Denver, CO – In a nutshell, the Paid Family Medical Leave Act would tax businesses, this money would go into a fund, most likely run by the government, and the fund would be used to pay for employees at other companies to take time off.
Obviously, paid time-off is something an employer can negotiate with their employees. However, the Democrats in the legislature want to force paid time off down the throats of businesses here in Colorado. This legislation has been killed every time in past years because it’s a bad idea, and the Democrats can’t rally the votes. This includes the crazy liberal 2019 legislative session.
What happened with this bill (we also covered this is the last article) was the usual ruse:
- The bill can’t be passed as is
- The legislation is turned into a “Study Committee”
- The Study Committee’s purpose is to rally support for the legislation (at taxpayer expense) for a future session to pass it.
- Most of the time, this works, and bad legislation eventually gets adopted.
However, sometimes there is one of those “Whoops!” moments when a monkey wrench is thrown in the mix. Well, that monkey wrench was thrown in by an actuarial analysis this time. In layman’s terms, the numbers were re-crunched, and the new cost of the program was released in a study.
As you can guess, the numbers came in higher than originally estimated. Yeah, substantially higher:
The final report pegs the premium costs, beginning in 2024, at $1.168 billion for the low benefit model and almost $2.3 billion for the high benefit model, all beginning in 2024. The legislation estimated premium costs at at $922.4 million in 2021-22 and $956.5 million the following year.
Colorado Politics, Dec 11, 2019
So that’s about 20% higher on the low end, and up almost 250% on the high end. The initial estimates for the legislation that was killed were substantially lower. Not surprisingly, Democrats low-balled the cost of another expensive piece of bad legislation.
Common sense would dictate that this legislation should be dead-on-arrival based on this new revelation on cost. Don’t bet on it. Politicians at the state capitol…Well, almost all politicians…Don’t have a lot of common sense. Expect this legislation to be introduced in the 2020 Legislative session.
The Democrats are relentless when it comes to their far-left agenda. We at the Colorado Citizen Press will call them out on all of their shenanigans. Stay tuned!
This article is a follow-up to something we published a few weeks ago concerning the Paid Family Medical Leave Act. If you want to read the original article, please [CLICK HERE].
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