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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...

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.

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...

New estimates that President Barack Obama’s health care law will encourage millions of Americans to leave the workforce or reduce their work hours have touched off an I-told-you-so chorus from Republicans, who’ve claimed all along that the law will kill jobs. But some aren’t telling it straight. […] In a key point overlooked in the GOP response, the report says, “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.” In other words, workers aren’t being laid off. They...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said the Congressional Budget Office report that shows Obamacare will make the labor force lose 2.3 million full-time workers by 2021 is positive because it lets Americans be “free agents.” “We have the CBO report, which rightfully says, that people shouldn’t have job lock. If they — we live in a country where there should be free agency. People can do what they want,” Reid told reporters outside of a close policy luncheon. “And what they’re saying here is — and the fact checkers have already done this — the Republicans talk about losing...

ED HENRY, FOX NEWS: Jason, on your example, and you’re talking about somebody making -- working 60 or 65 hours a week and they might now be able to work. I can’t remember if you used 30 or 35 hours a week. And they'd have health insurance, just an example. So it's a good thing that they now have health care; maybe they didn’t before. But isn’t that man or woman going from 60 or 65 hours to 30 hours -- JASON FURMAN, WHITE HOUSE ECONOMIC ADVISER: No, no. HENRY: They're making less money, right? FURMAN: I'm saying if they...