'Obamacare' will reduce US workforce, report finds

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Originally posted by kpo:

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You're still assuming that I modified it to suit my argument.

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If you knew what 'subconsciously' meant you would know that this precludes your doing anything 'on purpose'. And when you see that I actually typed 'accidentally/subconsciously' it's even clearer that I'm not accusing you of doing anything on purpose. On the contrary I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt. But you're still finding reason to whine, and play the victim, somehow.

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I have some idea what subconsciously means. The issue is with you suggesting I modified something to suit my argument, subconsciously or no.

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I copied it and posted it. I wondered at the time about the paragraph structure. Perhaps The BBC corrected it later. It's been known to happen.

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Sounds plausible. The non-douche thing to do would've been to give this explanation about 50 posts ago.

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Actually, the non-douche thing would have been to not accuse folks you disagree with of sneakily modifying things on purpose to suit their argument.

Sort'a like this...

"Did you doctor this quote Geezer?"

"Anything to say in your defence, Geezer?"

"Are you saying you did it by accident?"

"I wanted to see if you're the kind of person who would make it sound like it was an accident when it wasn't."

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Since your quote from the CBO blog (which one, BTW?) doesn't refer to negative effects or low income workers at all, I'd say the blog is talking about a different group of people

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http://www.cbo.gov/publication/45096

From the blog post:

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Q: Will 2.5 Million People Lose Their Jobs in 2024 Because of the ACA?
A: No, we would not describe our estimates in that way...



There. With this blog post the CBO was clarifying some of the points in their report, in response to all the misunderstandings that flew up around it. Thus it is referring to the same group of people, largely low income, that they talked about in their report. The 'negative effects' on people's incentive to work are talked about and explained at length.

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So you expect that the CBO will go back and edit this part of the report?

"Correspondingly, the negative effects of exchange subsidies on incentives to work will be relevant primarily for a limited segment of the population - mostly people who have no offer of employee-based coverage and whose income is either below or near 400 percent of the FPL (Federal Poverty Level),"

That's the basis of my comment...

"If you read "Number and Types of Worker Likely To Be Affected", starting on page 119, you'll see that it's folks who are incentivized by the availability of subsidized health care payments (i.e. folks not making much money) who will be most likely to work less hours. This is folks who are on the cusp of poverty, and may be dissuaded from moving up the economic ladder by fear of loss of the subsidy."

I still feel that way.

I have noted above that the subsidies under the ACA will benefit some folks, but I'm concerned about those that choose not to try and advance only because they must rely on the subsidy to get insurance to cover their families.




"When your heart breaks, you choose what to fill the cracks with. Love or hate. But hate won't ever heal. Only love can do that."

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GEEZER

Friday, February 14, 2014 6:26 PM

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Originally posted by kpo:
I find it hard to believe that those two specific words were omitted by complete random coincidence. For me this whole incident is illustrative of your ability to ignore things that don't quite fit your narrative. You ignored those two words when you read the sentence, which allowed you to misunderstand it. And then, it's no surprise when you came to retype the sentence that those were the two words you missed.

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So you're still accusing me of changing the sentence to fit my narrative.

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Actually, the non-douche thing would have been to not accuse folks you disagree with of sneakily modifying things on purpose to suit their argument.

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Those were questions, not accusations, and I largely accepted your answers.

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Bullshit.

When you ask if I doctored something (instead of asking if I made a mistake), or if I have anything to say in my defense, those are accusations, and you know it.

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This is folks who are on the cusp of poverty, and may be dissuaded from moving up the economic ladder by fear of loss of the subsidy."

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As I've already pointed out, the CBO has a very different view of the people being affected by the law:

"when the labor market is strong and people decide on their own to retire, to leave work to take care of their families, or to cut back on their hours to pursue other interests, those people presumably think they are better off (or they would not be making the voluntary choices they are making). As a result, other people are generally happy for them"

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Unfortunately, the labor market is not strong right now, as is noted elsewhere in the CBO's blog as is the fact that the subsidies are an implicit tax on the poorer workers.

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For example, under the ACA, health insurance subsidies are provided to some people with low income and are phased out as their income rises; as a result, a portion of the added income from working more would be offset by a loss of some or all of the subsidies, which represents an implicit tax on earnings. Also, the ACA’s subsidies effectively boost the income of recipients, which will lead some of them to decide they can work less and still maintain or improve their standard of living. Therefore, some people will decide not to work or to work fewer hours than would otherwise be the case—including some people who will choose to retire earlier than they would have otherwise, and some people who will work less themselves and rely more on a spouse’s earnings. (Many other factors influence decisions about working, including, for example, income and payroll taxes and the cost of commuting and child care. Moreover, under current economic conditions, a substantial number of people who would like to work cannot find a job.)

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To be fair Geezer I think you have a point. The healthcare law (as with any provision that gives help to the poor) will create some dependency, and in effect erode some people's incentive to advance themselves. But that's not the full picture. It's not even the main picture. It's a small part of the picture.

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Plenty of folks here pointing out good things about the ACA, including me. I also see issues with some of the provisions and the lack of planning for implementation. This apparently makes some folks very angry.


"When your heart breaks, you choose what to fill the cracks with. Love or hate. But hate won't ever heal. Only love can do that."

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Originally posted by Niki2:
You won't get anywhere, KPO, any more than I did. Note he's not responded to me since I called him on his dishonesty. I assume he'd claim that in "switching between screens" he also "missed" those two paragraphs he left out in his original quoting of the article. If he even bothered, which he hasn't.

I'd say "give it up". Geez wants this to go away so he can start anew twisting things on some other issue. He's never going to answer my challenge about his lie that he was "just" pointing out the difference between the CBO's previous numbers and the new ones, and that he just happened to find the article "interesting". After all, he's totally non-partisan, remember?

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Under the title Stupidity in Economic Discourse

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. . . he pulls multiple fast ones, asserting things that he says are conclusions of the CBO report when they aren’t — they’re his own views, pulled out of, um, thin air, or maybe someplace else, which he is projecting onto the budget office to make them seem authoritative. . . .

It works like this: Conservatives in general, and conservative economists in particular, often have a very narrow vision of what economics is all about — namely supply, demand, and incentives. Anything that interferes with the sacred functioning of markets or reduces the incentive to produce must be a bad thing; any time a progressive economist supports policies that don’t fit neatly into this orthodoxy, it must be because he doesn’t understand Econ 101. And conservative economists are so sure of this that they can’t be bothered to actually read what the progressives write — at the first hint of deviation from laissez-faire, they stop paying attention and begin debating with the stupid progressive in their mind, not the real economist out there.

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http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/14/stupidity-in-economic-disc
ourse/ FEB 14, 7:39 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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So you're still accusing me of changing the sentence to fit my narrative.

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Well you DID, the question is whether it was purposeful or subconscious (or completely accidental, I suppose, but that seems less likely).

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When you ask if I doctored something (instead of asking if I made a mistake), or if I have anything to say in my defense , those are accusations, and you know it.

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They're still not accusations. And if you don't want people to be suspicious of you for changing the meaning of quotes, be more careful when you're transcribing them.

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as is the fact that the subsidies are an implicit tax on the poorer workers.

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Hence their incentives to work have decreased. Which is what we've been talking about. This isn't a new point you're raising here.

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Unfortunately, the labor market is not strong right now

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See the BBC article, the CBO is talking about the period 2017-2021, when, according to projections, the labour market will be stronger than it is now.

Understand that the CBO in that blog post is trying to explain the difference between 2.3 million workers being laid off because of an economic squeeze, and the equivalent of 2.3 million workers leaving the workforce voluntarily in ordinary, healthy economic conditions. But it doesn't make that big of a difference if the labour market is somewhat less than healthy, the distinction is still completely valid.

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I also see issues with some of the provisions and the lack of planning for implementation.

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The lowering of incentives to work and the 'implicit tax on earnings' effect is not unique to Obamacare. It's a downside to ALL provisions that benefit the poor. If you're poor, you get aid. If you stop being poor through self-advancement, that aid is withdrawn. Hence the government is, in a sense, making work pay less well. This is the implicit tax. But the alternative to government playing this role, of providing a safety net, is to have a society where some people live in misery, and grinding poverty.

It's not personal. It's just war.

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The problem with you, Geezer, is that you like to think you're reasonable. But the reality is that you're reasonable, but only to the point where an issue cuts across your assumptions... which is most of the time. After that, instead of using your big brain to learn, you use it to defend your assumptions.

Every step of they way, you've biased your arguments - and your quotes- to say exactly the opposite of what the CBO said. (And no, I don't think the BBC changed the article... they list corrections at the end of an article when it's been changed). I'm not making a big deal out of this single event, but you show a pattern of using that big brain of yours to delete huge chunks of data, obliterate decades of history, miss myriad obvious connections (like the Bush - Bandar "Bush" -Al Qaida connection), and avoid answering direct, repeated questions.

You know that we humans really don't really see what's in front of us. Even a simple sense like vision is heavily processed, which is why we can be fooled by magic tricks. Perceptions are deeply directed by what we want, or are afraid of. People misperceive things all of the time. So when people make a glaring mistake... like pulling into traffic without seeing that vehicle heading in their direction .... or consistently misquoting/ misrepresenting what someone else said... people would be far better off admitting the mistake, backtracking to the source of the error, doing actual LEARNING, and rooting out whatever it was that misled them in the first place.

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Originally posted by kpo:

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as is the fact that the subsidies are an implicit tax on the poorer workers.

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Hence their incentives to work have decreased. Which is what we've been talking about. This isn't a new point you're raising here.

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I know. It is my point. That folks are incentivized to not try and advance by the implicit tax of the subsidy. This may be fine if you're closing in on retirement, but folks in their early twenties who need health insurance for themselves and possibly a child are being held back from earning more, which may affect their standard of living, the possibility of higher education for children, and the amount of retirement income they'll have.

You didn't understand this by now?

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Unfortunately, the labor market is not strong right now

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See the BBC article, the CBO is talking about the period 2017-2021, when, according to projections, the labour market will be stronger than it is now.

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And you can predict the labor market now? How about some stock tips while you're at it?

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Understand that the CBO in that blog post is trying to explain the difference between 2.3 million workers being laid off because of an economic squeeze, and the equivalent of 2.3 million workers leaving the workforce voluntarily in ordinary, healthy economic conditions. But it doesn't make that big of a difference if the labour market is somewhat less than healthy, the distinction is still completely valid.

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Yes, teacher. I understand that jobs won't be lost, just workforce equivalent hours.

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The lowering of incentives to work and the 'implicit tax on earnings' effect is not unique to Obamacare. It's a downside to ALL provisions that benefit the poor. If you're poor, you get aid. If you stop being poor through self-advancement, that aid is withdrawn. Hence the government is, in a sense, making work pay less well. This is the implicit tax. But the alternative to government playing this role, of providing a safety net, is to have a society where some people live in misery, and grinding poverty.

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But in most such programs the reduction in benefits is pretty much dollar-for-dollar. The subsidy is not like that, cutting off dramatically when you reach the 400% FPL limit.

As noted above...

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And it's a good deal for some, Using the Kaiser Subsidy calculator Kiki introduced in another thread, we have a 60 year old woman living in Albany Ga. and making $47,000, paying $12,264 for insurance with no subsidy. If she drops her income by $2,000, to $45,000, She'd receive a $7,989 subsidy, for a net $5,989 benefit.

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So if this were a 25 year old woman, and she were offered a better job with a $3,000 pay raise, she'd actually lose almost $5,000 a year in real money.




"When your heart breaks, you choose what to fill the cracks with. Love or hate. But hate won't ever heal. Only love can do that."

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The problem with you, Geezer, is that you like to think you're reasonable. But the reality is that you're reasonable, but only to the point where an issue cuts across your assumptions... which is most of the time. After that, instead of using your big brain to learn, you use it to defend your assumptions.

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Not surprisingly, this is pretty much the way I see you, KPO, and Niki.

I point out that there may be some particular thing wrong with one of your pet laws, or parties, or politicians, or whatever, and you can't see it as showing something that could be improved, but an attack on all you hold dear.

I've particularly enjoyed when you call me or Auraptor trolls in threads that we started.


"When your heart breaks, you choose what to fill the cracks with. Love or hate. But hate won't ever heal. Only love can do that."

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