Your Daily Dose of Absurd Liberal Legislation

The complete inability of the ruling elites to grasp the economic effects of their “feel good” legislation reached an unprecedented level yesterday. U.S. Representative Alan Grayson (FL-8) has just introduced the Paid Vacation Act of 2009, which would:

• Require one week of paid vacation for employees of companies with at least 100 employees. Three years after passage, the bill extends this requirement to companies with at least 50 employees, and requires two weeks for companies with 100 employees.
• Covers workers after one year on the job. Part-timers must work 25 or more hours a week to be covered.

The impact of this bill, if it were to ever become law, would be disastrous. Small companies across the country would be saddled with an incentive to keep their workforces low, lest they cross the Grayson Vacation Line and incur new costs. Medium-sized firms who fall just above the threshold will be given another reason to trim their payrolls by a critical few employees to fall just below the line that would mandate new costs on their operations. Multiply these layoffs and reduced growth incentives across the entire economy and the impact would be profound.

As the nation grapples with recession-induced record unemployment, how can anyone think that making employing people, which will be critical to our recovery, more difficult is a good idea? Could it be because Grayson’s district includes Disney World? He did hatch the idea while strolling through the Magic Kingdom.

The bill is also being pushed by Take Back Your Time, a group dedicated to helping Americans balance their work and home lives: a laudable objective. In their materials they offer the following piece of advice, “It’s time we traded some of our productivity gains for time instead of money and stuff. We’d all be happier.”

Maybe so, but should we really legislate happiness? Does the big government absurdity know no ends?
Read it here on our AFP Blog.

Stuart Jolly Lt. Col. (R), US Army is the Oklahoma State Director for Americans for Prosperity-Oklahoma.