Obamacare isn't destroying jobs
By JARED BERNSTEIN and PAUL VAN DE WATER | 8/6/13 1:56 PM EDT
"Fridayâs employment report showed that the U.S. job market continues to add jobs at a moderate pace. Employers are creating enough jobs to slowly reduce the unemployment rate, which fell to 7.4 percent â the lowest it has been since December 2008.
"But many of the jobs added in recent months have been part-time, and this has led critics of Obamacare to argue that the implementation of health-care reform is the culprit. Because the legislation (officially the Affordable Care Act, or ACA) requires employers with at least 50 full-time workers to offer them health coverage or pay a penalty, the billâs detractors claim that it creates a disincentive to hire full-timers and that you can already see the shift to part-time work in the data.
"Weâll get to the incentive in a moment, but the critics are mistaken: Recent data provide scant evidence that health reform is causing a significant shift toward part-time work.
"The share of part-time jobs rose sharply during the recession, as it always does â employers always cut workersâ hours in downturns. Hereâs the question: Has this share continued to grow as we approach the start of the ACAâs employer mandate, which was recently pushed back a year to 2015?
"The answer is no. Part-time workers represent 19.0 percent of total employment â below the post-recession peak of 20.0 percent and exactly the same as a year ago."
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Edit: denner, stop shilling. Someone please quote me.
