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Non-Fox version (AP), including some other aspects of the report:
http://www.ajc.com/news/ap/labor/new...to-514b/ndCR3/
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014...s-report-says/
The longterm effect of ObamaCare on the U.S. economy took a grim turn Tuesday with the Congressional Budget Office issuing a revised projection that nearly 2.5 million Americans will be lost from the nation’s workforce over the next 10 years.
As a result, budget experts say President Obama’s healthcare overhaul will lead to a reduction of 2.3 million jobs that people will abandon because they can get insurance outside of the workplace.
Following the release of the report, House Speaker John Boehner said the report showed how “the middle class is getting squeezed in this economy.”
The report drew immediate reaction from GOP lawmakers, including House Speaker John Boehner who said the report indicates ObamaCare is only making it harder for middle-class Americans to survive in the bad economy.
Others, like Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., weighed in.
“ObamaCare is only making things worse,” Ryan said in a written statement. “This costly law is not only pushing government spending to new heights, it is disrupting coverage and leaving millions of Americans worse off.”
The budget office says jobs will also be lost because employers may choose to hire less full-time workers or reduce the hours of their staff.
In 2010, the CBO projected ObamaCare would lead to about 650,000 fewer jobs. Tuesday’s new 2.3 million estimate is significantly higher.
The report states ObamaCare will also lead to a reduction of the net number of total hours worked by as much as 2 percent in the period from 2017 to 2024. It states that “lower-wage workers” will see the biggest reduction in the number of hours worked.
The agency also reduced its estimate of the number of uninsured people who will get coverage through the health care law.
The budget experts now say about 2 million fewer people will get covered this year than had been expected, partly because of website problems that prevented people from signing up last fall when new markets for subsidized private insurance went live.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, a ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, called the report “devastating” to the millions of Americans seeking employment.
“A direct threat to the long-term health and prosperity of our nation, this law must be repealed,” Hatch, R-Utah, said in a statement. “Its impact and consequences are too great.”
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan said the report indicates ObamaCare is making things worse for Americans.
“This costly law is not only pushing government spending to new heights; it is disrupting coverage and leaving millions of Americans worse off,” Ryan, R-Wis., said.
However, the White House focused on the report's claim that the loss of jobs will not be due to employers cutting back, but due to Americans choosing to voluntarily leave the workforce. White House spokesman Jay Carney said in a statement the report proves ObamaCare is allowing Americans to be "empowered" to make such a choice.
"At the beginning of this year, we noted that as part of this new day in health care, Americans would no longer be trapped in a job just to provide coverage for their families, and would have the opportunity to pursue their dreams," he said. "This CBO report bears that out, and the Republican plan to repeal the ACA would strip those hard-working Americans of that opportunity."
Carney also says the report does not take into account the estimate by experts that lower health care costs due to ObamaCare will lead to thousands of jobs being added to the economy annually.
The report also predicted the U.S. budget deficit would fall to $514 billion this year, down substantially from last year and the lowest level by far since President Obama took office five years ago.
Non-Fox version (AP), including some other aspects of the report:
http://www.ajc.com/news/ap/labor/new...to-514b/ndCR3/
Wake me up when a viable alternative is proposed, and repeal and do nothing is not viable.
But the White House said the possible reduction would be due to voluntary steps by workers rather than businesses cutting jobs — people having the freedom to retire early or spend more time as stay-at-home parents because they no longer had to depend only on their employers for health insurance.
Severing the employee-health insurance nexus is good news, IMO. It's part of the old system that hid from consumers what insurance actually cost (and healthcare in general).
Jobs will not be lost, but “some people might decide to work part-time, not full time, in order to keep getting health care subsidies. Thus, they are reducing their supply of labor to the market.”
In other words, people will be able to work less without the fear of losing their health insurance, which is fantastic. Mothers and fathers will choose to stay home with their kids and workers will have the freedom to start businesses and seek educational opportunities.
“Obamacare alters the employer-employee relationship in a way that empowers employees,” Business Insider‘s Josh Barro wrote, explaining how the law will help decrease income inequality.
Meanwhile, the other news in the report contradicts nearly every talking point Republicans have used against the law. Not only does it decrease the deficit, the CBO found that “there is no compelling evidence that part-time employment has increased as a result of the ACA.”
If increasing the workforce is the party’s goal, let’s just get rid of Social Security and Medicare so grandma stops lounging around and gets a job.
Or if they really wanted to grow the workforce, Republicans could pass the Senate’s immigration bill. The CBO predicts that this one piece of legislation would cut the deficit, grow wages and increase the labor force by 6 million in the next decade.
http://www.nationalmemo.com/gops-lat...ng-point-bunk/
Fox/Repugs will obviously, inevitably propagandize "obamacare is a job killer" for months as their PRIORITY for 2014 and 2016 elections is that ACA is a disaster.
So if the suy of labor decreases and the demand for labor remains constant, what happens?
if the demand for labor is "serious", then the demanders will have to pay more to attract supply, "in theory".
Freeing Workers From the Insurance Trap
The Congressional Budget Office estimated on Tuesday that the Affordable Care Act will reduce the number of full-time workers by 2.5 million over the next decade. That is mostly a good thing, a liberating result of the law. Of course, Republicans immediately tried to brand the findings as “devastating” and stark evidence of President Obama’s health care reform as a failure and a job killer. It is no such thing.
The report estimated that — thanks to an increase in insurance coverage under the act and the availability of subsidies to help pay the premiums — many workers who felt obliged to stay in a job that provided health benefits would now be able to leave those jobs or choose to work fewer hours than they otherwise would have. In other words, the report is about the choices workers can make when they are no longer tethered to an employer because of health benefits. The ulative effect on the labor supply is the equivalent of 2.5 million fewer full-time workers by 2024.
Some workers may have had a pre-existing condition and will now be able to leave work because insurers must accept all applicants without regard to health status and charge premiums unrelated to health status. Some may have felt they needed to keep working to pay for health insurance, but now new government subsidies will help pay premiums, making it more possible for them to leave their jobs.
The report clearly stated that health reform would not produce an increase in unemployment (workers unable to find jobs) or underemployment (part-time workers who would prefer to work more hours per week).
It also found “no compelling evidence” that, as of now, part-time employment has increased as a result of the reform law, a frequent claim of critics. Whether that will hold up after a mandate that requires employers to provide coverage, which was delayed until 2015, kicks in is uncertain.
In separate estimates, the budget office predicted that two million fewer people will get insurance coverage in 2014 than it had previously predicted, mostly because of technical problems with the rollout of new insurance exchanges and other implementation glitches. The shortfall includes one million fewer people enrolling in private insurance (the 2014 projection is reduced from seven million to six million) and one million fewer enrolling in Medicaid and a related children’s health insurance program (reduced from nine million to eight million).
Given the rocky start, 14 million additional Americans covered by insurance through the exchanges and Medicaid is sound progress; and the budget office projects a sharp increase in enrollment in 2015 and 2016 and a bigger net reduction in the number of uninsured. Its projections for subsequent years remain essentially unchanged. In 2017, it predicts 12 million more in Medicaid and 24 million more in private coverage through the exchanges.
The new law will free people, young and old, to pursue careers or retirement without having to worry about health coverage. Workers can seek positions they are most qualified for and will no longer need to feel locked into a job they don’t like because they need insurance for themselves or their families. It is hard to view this as any kind of disaster.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/02/05...ance-trap.html
http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news...id=msnhp&pos=1
The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office gave new fuel to the debate over the Affordable Care Act Tuesday with its estimate that the law will lead to the eventual loss of about 2.5 million full-time jobs.
In its annual budget and economic forecast the agency also said that the ACA or Obamacare will reduce the total number of hours worked by about 1.5 percent to 2 percent from 2017 to 2024.
Even though total employment will increase over the coming decade, the CBO said, “that increase will be smaller than it would have been in the absence of the ACA.”
Four health-care takeaways from the Congressional Budget Office report
CBO director Douglas Elmendorf told reporters that the analysis done by his agency’s experts “led us to conclude that the effect of the Affordable Care Act on labor supply would be a good deal larger than we had thought originally.” In 2011, the CBO estimated the loss of full-time equivalent jobs due to the law would be about 800,000.
Elmendorf also told reporters that the employer mandate – the requirement that firms offer health insurance to workers– “will reduce the demand for labor in the short term because employers face this extra cost. It is analogous in some ways to raising the minimum wage.”
The CBO report said that “workers will choose to supply less labor—given the new taxes and other incentives they will face and the financial benefits some will receive.”
Both sides of the Obamacare debate used the new findings to buttress their arguments, with House Speaker John Boehner saying that Republicans had argued for years that “the president's health care law creates uncertainty for small businesses, hurts take-home pay, and makes it harder to invest in new workers. The middle class is getting squeezed in this economy, and this CBO report confirms that Obamacare is making it worse.”
But Obama spokesman Jay Carney said the CBO analysis was incomplete. The budget office, he said, did not take into account the beneficial effect of slower health care cost growth due to the ACA, “Experts have estimated that slower growth in health costs due to the ACA will cause the economy to add an additional 250,000 to 400,000 jobs per year by the end of the decade,” he said. “Moreover, CBO does not take into account positive impacts on worker productivity due to the ACA's role in improving workers' health, including reduced absenteeism.”
from the same CBO report, says Jonathan Chait:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer...s.html?mid=rssNote that they’re both assuming not only that any subsidy can be fairly called a bailout, but also that a subsidy will surely exist. The risk corridor program could end up paying more than it takes in, in which case it will wind up subsidizing insurers. Conservatives have assumed as a simple given that the risk corridors will pay out more than they take in.
Today’s CBO report predicts just the opposite: that insurance companies will be paid $8 billion, but will pay back $16 billion. The risk corridor program is therefore predicted to result in a net expenditure of negative $8 billion. Repealing risk corridors would increase the projected deficit. If we accept the spurious equation of a subsidy with a bailout, then the Republican plan to repeal risk corridors would be a bailout, and the risk corridors would be the opposite of a bailout.
in other words, a tax?
A Lot Of Media Outlets Botched The CBO's Obamacare Report
The Congressional Budget Office issued a report on Tuesday that said that as many as 2 million people could exit the workforce thanks to the Affordable Care Act. The reasons for this, the CBO said, were varied, but it stressed that the economy would see "a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply, rather than...a net drop in businesses’ demand for labor," thanks to, for instance, people choosing to quit jobs they didn't like but were only staying in because of their health care benefits.
That's not how a lot of media outlets reported the news, however. A lot of them said that the report was warning that Obamacare would kill over 2 million jobs—a notion at odd's with the CBO's conclusion that some workers would choose not to work.
The Post's own Erik Wemple catalogued a lot of the other faulty headlines on his blog. A short sample:
UPI earlier: CBO: Obamacare to cost 2.3 million jobs over 10 years
UPI now: WH disputes media claims on CBO Obamacare study
Politico earlier: CBO: Lower enrollment, bigger job losses with Obamacare
Politico now: Report reignites debate over Obamacare and jobs
The Hill earlier: CBO: O-Care slowing growth, contributing to job losses
The Hill now: CBO: O-Care will cost 2.5M workers
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/0...n_4730216.html
The media’s massive revisions on CBO-Obamacare story
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...story/?hpid=z5
The Explosive CBO Report On Obamacare Wasn't As Explosive As It Seemed
The CBO doesn't answer those questions, noting that any estimate of the Affordable Care Act's "impact on labor markets is subject to substantial uncertainty." But the agency does explore good and bad effects on labor productivity that come with loosening the so-called job lock, in which people feel they can't leave an employer for fear of losing health care coverage.
On the bad front, the CBO notes that some employers may be rewarded to "invest less in their workers" (by, say, reducing training) if they believe there is going to be greater turnover of employees. Why spend money training someone who may end up leaving or asking to work fewer hours?
On the flip side, the CBO notes that when there is greater access to coverage on the individual market, it could "lead to improved health among workers" and "labor productivity could be enhanced." In addition, the CBO wrote, "the ACA could influence labor productivity indirectly by making it easier for some employees to obtain health insurance outside the workplace and thereby prompting those workers to take jobs that better match their skills, regardless of whether those jobs offered employment-based insurance."
This last point is not insignificant. In fact, it was one of the few outcomes of the law that has received positive press attention -- at least prior to Tuesday's CBO report.
In September, NBC News profiled Claudia and Joseph Schulz, an Arizona couple who had talked about starting their own real estate shop together, but had held off because they worried about giving up their health insurance.
In an interview Tuesday with The Huffington Post, Claudia Schulz explained that members of her family (they have three kids) had pre-existing conditions, making any change of employment rife with uncertainty.
"We had amazing jobs," she said. "We didn't have a problem with it. We didn't feel lost or trapped in our jobs. We had thought about opening our own business and one of the obstacles was not having good health insurance. When the Affordable Care Act came around, we thought, well now might be a good time. ... It was an obstacle removed."
That September, the Schulzs left their respective jobs. In October, they encountered some difficulty with the health care website rollout. But it wasn't overwhelming or discouraging, Claudia Schulz said. The tougher choice was picking the plan they wanted. The one they found had a $700 monthly premium for the entire family and a $12,000 deductible, she said. The deductible was "a little bit higher" than the one she and her husband had on their COBRA coverage. But the premium was $900 a month lower.
"With the difference, we are saving for our deductible," she said. "Hopefully, we won't have to use it and we can just add to our savings."
The family did not receive a tax subsidy for purchasing insurance. But their previous doctors (including their pediatrician and dentist) fell under the same network. They are now building their own residential real estate firm.
"It helped us," Claudia Schulz said of Obamacare. "I actually think it is good for small businesses. I'm now contributing to the economy, building a website, using contractors, and hiring small mom and pop shops for help."
The Schulzs' story is just one of many that will be told in the wake of the CBO report. There will be negative experiences to go with the family's positive one.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/0....html?ir=Media
How are you for my idea of requiring a one time pay increase to employees that gives them the employers share of the payroll tax, then having a strait across the board 13% social tax on everyone. Right now, for ever dollar, employees only get $0.9335 after their FICA deduction. They pay 7.45% and so does the employer. If the employee gets this extra money, making it $1.0745 instead of $1, then pays 13%, the employee now has $0.9366 from every dollar.
Now here is the catch. We have to balance the budget. As social expenditures increase or decrease, this rate goes up or down. For everyone. No exceptions. This is a social tax in addition to the federal income tax.
"We have to balance the budget."
Tell Repugs to stop starting bogus wars.
Put the taxes back up on the tax-evading wealthy and corporations (including NFL) way up so they pay their fair share.
result: budget in surplus.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 02-05-2014 at 01:22 PM.
New "Flat tax" withholding triggered by demand?How are you for my idea of requiring a one time pay increase to employees that gives them the employers share of the payroll tax, then having a strait across the board 13% social tax on everyone.
I'm not for that. No thanks.
The reason I advocate such an idea is it holds all tax paying voters more responsible to how they cast their vote. Without the 47% having a dog in the fight for paying a tax that reflect what DC does, they don't care if other people's taxes go up or down. They need skin in the game.
WC, always ready with highly regressive taxes that screw the poor and enrich the wealthy
there might be unforeseen problems arising from brand new federal bureaucracies purporting to reform bureaucracy itself, and you, the 47% do have a dog in the fight.
Btw, when did it becomes cool to put 47% of Americans down because they're too poor to pay income tax?
oh right, 2012.
let's just tax poor people more. it'd be unfair not to.
Nearly every U.S. state taxes the poor more than the rich, according to a 2009 report by the Ins ute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Overall, the poorest 20 percent of households paid an average 10.9 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes in 2007, while the top 1 percent on average paid just 5.2 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes, according to the study.
Most state and local tax systems are regressive, the study found: that is, tax rates become higher as income becomes lower. This regressiveness hits the middle class, too: The middle 20 percent of families paid a 9.4 percent state and local tax rate in 2007, according to the study.
State income taxes are the most progressive part of state and local tax systems, according to the study: that is, when it comes to state income taxes, richer people pay a higher tax rate than poor people. Sales and excise taxes, on the other hand, are very regressive, and property taxes are somewhat regressive. This combination forces poor people to pay a higher share of their income in state and local taxes than the rich.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1903993.html
There was one study for Texas only, poor paying a higher %age of the income in taxes than the wealty, can't find it now.
ACA = TFD
total ing disaster
Conservatives Seize On Report To Argue Obamacare Is A Job Killer — But The Author Says They’re Wrong
On Wednesday, Congressional Budget Office (CBO) director Doug Elmendorf refuted the claim that the Affordable Care Act is a job killer — a misleading takeaway from his agency’s new report that is being touted by Obamacare critics.
Testifying before the House Budget Committee on the CBO’s newly released economic projections for the next decade, Elmendorf addressed the report’s finding that the Affordable Care Act will reduce the labor participation rate and the total number of hours worked by an equivalent of 2 million jobs in 2017. According to Elmendorf, that statistic is being taken out of context to suggest that Obamacare will eliminate jobs.
“The reason we don’t use the term ‘lost jobs’ is there is a critical difference between people who like to work and can’t find a job — or have a job that’s lost for reasons beyond their control — and people who choose not to work,” he explained. “If someone comes up to you and says, ‘The boss says I’m being laid off because we don’t have enough business to pay,’ any other person feels bad about that and we sympathize for them having lost their job. If someone says, ‘I decided to retire or stay home and spend more time with my family and spend more time doing my hobby,’ they don’t feel bad about it — they feel good about it. And we don’t sympathize. We say congratulations.”
Even Budget Committee Chairman and former GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan conceded that point in part. “Just to understand, it is not that employers are laying people off,” said Ryan at the beginning of the hearing.
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014...re-job-killer/
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