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Grace-Marie Turner has the facts that confirm the anecdotes

Real numbers tell the real story: ObamaCare killing full-time work in America




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The more we hear about companies pulling back on hiring, or cutting their employees' hours, the more left-wing ObamaCare apologists try to claim that these are merely anecdotes and not indicative of any real trend. Common sense tells you there's something to it, since you're always going to get less of something when you make the something more difficult to pay for. Now common sense is backed up by real data, offered in Forbes by columnist Grace-Marie Turner, who serves as president of the Galen Institute, a non-profit research organization that focuses on market-driven health policy. Turner lays it out in unmistakable terms, and gives us the cause and effect:
Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that the ratio of part-time to full-time jobs has completely flipped this year from historical trends. Last year, six full-time jobs were created for every one part time job. This year, only one full-time job is being created for every four new part-time jobs. The shift to part-time has accelerated over the past several months because of the “look back” provision in ObamaCare that sets the baseline this year for the number of full-time workers a company employs to determine their compliance with the employer pay-or-play mandate. The administration may have been trying to stop the damage when it announced in July it would delay for a year the reporting requirements for the health law’s employer mandate – the requirement that businesses with 50 or more employees provide health coverage that is acceptable to the government or pay a fine of $2,000 to $3,000 per employee per year.
Turner makes it clear that the delay in the employer mandate was because the mandate is already killing jobs, and the White House hoped to forestall that impact by arbitrarily imposing the delay. Turner also makes it clear that it won't work, because you don't hire someone today knowing full well you will not be able to afford the person a year from now. And Turner has more data:
According to a survey by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 71% of small businesses say the health care law makes it harder to grow. One-half of small businesses that must comply with the employer mandate say they will either cut hours of full-time employees or replace them with part-time workers. Twenty four percent say they will reduce hiring to stay under 50 employees.
Anyone with the tiniest understanding of basic economics could see this would happen. The ObamaCare employer mandate jacks up the cost of hiring people, and the only way for businesses to respond to that is to hire fewer people. The fact that liberals try to argue with this should serve as Exhibit A for why liberals should never be allowed to make economic policy of any kind. And the most frustrating thing is that this was entirely unnecessary. The best thing that could be done to improve health care finance is to decouple it from employment and insurance, since that system not only breeds dependency on third-party payers (thus causing the cost of health care services themselves to rise), but it also shackles people to jobs it may or may not be in their best interests to have - since they are scared to death of losing their insurance - while freezing the unemployed out of the market entirely and making it much more difficult for the self-employed to access health care. One of the most telling statements from a Democrat about health care reform came from none other than Hillary Clinton during her spectacularly failed attempt to impose HillaryCare on the nation back in 1993. Irritated by arguments that HillaryCare's employer requirements would impose an undue burden on small businesses, Hillary declared, "I can't be responsible for every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America." Yeah, why don't these silly dreamers just get a good union job and shut up? Of course, as the unions are discovering, they can't even do that under ObamaCare, since the full-time jobs are going away. ObamaCare is such a disaster . . . I wonder if John Boehner will ever stop trying to "negotiate" with Obama and Harry Reid to defund it, and simply inform the president that the House will not pass a budget that authorizes the money to implement it - period. But I sadly think I know the answer.


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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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