Thread: A Trillion Dollars and 2 Million Jobs Lost: Obamacare Increases the Deficit After All

A Trillion Dollars and Two Million Jobs Lost: Obamacare Increases the Deficit After All

February 4, 2014 - 1:55 PM
By Hans Bader

"The new healthcare law will slow economic growth over the next decade, costing the nation about 2.3 million jobs and contributing to a $1 trillion increase in projected deficits, the Congressional Budget Office said in a report released Tuesday.
The non-partisan group's report found that the healthcare law's negative effects on the economy will be 'substantially larger' than what it had previously anticipated," reports The Hill. "The CBO is now estimating that the law will reduce labor force compensation by 1 percent from 2017 to 2024, twice the reduction it previously had projected. This will decrease the number of full-time equivalent jobs in 2021 by 2.3 million, CBO said. It had previously estimated the decrease would be 800,000."
Originally, the Congressional Budget Office had wrongly concluded that Obamacare would reduce the deficit. It reached that incorrect conclusion by allowing supporters of Obamacare to hide its costs through accounting gimmicks and dodges. But in 2010, after Obamacare passed, it began increasing its cost projections for Obamacare, and also admitted "that Obamacare includes work disincentives likely to shrink" the economy.
Obamacare contains massive marriage penalties that discriminate against married people, and huge work disincentives for some older workers. It has slashed hiring, cut economic growth, and induced employers to replace full-time workers with part-time employees, driving even unions that once backed it to seek its repeal or replacement. Obamacare's medical device tax has caused layoffs by medical manufacturers.
Due to Obamacare, millions of health insurance policies have been canceled, or replaced by policies with higher premiums and deductibles. In November, the president announced a supposed "fix" that was illegal, didn't restore the canceled policies, and was designed to scapegoat insurers rather than restore lost health insurance. In December, the president announced another "fix" that made things even worse, by illegally violating property and contractual rights, in a way that may drive up insurance premiums in the future. The administration's illegal 2013 suspension of reporting requirements mandated by the healthcare law may lead to billions of dollars in fraud.



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CBO Report: Obamacare Will Shrink Workforce By 2.3 Million

February 5, 2014 by Sam Rolley

PHOTOS.COM

President Barack Obama’s healthcare overhaul will remove an estimated 2.3 million Americans from the workforce by 2021, according to a report released by the Congressional Budget Office this week.
The bottom line of the CBO report is that the negative economic consequences of Obamacare are “substantially larger” than previously predicted.
The nonpartisan budget watchdog reports that Obamacare “will raise effective tax rates on earnings from labor,” while also creating incentive for some Americans to sign up for government benefits instead of seeking employment.
“CBO estimates that the ACA will reduce the total number of hours worked, on net, by about 1.5 to 2 percent during the period from 2017 to 2024, almost entirely because workers will choose to supply less labor — given the new taxes and other incentives they will face and the financial benefits some will receive,” CBO analysts said in their economic outlook.
“The estimated reduction stems almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply, rather than from a net drop in business’ demand for labor,” the CBO report said.
Obamacare proponents have already begun spinning the CBO findings as a positive, saying that the Americans leaving the workforce are people who shouldn’t be working in the first place.
Via the Los Angeles Times:

The CBO projects that the act will reduce the supply of labor, not the availability of jobs. There’s a big difference. In fact, it suggests that aggregate demand for labor (that is, the number of jobs) will increase, not decrease; but that many workers or would-be workers will be prompted by the ACA to leave the labor force, many of them voluntarily.
As economist Dean Baker points out, this is, in fact, a beneficial effect of the law, and a sign that it will achieve an important goal. It helps “older workers with serious health conditions who are working now because this is the only way to get health insurance. And (one for the family-values crowd) many young mothers who return to work earlier than they would like because they need health insurance. This is a huge plus.”

And White House press secretary Jay Carney said that under Obamacare, “individuals will be empowered to make choices about their own lives and livelihoods, like retiring on time rather than working into their elderly years or choosing to spend more time with their families.”
Of course, Obamacare supporters fail to acknowledge the CBO’s prediction that a shrinking workforce will have on the economy as a whole. The agency indicates that the workforce is already 6 million jobs short of where it should be.
By 2018, following some modest recovery, the CBO predicts that the economy will slow to a pace of expansion of 2.2 percent. As a result, government deficits will snowball to $7.3 trillion between 2014 and 2024 as tax revenues plummet because of the shrinking workforce. According to the CBO, the gross debt of the United States will rise to $27 trillion by 2025.

Filed Under: Conservative Politics, Liberty News, Staff Reports

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