How the Government "Creates" Jobs

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office is out with a report on the impact implementation of the Affordable Care Act will have on the labor market.  The CBO estimates that there will be 2-million fewer workers due to the law.  That "headline" had the crew at FOX News Channel going into BREAKING NEWS mode yesterday and exclaiming that "ObamaCare will be putting people out of work!"

That however, is not quite accurate.  You see, what the CBO has found is that 2-million people are just simply going to stop working--some because they have been added to the rolls of taxpayer-funded Medicaid programs--while others are now receiving taxpayer-funded credits to purchase their health insurance.  To continue to work full-time and pay for that coverage out-of-pocket is no longer necessary, so why put in all of that effort?  It's really the "grand vision" that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi predicted for the ACA right after she encouraged Congress to "pass the bill to find out what's in it".....

"Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance."


The CBO report also exemplifies the Democratic philosophy on "job creation": If we pay enough people NOT to work, the private sector will eventually have to hire everybody who does want to work!  You know full well that when the 2-million "dropouts" from the workforce are replaced by those currently unemployed, the Obama Administration will be quick to take credit for "creating new jobs"--even though the net effect is zero.

This is also the same strategy Keynsian economists like Paul Krugman at the New York Times espouse all the time as a panacea for high rates of unemployment among recent college graduates: move up the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare to 62 or even 60 and pay those people not to work sooner.  Voila! Unemployment crisis solved! (Nevermind that it greatly speeds up the insolvency of the two programs--we can just print more money to solve that problem!)

Now we just need the Congressional Budget Office to do a study on how much more the rest of us still choosing to remain in the labor force get to pay to make sure those 2-million people don't have to work so hard.