The Congressional Budget Office just confessed that the healthcare
law passed by Democrats and only Democrats in 2010—you know the one that
was supposed to save us so much money?-- is really a dud, a job killer,
as we have said all along.
And the consequences aren’t just that some guy you don’t know won’t
have a job, the consequences are that guys you DO know won’t have jobs,
and --in the best case—your tax bill will go up accordingly.
The reform package, derisively known as Obamacare, is going to cost
the country an additional 2 million jobs by 2017 says the CBO in a new
report. That’s in addition to the 6 million jobs Obama’s already managed
to kill by reforming the greatest, most vibrant economy in the world.
“The Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday said that the Affordable
Care Act will contribute to the equivalent of 2 million workers out of
the labor market by 2017,” reports
Yahoo’s Business Insider, “as employees work fewer hours or decide to drop out of the labor force entirely.”
As
I wrote
previously, the labor union-controlled Economic Policy Institute (EPI)
estimated recently that the numbers of missing worker in the country has
grown to 5.9 million people under Obama, through dropping labor
participation rates.
These are people who have become so discouraged by the job market that they stopped looking for work entirely.
Imagine a state the size of Illinois being completely unemployed:
That’s how many people we are talking about when combined with the new
CBO estimate.
Actually you don’t really have to imagine: Illinois is trending that
way anyway, with the third highest unemployment rate in the nation.
Thanks Obama! Care.
Since Obama took office, the country has added a little less than
2.5 million additional jobs while the populations from which we draw
workers have grown by 12 million people.
That means that we have only created 10,000 new jobs per state per year, or 27 jobs per day per state.
With the entire federal government straining itself and Obama waving
around his mighty pen, one would think that we could do better than
that.
Mitt Romney would have done better. Donald Trump would do better, even if he fired them too.
Jimmy Carter would have done better, as well.
Not coincidentally, the unemployment rate amongst government workers
is 3 percent, according to the BLS, which not coincidentally is about
half of the new “natural” employment rate predicted by the Congressional
Budget Office.
“The CBO also thinks it will be a long time before the country gets back to full employment,” says the Washington Post’s
Wonk blog. “The unemployment rate isn't expected to fall below 6 percent until late 2017.”
Full employment means 6 percent unemployment?
Say what you want about George W. Bush, but people had jobs under
Bush with unemployment only going above 6 percent once during eight
years in office. It’s hard to create jobs when you are at full
employment. 6 percent unemployment, the max under Bush, is Obama’s new
“natural” unemployment rate.
O let’s just say that there are many problems that can be solved when people have jobs.
Conversely, not having jobs is a bummer.
I only say this on the off chance that someone in the White House is
sitting on the can reading this column surreptitiously via their
Blackberry—you know, without the NSA monitoring them.
How big of a bummer are no jobs?
Well getting past the obvious problem that the ratings for
The View
go up, a state the size of Illinois—which is roughly the size of the
workforce problem we have-- puts out about $700 billion in GDP annually,
or about 4 percent of our GDP. That’s about $225 billion in missing
government tax revenues yearly.
While the Obama administration argues about the “fairness” of tax
rates for corporations, or the “fairness” capital gains tax rates, I
know this one thing: There’s nothing fairer than raising tax revenues by
giving someone a job.
And that’s likely the real liberals problem with this very simple
idea that the way out of our difficulties begins and ends with job
creation.
It’s an ideal that actually is fair to everyone, and liberals can’t have that.
