"You don't want to say to your workforce that you're going to lay people off," he says. "The tax is going to result in growth in another location and not in the U.S.; that's the way I see the impact on Cook."
Cook Group is privately held; Ferguson says publicly held companies will face more pressure to reduce workforce numbers to placate shareholders, but will be more reluctant to blame the tax in public.
Bipartisan Opposition
Even some liberal pundits, such as MSNBC host Ed Schultz, have expressed opposition to the device tax, and nine Democrats have joined 216 Republicans in the House to sponsor Minnesota Representative Erik Paulsen's legislation to repeal it. A companion bill in the Senate introduced by Orrin Hatch has 19 co-sponsors, all Republicans.
Paulsen is hopeful that more Democrats will reconsider the tax: "Most of those nine have come along in recent months as their constituent companies have alerted them to the danger. It starts in literally one year. So we have time to fix this." Right now, though, the tax is caught up in the politics of the larger health-care bill. Most Democrats do not want to undermine the new law, and most Republicans want to repeal it outright rather than remove its most objectionable features.
The Republican worries are especially misplaced. The device tax has motivated very little of the popular or congressional opposition to the health-care law. If Republicans succeed in eliminating the levy, that opposition will remain just as strong as before. If they fail, then at least their condemnation of the tax can help make the case that the law was even more misbegotten than opponents thought.