On the one hand, it seems good to have a God-awful policy delayed for a year — even if the electoral motivations behind it are more than obvious. On the other hand, if you have to eat a crap sandwich, why not start chewing early?

Businesses won’t be penalized next year if they fail to provide workers health insurance after the Obama administration decided to delay a key requirement under its signature 2010 health-care law. The government will postpone enforcement of the so-called employer mandate until 2015, the administration said today. Under the provision, companies with 50 or more workers face a fine of as much as $3,000 per employee if they don’t offer affordable insurance.

Note how the article terms as a “fine” or a “penalty” that which Obama administration lawyers argued, and the Supreme Court ruled, was a tax, and not a fine or a penalty. Anyway. [UPDATE: Actually, never mind, that analysis applies to the individual mandate, not the employer mandate. I blame Ace. Not that my mistake is his fault in any way. I just . . . blame Ace.]

I started to write a post questioning how a President can unilaterally suspend the collection of a duly passed tax, but then I decided to read the whole article I linked. This is the kind of diligence you get for your blogging dollar, folks! Anyway, the article says:

The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act allows the Obama administration to set the starting date for the employer coverage reporting requirement that’s the linchpin of the mandate. The administration had not yet announced a date, one of the officials said. Still, enforcement of the mandate had been widely expected to begin in 2014, the official said.

I guess I’ll take their word for it. If this is right, maybe we can just delay enforcement . . . forever.

By the way, the stated rationale for this is that businesses need time to comply. But guess what? Businesses all over are freezing their hiring because of ObamaCare.

Small business owners’ fear of the effect of the new health-care reform law on their bottom line is prompting many to hold off on hiring and even to shed jobs in some cases, a recent poll found. . . . . Forty-one percent of the businesses surveyed have frozen hiring because of the health-care law known as Obamacare. And almost one-fifth—19 percent— answered “yes” when asked if they had “reduced the number of employees you have in your business as a specific result of the Affordable Care Act.”

Which, duh. It’s a crap policy, designed to run our economy straight into the toilet. But I guess it would hurt Democrats in 2014 to implement it starting in January. As Allahpundit notes, this move means the political pain will be saved until 2016. No matter to Obama. He can’t run again, and that’s all he cares about.