See Yourself Here ~ Target Corporation
Photo: Target Stores

Welcome to Obama’s America.

Dan, age 26, did what he was supposed to do. Honors college, double major — worked in the Geology department and earned several achievement awards before graduating and pursuing a master’s program.

Thanks to a disastrous economy, five years after receiving his graduate degree, he hasn’t spent one day in the muck and mud hydrogeologists love so much. Instead, he’s done what hardworking Americans have always done — take a bad situation and create a new opportunity.

For Dan, that’s been a red shirt and khakis. Yes, six years and thousands of dollars later, he packed away his two degrees and decided to use his experience working the sales floor at Target as an alternate career path in retail management.

He’s good at it, and surprisingly, he even likes it. Forget the hours, the “guest” (in Target-speak) whining about a sold-out video game; overlook the dismissiveness of peers who would rather collect an unemployment check than take a “demeaning” job. What he rightly understands is that retail is a business — a huge, critically important business — that requires skills, training and sweat equity to make it hum.

And so Dan is working his way up, hours and pay notwithstanding.

This week, Target Corporation joined the growing list of companies canceling part-time employees’ health insurance, the result of what Charles Krauthammer says is Obamacare’s purpose to “destroy the relationship between the employer and the employee.” On a store level, the cancellations affect virtually ALL Target staff except for executive management; meaning Dan, who works an average of 30 to 40 hours each week, has been dumped into the Obamacare vortex.

Thing is, he doesn’t want to be there. The quality of coverage will decline, costs will surge, and there’s even the specter of Medicaid should he fall below a designated income level. So much for the left being the proponents of individual “choice.” So much for Barack Obama’s deceitful “promise” that will go down as one of the biggest lies in presidential history.

Dan’s is the story of one young American. He is also my son. Like so many others, he is being used as a political pawn in the left’s voracious appetite for government control. Certainly, this is not the nation where individual effort results in individual outcome; the country where my dad, the poor, uneducated son of Italian immigrants, was able to use his smarts and grit to help build an international fast food empire.

We have to stop this, and this is the year. The alternative is more of these stories, and worse.