Republicans are misrepresenting what the CBO found, and there's an easy way to prove it.
What the CBO report on Obamacare really found
Republicans are misrepresenting what the CBO found, and there's an easy way to prove it.
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The CBO report actually says that the impact of the ACA will be “almost entirely” due to a decline in labor that “workers choose to supply.” It says explicitly that the ACA’s impact will not be felt as an “increase in unemployment” or “underemployment.”
Now, a few conservatives on twitter did seize on the report to make an argument about how the CBO report shows that the safety net act as a disincentive to work. Whether or not you agree with that argument, it at least exists within the parameters of what the CBO report actually said. The suggestion that Obamacare will cause over two million jobs to be lost does not. This is not a small distinction. It goes directly to the heart of one of the Republican arguments against the law — that it is a job killer, i.e., that its regulations strangle jobs.
Indeed, the response from many Republicans to the report suggests they are so wedded to their “Obamacare is a job killer” talking point that they will misrepresent what it actually says in order to continue making it. That’s not surprising, in a way. After all, the larger political context here is that claiming the safety net is a disincentive to work — again, whatever you think of the substance of that argument — is politically a hard case to make. Remember how Republicans moved away from arguing that unemployment benefits lull people into a state of dependency — Paul Ryan’s Hammock Theory of Poverty — and began arguing instead that it needed to be paid for?
As for the CBO report, there is a simple way to settle this argument. CBO director Douglas Elmendorf is set to testify before the House Budget Committee tomorrow. One committee lawmaker can ask him the following question: Is it true that your report found that Obamacare will result in over two million lost jobs?
And so, this doesn’t have to be a partisan argument. Tomorrow we can find out what the CBO’s own director has to say about it. There shouldn’t be any need for this to be represented by neutral news orgs as an unresolvable he-said-she-said standoff.
more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/02/04/what-the-cbo-report-on-obamacare-really-found/
