Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
A Night At The Movies: Higher Costs, Less Hours For Employees
A Night At The Movies: Higher Costs, Less Hours For Employees
Dec 25, 2025 8:44 AM

If your next date night costs you more, you can thank Obamacare. Regal Entertainment Group, the country’s largest movie theater chain, has announced that it is cutting employee hours due to Obamacare related costs.

One Regal theater manager told the move has sparked a wave of resignations from full-time managers who have seen their hours cut by 25 percent or more.

“In the last couple weeks, managers have been quitting on a daily basis from various locations to try and find full-time work,” said the manager, who asked not to be named. “Regal up until now has never restricted anyone to anything below 40 hours.”

Restaurants such as Red Lobster and Olive Garden are also trying to figure out ways to meet health-care costs, and that typically means cutting employee hours so that the employees do not meet full-time status, and thus do not require health care coverage. This “under-employment” is growing.

So-called “underemployment” is already a widespread problem in the weak economy, with many workers unable to get the hours they need to get by. According to an analysis by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), the percentage of workers clocking in on a part-time basis grew from 17 percent in 2007 to 22 percent in 2011. Only 28 percent panies that offer health benefits make them available to part-time employees, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

One website, Obamacarefacts, states that Obamacare will create jobs:

Small businesses have increasingly stopped providing health benefits to their employees over the past decade due to the ever rising cost of health care premiums. The rising costs don’t effect larger firms hiring processes. ObamaCare helps to regulate insurance making it more affordable to small businesses increasing job retention rate and making those jobs more attractive.

While jobs may be available, increasingly they will e with health-care benefits. According to Ed Haislmaier, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, “If you want to have reduced work, lower wages and economic stagnation, this is a great way to do it.” Further, Haislmaier points out that a majority of states have opted out of – at least for now – health care “exchanges” that are part of Obama’s Affordable Care Act. The costs for the states to set these exchanges up are high, impacting state budgets and these states consider the government plan to risky.

Obamacare is costing people money in many ways: lower salaries, higher consumer costs and taxes, and less consumer spending. Rather than dinner out and a movie, more Americans may be choosing dinner at home and a television program.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Alexis de Tocqueville, socialism, and the American Way
Tocqueville determined that the one defining factor in the United States was equality of condition, says John Wilsey in this week’s Acton Commentary. Tocqueville noticed that Americans apparently had the singular ability to prevent equality of conditions from yielding democratic despotism. Through voluntary associations, vigorous local government, a pursuit of self-interest rightly understood, and laws that were based on an accepted moral structure taught in disestablished church bodies, Americans were able to strike that critical balance between private interests and...
Review: Bradley Birzer’s Russell Kirk biography invites us to reconsider conservatism
This is the fifth in a series celebrating the work of Russell Kirk in honor of his 100th birthday this October. Read more from the serieshere. During the twentieth century, one man in particular took it upon himself to make a project of defining and perhaps re-invigorating an American conservatism which the prominent cultural critic Lionel Trilling dismissed as “a series of irritable mental gestures.” I remember picking up a copy of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mindmany years ago. As...
What determines the value of your money?
The value of money is determined by how much (or how little) of it is in circulation. But who makes that decision, and how does their choice affect the economy at large? Doug Levinson looks at the role of the U.S. Federal Reserve efforts to affect inflation and deflation affects the value of our money. ...
The Spanish tradition of freedom in the 16th and 17th centuries
The following article is written by Angel Fernández Álvarez and translated by Joshua Gregor. Juan de Mariana This October 31, I will give a conference entitled The Spanish School of the XVI and XVII Centuries at Harvard University, in order to explain in detail the “institutional framework” and the principles of growth upheld by the late Spanish scholastics. In the conference, organized by the Harvard Real Colegio Complutense, I will explain the importance of Christian humanism, which spread especially from...
How a Protestant pastor defended Brazil’s Catholics
It was in Brazil’s 2010 elections that the majority of the voters first learned about Silas Malafaia. It was also the election in which the left-wing president Lula da Silva reached the height of his political power. Lula was one of the most successful left-wing populist leaders of Latin America in the first two decades of the 21st century. He had all the pragmatism of a Tammany Hall boss. He could be applauded by a crowd of Communists one day...
The political manipulation of religion
The fact that something is political does not mean that it is not religious, says Paul Marshall. Instead of describing something as political, not religious, we might should describe it as the political manipulation of religion, or the insincere use of religion: This stress that events are not religion but politics can lead to misunderstanding the nature of both religion and politics. It can be akin to saying that a table is not round but red. But tables can be...
The reason young people embrace socialism revealed
Why do young people throughout the West have an increasingly positive view of socialism? The answer has been ferreted out between the lines of a survey recently conducted for the Charles Koch Institute. Young people’s infatuation with socialism remains one of the most lamented (or celebrated) facts of the cultural landscape – but both sides agree, it is an undeniable fact. Americans under the age of 30 hold a more favorable view of socialism than capitalism, according to a Gallup...
The economics of choosing the right career
Note: This is post #97 in a weekly video series on basic economics. Warning for young people: having a college degree no longer guarantees you’ll be able to find a good job, much less have a promising career. Four-year college graduates with entry-level jobs actually earned more in 2000 than they’re earning today. Choosing a good career requires planning beyond getting a college education, says Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution University. In this video he explains why you’ll want to...
Radio Free Acton: Was Jesus a socialist? The importance of poetry
On this episode of Radio Free Acton, Dan Hugger, Research Associate at Acton, speaks with Larry Reed, President of the Foundation for Economic Education, about the question that seems to be cropping up everywhere nowadays: Was Jesus a socialist? Then, Bruce Edward Walker talks to James Matthew Wilson about his new volume of poetry and on why poetry is important today. Check out these additional resources on this week’s podcast topics: Read “Jesus would have voted socialist, says Germany’s Left”...
The best ways (empirically speaking) to alleviate global poverty
Virtually all poverty es from economic growth and migration—not redistribution or philanthropy. That’s how economist Bryan Caplan summarizes a fascinating new working paper by Lant Pritchett of the Harvard Kennedy School and Center for Global Development. To make it easier to get the gist of the argument (without having to read all 32 pages), I’ve taken the liberty of “interviewing” the paper. All questions are my own and all answers (with the exception of the parts in brackets) are exact...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved