaging.”
When he was asked on CNBC this morning why AOL was making the change, Armstrong said it was to spare employees from what he described as the added costs of Obamacare.
“As a CEO and as a management team, we have to decide: Do we pass the $7.1 million of Obamacare cost to our employees? Or do we try to eat as much of that as possible and cut benefits?,” said Armstrong in the CNBC interview.
Or Armstrong could have cut Arianna Huffington’s 4 million dollars a year salary. Just kidding.
The media’s Obama defense team is liming up to bash Armstrong and defend ObamaCare, as if a thousand other businesses aren’t giving variations of the same explanation for why they’re firing employees, cutting back on benefits, eliminating hours, and all the other goodies that turn formerly employed people into “free contractors” and empowering them to collect unemployment.
And I have no sympathy for Tim Armstrong whatsoever.
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine:
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