Obamacare will reduce American workforce participation by the equivalent of 2 million full-time jobs in 2017, according to a new report by the Congressional Budget Office. Work hours would be reduced by the equivalent of 2.5 million jobs in 2024, a tripling of the previous estimates.
If you believe this report — and I’m not sure why we pay this much attention to CBO projections — you can then believe that Obamacare discourages work, pushes people out of the labor market and, consequently, leads to fewer people having jobs. Certainly, it is well within the parameters of political rhetoric for the opposition to assert that the CBO has found Obamacare is “costing” or “killing” American jobs. It is no more a “lie” to say so than it is to claim Mitt Romney was “shipping jobs overseas” or hear an administration assert that it “created jobs” — or any of the other countless shorthand we use for economic consequences in political debate.
But the only way to blunt the negative force of the CBO findings was to deflect from the numbers and gin up a controversy over semantics. And the synchronicity and speed in which Left punditry accomplished this task was pretty extraordinary. No, absolutely false, the term “killing jobs” implies that the problem is on the labor demand side, but the CBO, as any honest person can see, is talking about the labor supply side. So really, “jobs” aren’t being lost, people just don’t want to work.
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