The carnage from the worst legislation in modern history keeps piling up. The latest damage assessment comes from a Gallup poll that shows “Forty-one percent of small businesses surveyed have frozen hiring” because of ObamaCare, while an equally astonishing 19 percent have actually reduced the number of employees in their business specifically as a result of the President’s health care reform. 38 percent said they have pulled back on expansion plans.

CNBC reports:

“We were startled because we know that employers were concerned about the Affordable Care Act and the effects it would have on their business, but we didn’t realize the extent they were concerned, or that the businesses were being proactive to make sure the effects of the ACA actually were minimized,” said attorney Steven Friedman of Littler Mendelson. His firm, which specializes in employment law, commissioned the Gallup poll. “If the small businesses’ fears are reasonable, then it could mean that the small business sector grows slower than what economic conditions otherwise would indicate. And small businesses have been a growth engine in the economy,” Friedman told CNBC.

Friedman found these results “startling” and described the reported job cuts as “significant, and a bit troubling.” His firm commissioned the poll because they had been hearing such complaints from a number of their small business clients.

But wait, it gets worse: 24 percent of poll respondents are thinking about dropping insurance coverage for their employees (“If you like your health care plan, you will be able keep your heath care plan. Period. No matter what.” – Barack Obama, July 2009.) And 18 percent report transforming full-time jobs into part-time positions – the great ObamaCare “burger flipper” transformation of the American workforce, which the media instantly lost its taste for discussing on the day George Bush left the White House.

Of course, the Democrat response is to call these business owners ignorant fools who need more “education” in the glories of ObamaCare – an effort that has been stuffing hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of Democrat interest groups. And if the engines of job growth remain in neutral for much longer, we’ll hear more grumbling that these entrepreneurs are nothing but a pack of greedy fatcats using health care as an excuse to fire people, because they can’t run their companies as well as Barack Obama could.

Why is Congress wasting its time on an amnesty bill that will flood this moribund job market with millions of new low-income workers, when the most urgent business of the American people is the immediate and complete repeal of ObamaCare? The people who inflicted it upon us don’t want to live under it. ObamaCare bureaucrats are growing comically desperate in their search for young, healthy suckers they can fleece to keep the system afloat. The corrupt IRS will play a major role as enforcers… and they won’t even be the most unaccountable players. “The power given by Congress to the Independent Payment Advisory Board is breathtaking,” noted David Rivkin and Elizabeth Foley at the Wall Street Journal this week. “Congress has willingly abandoned its power to make tough spending decisions (how and where to cut) to an unaccountable board that neither the legislative branch nor the president can control. The law has also entrenched the board’s decisions to an unprecedented degree.”

The American people have already lost control of the legislative and executive branches… and they’re busy handing over vast life-and-death powers to bureaucracies not even they can control? No thanks. There’s no reason to stick with this nightmare long enough to find out how that works out. We’ve paid more than enough already, and we have less than nothing to show for it.