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CBO spin cycle
Congressional bad news office
CBO claims PPACA will slash work hours

"CBO more or less punts on the issue because the White House delayed the mandate for a year and the changes would be hard to model. But this means CBO is probably still underestimating job losses because common sense says that labor mandates raise hiring costs and induce businesses to hire less, or pay lower wages, or slash hours, or all three.

"Too bad this reality isn't permeating the liberal force field of thinking only positive thoughts."

They didn't say so, but the editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal easily could have been referring to their liberal brethren at the New York Times.

"The Congressional Budget Office estimated on Tuesday that the Affordable Care Act will reduce the number of full-time workers by 2.5 million over the next decade. That is mostly a good thing, a liberating result of the law," the Times wrote.

Why's that?

Well, according to the Times' way of thinking, "some workers may have had a pre-existing condition and will now be able to leave work because insurers must accept all applicants without regard to health status and charge premiums unrelated to health status. Some may have felt they needed to keep working to pay for health insurance, but now new government subsidies will help pay premiums, making it more possible for them to leave their jobs.

"The report," it continued, "clearly stated that health reform would not produce an increase in unemployment (workers unable to find jobs) or underemployment (part-time workers who would prefer to work more hours per week).  

The bottom line, at least for the Times, is that "the new law will free people, young and old, to pursue careers or retirement without having to worry about health coverage. Workers can seek positions they are most qualified for and will no longer need to feel locked into a job they don't like because they need insurance for themselves or their families. It is hard to view this as any kind of disaster."

On the other side of the country, Michael Hiltzik, an editorial writer at the Los Angeles Times, pointed out one of the less-noticed assertions in the CBO report.

"The CBO estimates that on balance, the ACA will increase aggregate demand for goods and services, in part by relieving lower-income people of the burden of health insurance or healthcare expenses, so they can increase their spending on other things. In turn, that will 'boost demand for labor,' especially in the near term, while the economy remains slack," he wrote.  

Over at the Washington Post, Dana Milbank, who writes on politics, offered a position with which nonpartisans would no doubt agree.

"The congressional number-crunchers, perhaps the capital's closest thing to a neutral referee, came out with a new report Tuesday, and it wasn't pretty for Obamacare. The CBO predicted the law would have a 'substantially larger' impact on the labor market than it had previously expected: The law would reduce the workforce in 2021 by the equivalent of 2.3 million full-time workers, well more than the 800,000 originally anticipated. This will inevitably be a drag on economic growth, as more people decide government handouts are more attractive than working more and paying higher taxes."

"This is grim news for the White House and for Democrats on the ballot in November," he intoned, concluding:

"Obamacare has been undermined by the very entity they had used to validate it."