Here’s yet another story that shows democrats will suck up to voters regardless of how much it costs businesses. Alan Grayson, a representative from Florida, is getting ready to introduce legislation that would require businesses to provide paid vacation leave for their employees.

The bill would require companies with more than 100 employees to offer a week of paid vacation for both full-time and part-time employees after they’ve put in a year on the job. Three years after the effective date of the law, those same companies would be required to provide two weeks of paid vacation, and companies with 50 or more employees would have to provide one week.

Translation: some larger small businesses would be forced to offer employees paid vacation.

At this point I’m sounding like a broken record but, this isn’t the government’s job and they don’t have the right to do it.

Now that I’ve got that out of the way I’ve got a simple question, what if a business can’t afford to offer paid vacation? Are they suppose to go into bankruptcy or close their doors because the government is forcing them to give their employees paid leave.

According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research only about a quarter of the American workforce doesn’t get paid leave, so already 75% of workers employers are doing this because they can afford it and it attracts people to work for them. However, that other 25% of the workforce might work for an employer that can’t afford to offer paid vacation. And I’ll bet that most workers would give up paid vacation time to keep their jobs.

Grayson and supporters claim that more paid vacation will decrease work related stress and make more productive workers, however nearly every worker gets some form of a vacation or time off, the key is whether or not it’s paid. Does getting a paid vacation decrease stress even more? Uhh, maybe a little, but nothing that would be noteworthy. And again, I think workers would gladly take some additional work stress if it meant they got to keep their job.

Just like Obama’s increased taxes for individuals making $250,000 and up, this idea of forced paid vacation creates a government mandated disincentive to expand. Some businesses will cap there hiring at 50 workers or 100 workers, thus avoiding forced paid vacation.

The government should be providing incentives to expansion, not disincentives.

If the bill were to pass, Obama would sign it, remember that was one of his campaign promises. Of course some of them have gone by the wayside, but I’d have to imagine he’ll put his John Hancock on this, it has just the right amount of voter suck up potential.

–jb