Casey Mulligan, professor of economics at University of Chicago, studies the impact of government decisions on the incentives and disincentives for work. It so happens that Professor Mulligan's work had some influence on the recent CBO study that said the impact of ObamaCare would be the equivalent of 2.5 million jobs lost.
In response to the study Democrats, leftists, and their friends in the media are now claiming that job losses like this are a good thing.
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.
Funny, they didn't always think that way. As a matter of fact, ObamaCare was projected to create jobs, not destroy them. In 2011 David Cutler of Harvard and Harold Pollack of the University of Chicago put together a letter that was signed by dozens of left-wing economists. The letter said that ObamaCare would boost the economy, creating 250,000 to 400,000 jobs annually. Oopsies.
Well, maybe jobs don't matter after all. Especially the upside is a bumper crop of new artists! Whatever.
No matter the fallout from ObamaCare, we know one thing. Democrats and other lefties will say it's all good. OK, it hasn't fueled America's economic engine as advertised. So what if economy has been in the tank for Obama's entire administration? That's a good thing. And if it's not good it's George Bush's fault.
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."
Let's see how that leverage works out come November. Sooner or later you might expect even low information voters to begin wondering about all the contradictions surrounding ObamaCare. Maybe not.
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