Free Republic

The Chicago professor examined the law's incentives for the poor not to get a job or work harder, and this week Beltway budgeteers agreed. Mr. Mulligan studies how government choices influence the incentives and rewards for work—and many more people may recognize the University of Chicago professor as a serious economist after this week. That's because, more than anyone, Mr. Mulligan is responsible for the still-raging furor over the Congressional Budget Office's conclusion that ObamaCare will, in fact, harm growth and jobs. But then the CBO ... reported that by 2024 the equivalent of 2.5 million Americans who were otherwise...

Democrats are increasingly employing a new tack in the battle over a projected reduction of two million jobs due to Obamacare, saying the decline is actually the result of people not being required to work anymore when they don't want to -- a concept labeled "job lock.""Yesterday, the CBO projected that by 2021 the Affordable Care Act will enable more than 2 million workers to escape 'job-lock' – the situation where workers remain tied to employers for access to health insurance benefits," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) office said in a news release.The release continued: "In addition to being...

Yesterday, Washington’s official non-partisan bean-counter, the Congressional Budget Office, dropped a bomb. By 2024, says the CBO, Obamacare will reduce the size of the U.S. labor force by 2.5 million full-time-equivalent workers. That’s roughly triple what the CBO had estimated three years ago. Such a sizeable decline in the labor force will have substantial detrimental effects on the U.S. economic and fiscal picture. But the CBO wasn’t responsible for the most amazing thing that happened yesterday. That title belongs to the Obama White House, where Press Secretary Jay Carney claimed that 2.5 million Americans leaving the workforce was a good...

For years, the White House has trotted out the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to show that Obamacare would cut health-care costs and reduce deficits: Live by the sword, die by the sword, the Bible tells us. In Washington, it’s slightly different: Live by the CBO, die by the CBO. The congressional number-crunchers, perhaps the capital’s closest thing to a neutral referee, came out with a new report Tuesday, and it wasn’t pretty for Obamacare. The CBO predicted the law would have a “substantially larger” impact on the labor market than it had previously expected: The law would reduce the workforce...

The Congressional Budget Office released a report that suggests almost 2.5 million workers might lose their jobs (or have their hours cut to part-time) in the next few years thanks to the implementation of Obamacare. The average American might see this as a worrisome report from the non-partisan CBO about the unintended consequence of government’s regulatory take-over of healthcare… But Harry Reid and other Democrat big-wigs are trying to spin this as a positive. The Democrat from Nevada even suggested that the individuals who are set to lose their job should be happy, because they are about to become “free...

Many workers may opt to work less to retain their eligibility for Medicaid or federal subsidies under Obamacare, a new report has found. The Affordable Care Act could reduce the labor force by the equivalent of 2.5 million workers in 2024, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office's annual outlook. That doesn't mean employers will start swinging the ax or even that that many jobs will be lost, CBO says. Rather, more people will likely opt to reduce their hours, or leave the workforce entirely, so they stay under the income caps for Medicaid and federal subsidies.