ObamaCare expected to lead to loss of nearly 2.3 million US jobs, report says

[boutons_deux]

ACA = TFD

total ing disaster

evidence?

[tlongII]

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014...ntive-to-work/

Budget office chief: ObamaCare creates ‘disincentive’ to work

The head of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office delivered a damning assessment Wednesday of the Affordable Care Act, telling lawmakers that ObamaCare creates a "disincentive for people to work," adding fuel to Republican arguments that the law will hurt the economy.




The testimony from CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf comes after his office released a highly controversial report that detailed how millions of workers could cut back their hours or opt out of the job market entirely because of benefits under the health law.

The White House and its Democratic allies accused Republicans, and the media, of mischaracterizing the findings. But Elmendorf backed Republicans' central argument -- fewer people will work because of the law's subsidies.

"The act creates a disincentive for people to work," Elmendorf said, under questioning from House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis.

- Douglas Elmendorf, CBO Director

Ryan clarified that the CBO report found not that employers would lay people off, but that more individuals would choose not to work.

"As a result ... that [lower] labor supply lowers economic growth," Ryan said.

Elmendorf answered: "Yes, that's right."

Ryan fumed that this would mean fewer people would be "joining the middle class."

"It's adding insult to injury," he said. "As the welfare state expands, the incentive to work declines -- meaning grow the government, you shrink the economy."

Elmendorf, who was addressing the House Budget Committee, did say that the subsidies provided under the Affordable Care Act would make lower-income people "better off."

And Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., top Democrat on the committee, argued that the CBO findings were still being misinterpreted. He pointed to more positive findings in the report, including that health care premiums would go down.

The CBO report on Tuesday effectively found that more people would opt to keep their income low to stay eligible for federal health care subsidies or Medicaid. The workforce changes would mean nationwide losses equal to 2.3 million full-time jobs by 2021, the report said.

Republican lawmakers seized on the report as major new evidence of what they consider the failures of Obama's overhaul, the huge change in U.S. health coverage that they're trying to overturn and planning to use as a main argument against Democrats in November's midterm elections.

It's the latest indication that "the president's health care law is destroying full-time jobs," said Republican Rep. John Kline of Minnesota, chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee. "This fatally flawed health care scheme is wreaking havoc on working families nationwide," he said.

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.

The law means people "will be empowered to make choices about their own lives and livelihoods," said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on Tuesday.

It wasn't all bad news for the Obama administration. The CBO's wide-ranging report predicted that the federal budget deficit will fall to $514 billion this year, down from last year's $680 billion and the lowest by far since Obama took office five years ago.

The new estimates also say that the health care law will, in the short run, benefit the economy by boosting demand for goods and services because the lower-income people it helps will have more purchasing power. The report noted that the 2014 premiums that people pay for exchange coverage are coming in about 15 percent lower than projected, and the health care law, on balance, still is expected to reduce the federal deficit.

However, the budget experts see the long-term federal deficit picture worsening by about $100 billion a year through the end of the decade because of slower growth in the economy than they had previously predicted.

[angrydude]

That's ok. Obama says its a good thing.

[boutons_deux]

fox "news"

[ChumpDumper]

Wait. Being stuck in a job just for the insurance is a good and desirable thing according to Republicans.

Nice.

[boutons_deux]

fox "news"

"the president's health care law is destroying full-time jobs," said Republican Rep. John Kline of Minnesota

[Wild Cobra]

let's just tax poor people more. it'd be unfair not to.

How does my idea tax them more? I would say that one plus to it is that everyone sees a part of what their employment really taxes them.

Did you know your employer matched your 7.65% FICA deduction? How many people do?

[Wild Cobra]

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?

This way they can claim to pay taxes...

How did I put them down, or is that your personal prejudice on the topic?

[ElNono]

This way they can claim to pay taxes...

They pay taxes every day... gas, sales, etc...

[Winehole23]

Wait. Being stuck in a job just for the insurance is a good and desirable thing according to Republicans.

People are voting with their feet. Health benefits no longer tie them to crappy jobs.

[tlongII]

There are two rules in economics upon which all economists agree: 1) there's no such thing as a free lunch, and 2) incentives matter. This development in Obamacare hits them both.

People are being incentivized to work less. That means lower output, which means less wealth. Less wealth means fewer tax dollars to fund this program and less money in the economy in general.

Second, those that claim health care will be "cheaper" really mean to say, "someone else will pick up the tab". Those people who pick up the tab will have less to invest--meaning fewer jobs and less innovation--and less to spend, which means less consumer demand.

This program is a wealth transfer and a disincentive to work. It puts yet another layer of bureaucracy between doctor and patient, which raises costs and limits choice. And the proof in the pudding for how much this law sucks? The people who wrote it and supported it most vociferously have exempted themselves from and/or have been given loopholes to not be held to it.

At this point, those who still support this law deserve what they get.

[Jacob1983]

Bring on the revolution.

[boutons_deux]

you right-wingers so ing stupid.

[ChumpDumper]

So 2.3 million jobs will be available for those who want to work?

Great.

[boutons_deux]

So 2.3 million jobs will be available for those who want to work?

Great.

that and all the other right-wing/Repug/Fox LIES have been debunked, including by the author of the report.

[boutons_deux]

Taibbi trashes the right-wing again

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...ign=newsletter

[boutons_deux]

Plenty of (male) people can' find (good) jobs anyway, but you right-wingers and the asshole Repugs you elect don't give a about that

Over 1 in 6 Men in Prime Working Years Don’t Have a Job


A new Wall Street Journal story on how many men aged 25 to 54 can’t find work, fails to mention but nevertheless s acks an embarrassing New York Fed paper released earlier this week. The Fed’s propagandists tried to argue that labor markets are tighter than is widely believed. The basis for the authors’ sunny view? Changing demographics. Their proof? An absurd “normalized, demographically adjusted,” seasonally adjusted, business-cycle free employment to population ratio, to wit:

For each of the 10.2 million individuals in our sample, based on their decade of birth, sex, race/ethnicity, and education, we select one of our 280 estimated career employment rate profiles. Using the worker’s age, we calculate the predicted employment rate for that individual based on their selected employment rate profile. We then calculate the weighted average of these predicted employment rates across all individuals in a given time period to generate an estimated E/P ratio for that time period. We repeat this exercise for each time period covered by our data.

Oh, and after that they seasonally adjusted and then “normalized” the data.

They might instead have looked out the window, say at the long lines any time a big employer opens a new facility, or readily-available information like this:

ERE reports that “Although it varies with the company and the job, on average 250 resumes are received for each corporate job opening.” In addition, out of every 1000 people who view an online job posting, 100 people will apply, 4 – 6 will be selected for an interview, 1 – 3 will be invited for a final interview, 1 will be offered the job, and 80% of those who get a job offer accept it.

Admittedly, the Internet makes it vastly easier to apply for jobs than the old-fashioned written submission, but this sort of bid to cover ratio isn’t consistent with a strong employment market.

Now if you had managed to take the New York Fed’s porcine maquillage seriously, you’d also have to believe that employment conditions hadn’t deteriorated within particular demographic groups. The Wall Street Journal shows how the very backbone of the labor market, men in their prime (for measurement purposes, 25 to 54), are out of work to an unprecedented degree. The story is worth reading in full; it has a larger-than usual number of anecdotes, including a 53 year old community college grant writer who was fired as a result of budget cuts, to a 29 year old who was laid off shortly after getting his first job as a public school administrator, to a 52 year old Army staff sergeant who was discharged six months prior to being eligible to receive a full pension as a result of a training injury.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/...+capitalism%29

[Jacob1983]

This is why America's government needs to crumble then everyone will be on a level playing field. Bring the revolution on. I'm ready.

[Rogue]

uneducated heads will always get a minimum-wage job no matter what, so they're the most staunch supporters of Obamacare. There's a subversive movement orchestrated by Obama that's gradually dragging this country deeper into the quagmire of economic hardship. It might be just me but what Obama does looks nothing different to me than breaking your wooden door to burn it for its warmth. It makes you feel good for a short while but in the long run it'll end up costing more, imho.

[DUNCANownsKOBE]

So people will be able to leave a job they hate because they don't need the insurance anymore.

Why is this a bad thing?

[ElNono]

So people will be able to leave a job they hate because they don't need the insurance anymore.

Why is this a bad thing?

you're not outraged enough, tbh

[tlongII]

Liberals, Obamacare and Work


So far, nearly all of the left-of-center responses to the latest C.B.O. projections on Obamacare and workforce participation have emphasized the upside of the downward trend — the fact that what we’re seeing is just the end of job lock in action, which gives parents the freedom to cut their hours, near-retirees the chance to stop working a job they hate a little early, and so on down a sympathetic list. ”If Obamacare really does cause millions of people to voluntarily leave full-time employment,” Matt Yglesias writes in a representative piece, “that shows us how much avoidable suffering the earlier system was causing,” and you can find roughly similar arguments from Jonathan Cohn, Jonathan Chait, and others too numerous to name.

The issue that I’d really like to see liberals reckon with comes from this post by Tyler Cowen, which I’ll quote at length:


In two papers, one of which is quite recent, and does not stem from the Heritage Foundation, [Alan] Krueger shows rather convincingly that the unemployed maintain reservation wages which are simply too high. They would be better off lowering those wages, being more realistic, accepting work, and getting back on their feet again. In other settings (not considered by Krueger), other workers seem to be too slow to move to new areas for new jobs, given the costs of being unemployed long-term.

… OK, given all that, when those workers, hit by negative shocks, do not rush to go back to work at lower reservation wages, we then read a portrait of hysteresis, despair, and soul-crushing joblessness, a psychic swamp so difficult to escape that even summoning up the strength to go back to work may be difficult.

In other words, would-be workers irrationally undervalue the benefits of having a job and they also underestimate the costs of remaining unemployed.




Now let’s switch settings. A benefit shock comes along, positive for many people, and it induces many of them to work less or not work at all. How happy should we be? And here I mean happy at the margin, due to their change in employment decision.

People, it is rather difficult to have it here both ways. I guess it is possible that workers are irrational in changing their employment decisions in response to changes in relative dollar wage opportunities, but rational when changing their employment decisions in response to changes in relative benefit opportunities. It really is possible. But are any of you actually arguing that or holding some deep-seated reason for believing in that difference, other than perhaps the reason this post might have induced you to come up with? No, I see one assumption about a destructive choice in one context and the opposing assumption about a beneficial choice in the other context, without much regard for the tension or contradiction between those two assumptions ….

… A simpler possibility is that people undervalue the long-term benefits of having a job and thus in both settings the contraction in employment is a quite negative outcome. That is then very bad news for ACA, if only in expected value terms.

Here is how I would frame the issue: There are specific classes of people who plainly benefit, in fairly uncomplicated ways, from benefits that provide an incentive to work less, or leave a job outright. The obvious examples are the ones that liberals keep invoking: Parents of young children (for whom the family-friendly tax overhaul that conservative reformers like to tout would presumably have a similar effect), and people with a disability or chronic medical condition that makes work a simple misery.

But there also lots of people who emphatically do not benefit from being given an incentive to either detach from the workforce or (if they’re already unemployed or underemployed) remain detached rather than taking a lower-paying job. And given the current economic landscape, especially — in which persistently high unemployment coexists with a growing population of workers too discouraged to even look for work — the size and scope of a work-discouraging effect matters a great deal: The bigger the effect, the more likely that the people dropping out aren’t just, say, parents cutting hours to spend more time at home while the other spouse works full time, but people we should want to be attached to the workforce, for their own long-term good and the good of the economy as well.

Which is why it’s appropriate that the new C.B.O. projection of 2 million to 2.5 million job-equivalents disappearing has inspired more disquiet and debate than the old projection of 500,000-900,000 … because it’s a sign, however provisional, that the costs of Obamacare’s workforce effects might exceed the benefits. I don’t see liberals reckoning seriously with that possibility, and I think they really should.

[ChumpDumper]

Hey, possibilities and guesses.

Nice.

[spursncowboys]

The French govt. tried this idea. Make people not able to work past a certain number of hours, thereby keeping more hours available to others who do not have jobs. Then making minimum wage laws so everyone is getting paid enough to live comfortably on. The result: higher unemployment. A shrinking economy.

Obama and the writers of the ACA never planned this. So using the 'not making them have to stay in a company for benefits' is an attempt to save face.

So far:
You can't keep your doctor
You can't keep your plan
It won't make it cheaper
It won't lead to job creation

[ChumpDumper]

lol talking points