Last week, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office issued its analysis of Obamacare — the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act — finding that under the act, about 2.5 million workers would leave the workforce by 2024 as a result of the act’s provisions.
Republicans immediately seized on the CBO finding, claiming the report proved that Obamacare was indeed “a job killer,” and that it would “cost millions of Americans their jobs” or “leave millions of people looking for work.”
The Republican spin on the Obamacare CBO finding was widely debunked in the press and The Washington Post went so far as to call it “another Big Lie.”
Today, the CBO itself weighed in, explaining in its usual dispassionate terms, that Republican talking points aside, the Obamacare report never said what the Republicans said it said.
In fact, the CBO said, that Obamacare will make people better off by allowing them to reduce their working hours or leave the workforce altogether voluntarily — something generally referred to as “retirement” and traditionally in America, celebrated as a good thing.
“When firms do not have enough business and decide to lay people off, the people who are laid off are generally worse off and are therefore unhappy about what is happening,” the CBO explained in a FAQ document posted to its online site today. “As a result, other people express their sympathy to those people for having ‘lost their jobs’ due to forces beyond their control.”
Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at CBO Says Relax Everyone, Obamacare Will Not Cost 2.5 Million Jobs.
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