CBO: ObamaCare To Increase Deficit, Decrease Jobs

[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED, twice three times]

The Hill reports this morning that the Congressional Budget Office has substantially revised its earlier views on the economic impact of Obamacare.

The nonpartisan agency’s report found the healthcare law’s negative effects on the economy will be “substantially larger” than what it had previously anticipated.

The CBO is now estimating the law will reduce labor force compensation by 1 percent from 2017-2024, twice the reduction it previously had projected.

This will decrease the number of full-time equivalent jobs in 2021 by 2.3 million, the CBO said. It had previously estimated the decrease would be 800,000….

The agency also said employer penalties in the law would decrease wages, and part-year workers would be slower to return to the work force because they would seek to retain ObamaCare insurance subsidies….

The slower growth will mean less tax revenue, which will add to the deficit. Instead of adding $6.3 trillion in deficits from 2014 to 2023, the government will add $7.3 trillion, the CBO now projects.

So, the “change” for individuals is that Obamacare has caused millions of people to lose their insurance, has prevented untold numbers of others from continuing to see their preferred doctors, has caused another so far untold number of people who found policies on one of the exchanges to pay more (higher premiums or higher deductibles or both) for policies that contained many coverages they can never use. And for the society as a whole, it will dramatically increase the deficit and decrease the number of jobs.

That’s the “change.” Now remind me, what and where in the “hope”?

UPDATE

I don’t believe I’ve ever read a “news” article that was more defensive, that tried so hard to soften edges of what the reporter and his editors obviously regard as bad news, than this article about the new CBO report in — where do you think? — the New York Times.

And speaking of the New York Times, “The Tyranny and Lethargy of the Times Editorial Page” in the New York Observer provides a long, fascinating account of the disdain and even contempt a large and growing number of news and other reporters there have for the opinion pages of the NYT. “You know,” one of these reporters told the Observer reporter,

we hold ourselves to incredibly high standards on the news side, and we meet them more often than not. Methodically, for the last 10 years, you’ve seen various editors march through and dispatch with mediocrity in many places where it had been allowed to fester for years, from the book review to the feature pages. And so to see it persist and persist and persist on the editorial page with nobody having the guts to retire some of the people or things that are not only not working but have become caricatures of themselves is just a huge bummer.

Color me skeptical, but in any event the Times article on the CBO report reads exactly like a Times editorial or opinion piece, trying every which way to undermine or at least blunt what it notes as the report’s effect of “providing Republican opponents fresh lines of attack and putting Democrats on the defensive.”

Those “lines of attack,” of course, aren’t “fresh” at all. They are exactly what Republicans have been pointing out and predicting since before Obamacare was passed.

UPDATE II

The View From the White House … And The Kitchen

From the New York Times article linked above:

“Claims that the Affordable Care Act hurts jobs are simply belied by the facts,” said the White House press secretary, Jay Carney. “The report itself says that there is ‘no compelling evidence that part-time employment has increased as a result of the A.C.A.’”

From a “Google Hangout Session” on Friday quoted on National Review Online:

… fry cook Darnell Summers told President Obama that his hours were cut due to the Affordable Care Act. “We were broken down to part time to avoid paying health insurance,” he said.

UPDATE III

The View From the Federal Reserve

The Heritage Foundation reports that the Federal Reserve has recently released its January Beige Book, which “gathers anecdotal information on current economic conditions in its District through reports from Bank and Branch directors and interviews with key business contacts, economists, market experts, and other sources.” Unlike the White House, the various branch banks have noticed that Obamacare is already, even before the imposition of the employer mandate, having a negative impact on jobs. Among their findings:

• Atlanta Fed: “On balance, many firms expressed continued hesitancy caused by concerns about healthcare reform in terms of their overall hiring plans” (p. VI-3).
• Richmond Fed: “Employers continued to express concern about potential cost increases related to [Obamacare]” (p. V-4).
• Chicago Fed: “Non-wage labor costs also increased, with a number of contacts reporting higher healthcare premiums” (p. VII-3).
• Boston Fed: “Downside risks include the upcoming costs to businesses of compliance with [Obamacare] and the trend toward office downsizing on a space-per-person basis” (p. I-3).
• Philadelphia Fed: “Firms also expected to see the largest increase in health benefits costs compared with other input and labor costs in 2014” (pp. III-1 and III-2).
• Cleveland Fed: “A majority of our contacts cited rising healthcare insurance premiums as a concern” (p. IV-2).