As part of its week-long special targeting government regulations, Fox's "straight news" program, Special Report with Bret Baier, listed "jobs regulations" that supposedly "adversely impact ... small business owners in a real-time way." However, the regulations listed by Fox include vital statutes that are the bedrock of 20th and 21st Century worker protections in the United States.
Fox News Report Attacks Laws That Supposedly "Adversely Impact ... Small Business Owners In A Real-Time Way"
Fox Report Lists Regulations That Are Supposedly Burdensome To Small Business. From the September 16 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier:
BRET BAIER (host): We continue our series about excessive regulations, tonight focusing on small business. Chief Washington correspondent, James Rosen, reports while the companies may not be large, the rule books they must follow are getting bigger all the time -- James.
JAMES ROSEN (Fox News chief Washington correspondent): Bret, good evening. There are close to 28 million small businesses in the United States, and they employ more than half of all private sector workers. One problem is that as he hires more people, the small business owner will often not know about new regulations he faces until after he's been found in violation of them, or perhaps, even fined.
Businesses with just one employee face right off the bat at least ten federal regulations, including predictable ones like Social Security, but, also, the Polygraph Protection Act. Grow your business to 25 employees and you face all of those plus a whole new wrath of them, including the Older Worker Benefit Protection Act. Surely every pizzeria owner has that memorized. And the list grows like a beanstalk when your company grows to 100 employees.
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Fox's Targeted Regulations Include Minimum Wage Laws, Worker Safety Laws, Civil Rights Laws
Those laws included: Fair Labor Standards Act (minimum wage, child labor, OT); Social Security Act; FICA; Medicare; Immigration Reform Act (1986); Occupational Safety And Health Act; Polygraph Protection Act; and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
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http://mediamatters.org/research/201109170003Seriously. How many people really are buying this premise that these laws are causing the recession and that the private sector is inherently self-policing? In the real world that's a bunch of crap. And seriously, FNC decided to include the freakin' 1964 CIVIL RIGHTS ACT - the one that innocently bans discrimination on race/religion/etc. in hiring decisions??? I guess they gotta pander to the Rand Paul lovers - he's the one who advocated that private businesses have the "right to discriminate" - and the old geezers who miss the days when they could get away with calling black people n----rs or Asian people Chinamen. It's like how Ronald Reagan mentioned "states' rights" when campaigning in the Mississippi town where the civil rights activists were murdered. I'm astonished why so many people consider Fox News legitimate.
How many pensive FNC viewers have ever considered that if they had their way, they'd be:
- breathing in toxic air and become bed-ridden with cancer or asthma,
- and then have to rely on big bad socialist government health care because they can't even work anymore now that they have lung cancer
- and their kids could work for hours and hours for $2 and hour like what's happening all over Asia as big American corporations especially clothing companies outsource work to low wage countries,
- thus their kids can't even go to school because they can be exploited for cheap labor,
- which brings down wages for adult workers,
- and then the CEOs and stockholders get to go party in Vegas while the rest of us eat scraps of bread.