What Homer Called Stealing in the Mind
There
really isn’t a debate going on about the meaning of the Congressional Budget
Office’s report on the economic effects of the ACA. There’s a spinning contest,
though a one-sided one so far. For right wing types, the strategy is
to ignore the bulk of the report, which basically concludes that Obamacare
won’t hurt the budget and is succeeding in insuring millions of the formerly
insured, in order to claim that it will cost a couple of million jobs. The report doesn’t actually say that. It projects that Obamacare will reduce the number of hours that people
will chose to work. To quote the report itself:
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, so it will appear almost entirely as a reduction in labor
force participation and in hours worked relative to what would have occurred
otherwise rather than as an increase in unemployment (that is, more workers
seeking but not finding jobs) or underemployment (such as part-time workers who
would prefer to work more hours per week).
When
called on their misrepresentation of the facts, the Conservatives switch to a
slightly different line. One of them argued to me “in the macro fewer folks
choosing to work means lower output and living standards.” Ignoring the obvious
dishonesty involved in changing your story when you get caught in a lie, this
argument, which sounds like it comes from the 40s—the 1840s—has an interesting
implication. Any universal health care system whatsoever has the effect of
reducing the need for some people to work and thus the number of hours worked.
Of course, the eight-hour working day, restrictions on child labor, and social
security have exactly the same tendency, except to a vastly greater extent,
which no doubt explains why the U.S. experienced a marked decline in output and
living standards in the years after the introduction of these well-meaning but
economically naïve measures. They all have the effect of reducing the
desperation that is the only effective means of getting the slackers to move
off their ass, at least in the view of the latest generation of Manchester mill
owners.
One
of the ironies here is that the probable net effect of measures like Obamacare
is to increase employment because we’re obviously in a period of depressed
demand and the ACA transfers wealth to people who will spend it—the
Congressional Budget Office report makes that point, too, not that we’ll be
able to read about it in the Wall Street Journal. That we don’t have a problem
of lower output caused by insufficient factors of supply is pretty obvious when
you consider the piles of cash that so many corporations are currently sitting
on and the armies of people clamoring for work. The genuine objection to the
ACA is not that it reduces living standards but that it doesn't increase the
living standards of the right kind of people, that, and it doesn’t properly
chastise the slackers.