Democracy Has Prevailed.

February 6, 2014

Um, No...

Scaife's Editorial Board over at the Trib joins the rest of the right wing media today in their CBO/ACA mislead:
ObamaCare is the gift that keeps on taking. The Congressional Budget Office says the health care law will explode the debt and force the equivalent of more than 2 million workers out of the labor market by 2017. It says ObamaCare's incentives are driving businesses and people to choose government-sponsored benefits rather than work. It's yet another sorry example of how “progressive” economics is bankrupting America. [Bolding in original.]
The important phrase here are how the ACA will "force the equivalent of more than 2 million workers out of the labor market" and how the AVA's incentives "are driving businesses and people to choose government-sponsored benefits..."

Now let's go to exactly what the CBO wrote:
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 businesses’ demand for labor, so it will appear almost entirely as a reduction in labor force participation and in hours worked relative to what would have occurred otherwise rather than as an increase in unemployment (that is, more workers seeking but not finding jobs) or underemployment (such as part-time workers who would prefer to work more hours per week). [Emphasis added.]
How they go from the report saying that "workers choose" to reporting that the CBO says that workers will be "forced" out of the labor market is a question for greater minds than mine.  In the meantime, let's just call it "dishonesty."

In fact the guy who wrote the report has more (this is from think progress):
On Wednesday, Congressional Budget Office (CBO) director Doug Elmendorf refuted the claim that the Affordable Care Act is a job killer — a misleading takeaway from his agency’s new report that is being touted by Obamacare critics.

Testifying before the House Budget Committee on the CBO’s newly released economic projections for the next decade, Elmendorf addressed the report’s finding that the Affordable Care Act will reduce the labor participation rate and the total number of hours worked by an equivalent of 2 million jobs in 2017. According to Elmendorf, that statistic is being taken out of context to suggest that Obamacare will eliminate jobs.

“The reason we don’t use the term ‘lost jobs’ is there is a critical difference between people who like to work and can’t find a job — or have a job that’s lost for reasons beyond their control — and people who choose not to work,” he explained. “If someone comes up to you and says, ‘The boss says I’m being laid off because we don’t have enough business to pay,’ any other person feels bad about that and we sympathize for them having lost their job. If someone says, ‘I decided to retire or stay home and spend more time with my family and spend more time doing my hobby,’ they don’t feel bad about it — they feel good about it. And we don’t sympathize. We say congratulations.”
Now go back and look at how Scaife's braintrust described the report.  That cognitive dissonance (sorry, Ed) you're experiencing?  That's a recognition of the braintrust's dishonesty.

1 comment:

Zeus0209 said...

An uninsured teabagger walks into a bar, gets drunk, and starts to drive home until she crashes into a tree. The unconscious, uninsured and now hemorrhaging teabagger gets lifeflighted to a hospital and treated. (And just what will that same teabagger say when the bill comes?)

Teabaggers must so hate Hippocrates' legacy because that really is where the metal hits the meat on this whole issue. Somewhere between health care's promise to all of humanity vs. its warranting a paycheck.