"Liberalism's Tombstone"

Charles Krauthammer manages to explain the moral and functional bankruptcy of American leftist ideology - all in less than two minutes.

http://townhall.com/video/krauthammer-defines-liberalism-working-people-subsidizing-people-who-choose-not-to-work-n1790720

A somewhat longer discussion of the issue that prompted Krauthammer's comments - the belated Congressional Budget Office discovery that built in Obamacare disincentives to work, especially among those in the lower income groups, will cost the American economy roughly two and a half million full time job equivalents by 2024 - can be found in this weekend's WSJ interview by Joseph Rago of University of Chicago Economics Professor Casey Mulligan. Mulligan's research revealed those disincentives long before the CBO discovered them. (Mulligan still believes the CBO is underestimating the damage to the employment picture by half, though that's a three fold improvement over its initial estimate).

During the interview, Mulligan addresses the response of Obamacare apologists to the data.

...liberals have turned to claiming that ObamaCare's missing workers will be a gift to society. Since employers aren't cutting jobs per se through layoffs or hourly take-backs, people are merely choosing rationally to supply less labor. Thanks to ObamaCare, we're told, Americans can finally quit the salt mines and blacking factories and retire early, or spend more time with the children, or become artists.

Mr. Mulligan reserves particular scorn for the economists making this "eliminated from the drudgery of labor market" argument, which he views as a form of trahison des clercs. "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."

 

A job, Mr. Mulligan explains, "is a transaction between buyers and sellers. When a transaction doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. We know that it doesn't matter on which side of the market you put the disincentives, the results are the same. . . . In this case you're putting an implicit tax on work for households, and employers aren't willing to compensate the households enough so they'll still work." Jobs can be destroyed by sellers (workers) as much as buyers (businesses).

 

He adds: "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?"

 

The larger betrayal, Mr. Mulligan argues, is that the same economists now praising the great shrinking workforce used to claim that ObamaCare would expand the labor market.

He points to a 2011 letter organized by Harvard's David Cutler and the University of Chicago's Harold Pollack, signed by dozens of left-leaning economists including Nobel laureates, stating "our strong conclusion" that ObamaCare will strengthen the economy and create 250,000 to 400,000 jobs annually. (Mr. Cutler has since qualified and walked back some of his claims.)