Chip Bok's Bokbluster

War is peace, freedom is slavery, and unemployment is liberation.

A new Congressional Budget Office report says ObamaCare will cost the economy 2.3 million jobs. Lower income workers will have a “disincentive to work”, as CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf put it.

“By providing subsidies that decline with rising income (and increase with falling income), and by making some people financially better off, the Affordable Care Act will create an incentive for some people to work less,” the report states.

The White House has embraced this. Jason Furman the chairman of the Council for Economic Advisers calls it freedom from “job lock”.

Unemployment Liberation Update:

University of Chicago Economist Casey Mulligan thinks that’s nuts:

I don’t know what their intentions are,” he says, choosing his words carefully, “but it looks like they’re trying to leverage the lack of economic education in their audience by making these sorts of points.

I can understand something like cigarettes and people believe that there’s too much smoking, so we put a tax on cigarettes, so people smoke less, and we say that’s a good thing. OK. But are we saying we were working too much before? Is that the new argument? I mean make up your mind. We’ve been complaining for six years now that there’s not enough work being done. . . . Even before the recession there was too little work in the economy. Now all of a sudden we wake up and say we’re glad that people are working less? We’re pursuing our dreams?