ObamaCare's New Theory of Employment

At WSJ (via Google):

The Congressional Budget Office report estimating that ObamaCare will cause the economy to lose the equivalent of 2.5 million workers is remarkable on its own. But the reaction from the left—giddy celebration—is another order of magnitude.

U.S. politics used to have enough of a center that politicians could agree that fewer Americans working and others working less as a result of qualifying for a new taxpayer-funded benefit wasn't desirable. But liberals are now actively glorifying another political incentive not to contribute to U.S. economic life.

The CBO essentially says that because ObamaCare's means-tested subsidies phase out as cash income rises, some people will choose to stay poorer to keep earning benefits. Some of the giddier liberals even extol ObamaCare for "liberating" workers from the adult responsibility of earning a living.

Supposedly this shrinking labor force development is great news because "this is a choice on the part of workers," as White House chief economist Jason Furman put it. If businesses shed jobs in response to ObamaCare, he said, that would be bad because people who wanted work would have a harder time finding it.

But CBO's lost workers are splendid, Mr. Furman argued, because it means they will simply be making a rational decision to drop out or cut back, and "that, in their case, might be a better choice and a better option than what they had before." Liberals cite the 60-year-old who can retire early before qualifying for Medicare or the second-income spouse who quits to spend time with her kids.

It's worth parsing this supply-of-labor reasoning. In the post-recession economy, the unemployment rate has fallen in major part because fewer people are actively seeking work; the labor-force participation rate is the lowest since 1978.

For years liberals have lamented the jobs crisis and underemployment to castigate Republicans as mean-spirited for opposing more "stimulus" and more weeks of unemployment benefits. But if pervasive joblessness is an economic and social scourge, why celebrate a program that is creating more of it?

Apart from harm to individuals, ObamaCare is also wasting human potential because fewer workers mean a less prosperous, less dynamic economy. Contrary to liberal patronizing, many near-seniors, moms and the rest like their jobs and contribute to productivity. The 2.5 million worker ObamaCare job exodus, CBO estimates, translates into a 1.5% to 2% reduction in the total number of hours worked, which means less growth.

Liberals are also trying to spin the CBO report as an endorsement of ObamaCare's alleged health security. Mr. Furman cited the phenomenon known as "job lock," in which people don't switch employers or start their own business to preserve fringe benefits. But job lock is really about employment flexibility, rather than the government extending subsidies so people don't need or want jobs.

Whether ObamaCare is leading to fewer jobs or fewer workers—we'd argue both—most normal, nonpolitical people probably see either one as negative. We know liberals don't care about tax rates on the rich, but you'd think they'd care about marginal rates so high on the poor that it makes no sense to climb the income ladder. The liberal applause for this "liberation" shows how radical ObamaCare really is.

I've posted on this previously: "#ObamaCare Slashes U.S. Labor Force," and "CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf: People Have 'Disincentive to Work' Under #ObamaCare."

Because leftists are partisan assholes who've no clue of basic decency, much less economics.