Monday, January 16, 2006

Hooray for Maryland! (I think...)

This morning at Yahoo! News I found an article that made me happy. The state of Maryland has passed a law that employers of over 10,000 state residents are now required to spend a minimum of 8% of their income (or was it revenues?) on employee health care coverage. That sounds like a pretty broad law, does it not? That's what I thought. However it turns out that (guess who?) WalMart is the only employer in the state that meets that size requirement that's not already spending that magic 8%. Yet another reason that WalMart is an evil company and why "Everyday low prices!" has its cost in the community. And that, my dear readers, is a cost I'm not willing to pay. I have actively boycotted WalMart for a couple of years now (the number of times I've caved and had to run in for something I can count on one hand), and will continue to do so.


The 'I think...' part of the header comes from the slippery slope that is single-company-targeted legislation. On one hand if WalMart would just do the right thing (tm) this wouldn't be an issue, but on the other, I don't really like the idea of state legislatures targeting one company with a particular law. It seems sorta like Gov't micromanagement. So which is the lesser of the evils?

-B

1 comment:

Speedmaster said...

Here's a link to a very good column on the topic.

http://amateureconblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/incredible-stuff-machine-by-llewellyn.html