The Rise in Part Time Labor Has NOTHING TO DO WITH OBAMACARE

~ Laura

The rise of consultant job and adjunct labor is a huge topic in our house, for obvious reasons. I’ve brought up the issue on the blog several times and often a commenter will say something like, “this is all because of Obamacare. Thank Obama for this situation.”

Well, no.  And here’s a nice chart from Derek Thompson at the Atlantic to back that up. More info here.

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Published by Laura

92 thoughts on “The Rise in Part Time Labor Has NOTHING TO DO WITH OBAMACARE”

    1. And if any Republican officeholder tried push for a law decoupling employment and health insurance, or even any alternative to Obamacare that didn’t involve shutting down the whole government but for the part that pays for health care in the 65+ set, I might care. When this all started, I was very worried about Obamacare because I thought it was going to slide into single-payer and I didn’t want that. After watching this process for several years now, I’m now far less worried about single-payer than the status quo.

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    1. The point of the post is that such claims are self-interested nonsense because employers started hiring part-timers when the economy went bad not when the ACA was passed.

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  3. Even in the early 90s, when I was working in California, my research center had to avoid hiring anyone for more than 30 hours a week, for more than 3 months, because then we would have to start paying benefits (both retirement and health care). I don’t know if this was a California law or just the policy of our institution, but it was a pain in the neck.

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    1. Probably just institutional policy. We have it also. I think it is a very good idea because it sends a clear message to workers. “We can’t or won’t pay you enough to make this a career. Keep looking for work at other places.”

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  4. “..such claims are self-interested nonsense because employers started hiring part-timers when the economy went bad..”

    Do I hafta choose? Yes, employers of moderate-to-low-skill people are always going to be better served if they keep their workers hungry, sitting at home and eager for shifts. When they can adjust their staffing levels by the weather forecast, instead of having to commit to a month ahead – that’s happiness for a McD manager. They could get away with it better when the economy went south than they could before.

    Okay, but that doesn’t change the fact that ObamaCare has put an enormous new penalty on the employer whose workers go over 30 hours, and that some/many employers are making sure that some/many of their employees don’t go over 30 hours.

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    1. I’m sure that some employers will make sure their employees don’t go over 30 hours because of Obamacare (or avoid growing to over 50 employees — which I think is more likely to be an actual problem). There are lots of employers and many of them are trying to do absurd things like make JC Penny hip or sell magazines on paper or do whatever it is that Groupon does. What I don’t see is the certainty of how on the net this will result in fewer full-time employees. First, the implementation has already been delayed once and would presumably be delayed again if the recovering isn’t continuing. Because in a healthy economy workers won’t take a 25% cut in their hours. Second, it isn’t an “enormous” new penalty compared to the incentives already there. The maximum penalty is $2,000 per full-time employee. That’s nearly half of the average tax subsidy that employers get right now for offering coverage. The stick is still much smaller than the carrot. Third, you’ve only mentioned potential jobs losses (and I’m sure there will be some) without looking at jobs that will be created. People without health insurance are less likely to buy houses and cars and whatnot. Or even just move out of their parent’s basement and create their own household. All the things that created jobs before the recession.

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    1. Did your eyes look at the chart and the link in the OP. It clearly addresses and refutes the point in your link.

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    1. That’s an example of it working the way it is supposed to work. People who don’t earn much money (i.e. nearly every part-time workers) are getting subsidized insurance. That giving money to poor people is actually what the people with money who are opposed to Obamacare are opposed to. And rather than offering an alternative plan or an argument, opponents have gone into “let’s scare old people and see if they’ll pass on the news like they do whenever it threatens to rain” mode.

      There’s other companies doing the same thing written up by less shrill sources. See below for an example.

      http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-12/trader-joe-s-sends-part-timers-to-obama-health-exchanges.html

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  11. Em Aitch – you’re right, I guess, that she could be talking about nonteacher members of the AFT

    “..Loretta Johnson, secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Teachers, said it was already happening in her union.

    “We are seeing employer after employer cut hours so as to avoid the 30-hour definition of a full-time job,” Johnson said. The AFL-CIO passed a resolution demanding either Congress or Obama fix the law to stop it from hurting union members…”

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    1. I missed Miss Johnson in there, but still she’s not giving any specifics. The only details in the article are about janitors.

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  12. I was tremendously impressed by a piece I read once, and have googled and cannot find. Maybe it is not on the intertubes: I know I read it on paper. I sort of thought it was from Caro’s book on Johnson. Maybe our Gracious Hostess, a genuine political scientist as she is, can help out. The discussion was about how Johnson, in the Senate and later as President, would keep looking for votes for something long after he had a majority. Anything big, he wanted to nail it down tight. He would offer significant concessions to get somebody on board. This was to get people to have an investment in something working, later. And once he got something passed, it stayed passed.

    I think the ObamaCare process was probably the most disastrous piece of legislative work of my lifetime: a huge change, with the barest majority. The Senate stolen by prosecutors in Alaska and the Secretary of State in Minn. The message of Massachusetts (Massachusetts!!!) electing a Reep was ignored by the Dems, and they jammed through the hugely flawed Senate version in the House because they could not go back to the well and fix things in the Senate. “You have to pass it, to find out what’s in it” in the deathless phrase of Nancy Pelosi. I expect that policy schools, for years to come, will be giving cases to their students about how foolish it is to try and do something like this on a thin majority. I guess a counter-example would be Bush 43 (yes!) and all the stuff he did with his pharmaceuticals benefit plan to get Dem backing, and it’s not under threat at all, now, it’s durable.

    Flaws including this crapdoodle we are talking about here of making a big incentive to force people part time, and making the pretense for tax scoring that it was low cost by the expedient of overcharging young people to subsidize old people through plan payments (you were always going to have to subsidize wrinklies, but you could do it honestly through taxes or you could do it by stealth on the backs of young premium payers).

    McMegan has a nice discussion http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-25/it-is-one-of-obamacare-s-weakest-links.html of the Dems’ expection that the opponents would roll over on their backs with their legs in the air. Will people start to like it once it’s in place? Maybe, we’ll see. But the process has been disastrous for the Dems and for Obama.

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    1. Look back in the comments here from when it was enacted and you’ll see that I was nervous myself. The behavior of the Republicans during and since is what convinced me that this is as good as it is going to get. There was no proposed alternative or even constructive engagement with a plan that was, in its fundamentals, largely copied from a plan enacted by the guy the Republicans ran for president recently.

      Ever since then, the idea has been to scare enough old people (who are covered by government-provided health care) with vague fears while ignoring any real problem for anybody else.

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  14. “Laura on September 30, 2013 at 10:27 am said:

    Just talked to the school district. Apparently, part of chaos in Ian’s class is due to the fact that all the experienced aides quit this summer when their hours were reduced from 7 to 5. The school district didn’t want to pay for their health insurance. So, some counter evidence to an old blog post.
    Reply↓

    MH on September 30, 2013 at 10:40 am said:

    The fact that the experienced aides all quit, while it sucks for you, isn’t actually counter-evidence for your old blog post. If they all quit, it seems likely they just went to work for somebody who will give them enough hours. It suggests that employers will be unable to hire experienced workers if they try to dodge the health insurance mandate which is different from suggesting that those experienced workers will be forced to take part-time jobs because of Obamacare.
    Reply↓ ”

    Hey Em Aitch! Our Gracious Hostess has just noted that her kid’s school cut hours for the good ones and all they could hire was the one with experience wiping butts. The reason they did it was to get out of health care. It seems to me that this BUTTresses my original position… even if the good ones could go off and get full time somewhere else, Gracious Hostess’ school has downgraded these positions to part time.

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    1. The original claim was about a rise in part-time employment overall, which would require both jobs being switched to part-time and there being no alternative to them for the employees. Wages going up because of increased labor mobility due to a weakening of the tie between healthcare and employment is one of the main purposes of Obamacare. An employer switching a job to part-time and being unable to fill it with as good of an employee is evidence that Obamacare is working as intended. That’s how wages go up and wages going up is how recessions end.

      I suspect that most people opposed to Obamacare are actually opposed to it because it will force wages to be higher. If that is actually what is happening, I’m delighted (in general).

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  15. Original Research! I did some! I am SO PROUD. I went to the Giant Supermarket tonight, and one of the cashiers was asking another whether his hours had been cut, too. So I asked what was going on, and he said they were moving people below 30 hours so the company wouldn’t have to provide health care. He was really angry at his employer. But he didn’t say he was going to walk.

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    1. I wonder how many incidents there are of somebody losing hours of work because they were sick and couldn’t afford health care?

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    1. That’s a pretty clear case of outsourcing for other reasons and blaming Obamacare, but I’m mildly alarmed to see that the management of a public university can publicly state they have a “responsibility” to dodge providing health care for their workers.

      And for a university (I can’t tell if the guy quoted on that is from the university) to pretend that letting grad students writing a dissertation work 40 hours a week is somehow selflessly looking out for the graduate students is appalling.

      Why don’t you post something that to refute the general idea in the original post (i.e. something that takes into account long-term trends toward part-time work and outsourcing) or drop it?

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  18. Em Aitch – Dan Lipinski – no enemy of Obamacare he! thinks forcing workers down below 30 hours is a real thing and worth addressing: http://supermarketnews.com/laws-amp-regulations/bill-defines-full-time-40-hours-aca. I don’t think I have to choose between long term trends toward part-timing and outsourcing and “Rise in Part Time Labor Has NOTHING TO DO WITH OBAMACARE”. I think there’s a long term trend, yes. I myself want to work part time in the future – if I can afford it – and I think it’s a good thing that part time is available for parents of young children. I think it’s too damn bad that the checkers in my supermarket are losing work hours they want because management wants to take them below the magic 30.

    Most of the discussion here has been of refutation of something different from Laura’s original claim, more like “Rise in Part Time Labor Has ONLY TO DO WITH OBAMACARE”. I agree that there is a long term trend. I think it’s pretty clear that Obamacare has created incentives which exacerbate the trend. Teasing out how much the trend is magnified by the magic fairy dust believers who wrote the ACA isn’t something Derek Thompson can do by looking at six months of data at the end of a long series. And a lot of the effect will be felt in 2015, when this part of the law starts to bite more. But the incentives are dreadful, and they go in the wrong direction.

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  19. In our area, we’ve noticed that working families who previously had 30-40 hours a week of unrewarding work at someplace like a fast food place are now having their hours cut, and instead businesses are hiring more high school students. No doubt, the government spin doctors will sell this to as as “new and improved opportunities for young working people” rather than “screwing working families”. Also, there’s a push to hire older, retired workers who already have pensions and health care at places like Walmart in our area. (“Increased hiring opportunities for older workers,” states government jobs analyst. I can see the headline now)

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    1. In a well-functioning economy, fast food jobs are held by high school students. That’s what happens when there start to be jobs elsewhere. Everybody leaves fast food.

      And businesses are not cutting hours for fast food workers a full year ahead of an employer mandate. That might affect some employers that have very long cycles for setting hours and working conditions (i.e. people with unions or something). But fast food workers don’t have that kind of structure to their working hours.

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  20. Em Aitch – you’ve exactly described the situation at my supermarket, a two-tier wage structure with a storewide aristocracy of a diminishing number of full time union and a lot of later-hired lower wage part timers. And they are nervously looking over their shoulders at Walmart and Target. But I think you underestimate the planning needs of even franchise McD type places: if they need a workforce which is composed of people who have shown willingness to work under low-hour conditions, it makes sense to get that workforce into place now to be ready.

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    1. Right. They’ve been deliberately slighting and degrading workers to keep wages down for years. It started before Obamacare and because Obamacare would make it harder to force down the wages of the relatively higher tier (people with benefits) is why they don’t want Obamacare.

      Not letting people work under low-hour conditions because it hurts them and because it results in the rest of us subsidizing the labor costs of the worst employers is what Obamacare is a step toward solving.

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  21. ??? “They’ve been deliberately slighting and degrading workers to keep wages down for years. It started before Obamacare and because Obamacare would make it harder to force down the wages of the relatively higher tier (people with benefits) is why they don’t want Obamacare.”

    I think this has evolved to you, essentially, abandoning the fight against the idea that Obamacare has provided incentives which resulted and will continue to result in employers moving more and more people under 30 hours, which is what I pushed back against in the first place, and shifting to talking about the vileness of the motives of employers of lower-skill people. There’s an implied CONSPIRACY OF EVIL PLUTOCRATS meeting to think how to most effectively slight and degrade the workers. You’ve also introduced a new idea: that Obamacare will make it harder to force down the wages of higher-wage people. If I’m mischaracterizing your view I’m sure you’ll let me know!

    We’ve talked a little about groceries in my area – for years-and-years we had a nice stable oligopoly of unionized Safeway and Giant with benefits and pretty good wages. Sort of like Ford and GM, they faced the same costs and each could afford decent benefits and comparable wages. There were some Yugo type nonunion grocers, but their stores were not so nice and convenient and didn’t hurt them very badly, their market share was pretty stable. Now, the Nissan-Toyota counterparts in this mix would be Shopper’s Food Warehouse and Costco, maybe. SFW is nonunion and has placed itself in big stores in second-tier malls, the quality is not quite so high but for the savings a lot of people flocked there. Costco doesn’t handle everything, but what they had is high quality and cheap. Giant made a lot less money than it once would have off my toddlers because I went to Costco once a month and stocked up on diapers and while there a case of dishwasher detergent and a bunch of cheap wine. These two new models hurt them in market share, quite a bit. But wait! On the horizon! The Kia-Hyundai of this tale would be nonunion Target and Walmart. Huge convenient stores, lots of items, and you can pick up a pair of jeans at the same time. Now things are really going to Hell in a basket for Safeway and Giant. And, oh my God Amazon is coming! The retail unions have acquiesced to contracts they never would have touched fifteen years ago, with, yes, limited hours and flex shifts for new hires, to keep things okay for their oldest employees. So the evil plutocrats here are not Safeway-Giant management, they are the Bentonville gang, the Target people, and Jeff Bezos.

    I absolutely don’t understand your contention that Obamacare will make it harder to force down wages of higher-tier folks. If you explain it a bit more I’ll be happy to think about it.

    ???”Not letting people work under low-hour conditions because it hurts them and because it results in the rest of us subsidizing the labor costs of the worst employers is what Obamacare is a step toward solving.”

    I don’t buy this for two reasons: First, I think we’ve been around the barn a bunch of times on the idea that Obamacare makes powerful incentives for employers to move people to under-30-hour work weeks. There is disagreement on the magnitude of the effect, but I don’t think you are any longer disagreeing that the incentives are there. By the way, here’s a money quote from a WSJ op-ed (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303382004579127162339871336.html?KEYWORDS=part+time+obamacare) which I like both because it agrees with me and because it seems well argued and sourced:

    “To understand ObamaCare’s impact on part-time employment, consider the six-month period between the employer mandate’s initial “look back” date of Jan. 1 and July 2, 2013, when the administration wisely announced it was delaying the employer mandate for a year. This is the period during which employers most significantly increased part-time employment in reaction to ObamaCare.

    The health-care law’s actual consequences unequivocally appear in the jobs data for this period. Between Jan. 1 and June 30, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy added 833,000 part-time jobs and lost 97,000 full-time jobs, for net creation of 736,000 jobs. In reality, the economy overall added no full-time jobs. Rather, it lost them. ”

    Second, about “subsidizing the labor costs of the worst employers” – if by worst employers you mean those who pay the lowest wages, I think we absolutely want to do that, we now do do that, and we should do more of it. I’m going to suggest several things: people’s lives are better if they work than if they don’t. Employers will only hire if they think they can profit from the employee’s work. And there are a lot of people out there who don’t have it in them to be worth $10 an hour – don’t have the habits of diligence, showing up, attention to detail, etc., to make an employer’s profits go up more than $10 for each hour on the job site. Working for a time can often improve a person’s ability to meet the demands of a work place. The two biggest ways we now subsidize labor costs for low-wage employers are the Earned Income Tax Credit and Medicaid. I’d like to make them both fatter.

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    1. I have not abandoned that fight. I’m repeatedly pointing out that there are many other incentives for employers to force down hours and that employers claiming Obamacare is the reason they are forcing down hours 15 months ahead of any Obamacare mandate is pretty straightforward evidence that employers are doing what they would have done anyway and blaming Obamacare.

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      2. I’ve read that stuff and others like it. It’s the exact same cheery-picking the time frame and ignore long term trends that was criticized in the OP. That nobody has produced a substantive analysis showing any trend yet reinforces my point.

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    2. The two biggest ways we now subsidize labor costs for low-wage employers are the Earned Income Tax Credit and Medicaid. I’d like to make them both fatter.

      Which makes it too bad that refusing to expand Medicaid to poor working people is something done by so many Republican governors.

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  22. Crap. in with the EITC and Medicaid, I should have listed food stamps. Food stamps and medicaid are more alike in applying to all low income people, EITC is the one which specifically rewards low-wage work.

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    1. And food stamps were viciously cut by the same people who are now hijacking the government. Just a couple of months ago. It was all over the news.

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      2. No, I’m saying that the people in Congress who want to stop Obamacare also want to stop Food Stamps and Medicaid expansion. It’s a matter of public record.

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      3. I looked it up. There were only 15 Republican House members who didn’t vote to cut Food Stamps (and no Democrats). Your personal views on Food Stamps don’t really matter. There is basically no way to vote Republican without thinking that Food Stamps are such a very low priority that they don’t really matter.

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  23. I don’t think there’s a thing more that I can do for you. I gave you reports by business people, discussion of the timing of the lookback provisions in the law, an attempt by union-friendly legislators to raise the full time to 40, an attack on the 30 by union leaders, a discussion of the incentives the law creates. Our Gracious Hostess gave us an anecdote about her kid’s teacher aides, and I gave you anecdotes about our local grocery chains. They say everybody gets his own opinion, but not his own facts. You’ve got your own facts. You’re on your own. Dave

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  24. Inside Higher Ed took a survey about limitation on hours, says its survey shows: ” Some 48 percent of respondents say their institutions already have placed or enforced limits on adjunct faculty to avoid having to meet new federal requirements of employer-provided health insurance. Respondents from public and private institutions were equally likely to say they had imposed limits, but responses varied by sector among public institutions. More than two-thirds of officers at associate degree-granting colleges say they have imposed caps, compared to just 29 percent of officials at doctoral, master’s and baccalaureate institutions.”

    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/survey/wellness-plans-retirement-and-adjunct-health-care-survey-chief-hr-officers

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    1. Are you Dave S still? You should maybe get something different to occupy your time. Have you considered part-time work?

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  29. Here is Yahoo bringing in discussion from IBD: they say the effect is big in low-skill low-wage jobs and not big at all in high-wage jobs, and that 8% of Americans have a family member whose hours have been cut to make them ’29-ers’ – http://finance.yahoo.com/news/obamacare-wields-big-impact-low-223500540.html;_ylt=A2KJ3Cerhn9SNUwArWuTmYlQ.
    So I will change my moniker for the ACA to the Screw The Adjuncts And The Burger-flippers Act of 2009.

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    1. You’ve linked to an article that actually engages the jobs data. Congratulations. It’s sort of unique to place a negative spin on hours and employment being up in the sectors of the economy that pay more, but some people really like not paying people money to work, I guess.

      All this is reinforcing my developing thesis that the 2010 elections was to the Tea Party what taking Moscow was to Napoleon, a thesis that is only reinforced by the fact that at a genetic level Ted Cruz is almost identical to the bacteria that causes typhus [citation needed].

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  30. Now I’m gonna go data-free on you again. The staggering incompetence of the Dems at all levels in bulldozing this thing through and assuming they could jam the Reeps to fix the inevitable problems, when they had not bothered to get any buy-in whatsoever, is still amazing. My speculative view is that the O, who had never run anything in his life, had been reading the NY Times editorial pages since forever and assumed that if he did what they suggested, it would work. “Obambi” is one of the right’s nicknames for him, it captures a lot.

    McMegan’s discussion of the problems to expect going forward is pretty well crafted, I think: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-11/hope-is-all-obamacare-has-left.html. One thing which it seems to me she missed is that they claimed that things would be fixed by Nov 30, which (how conVEENient!) would get them past the election. When they aren’t fixed by 30th, at least some voters will put two and two together.

    The incredibly screwy incentives which were baked into the law on what would constitute full time seems to be only one of many bad provisions, all of which are exposed to view as the roll-out continues. The fraudulent no-new-tax-burden piece, which required sticking slightly better off middle class people with higher premiums to subsidize the oldies, got them the score they thought they needed to put it through, but now these people are noticing that it’s not the Koch Bros nor George Soros who has the bill: Lori Gottlieb is complaining in a Gray Lady op-ed: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/11/opinion/daring-to-complain-about-obamacare.html?ref=opinion&_r=0.

    Back to your “… sort of unique to place a negative spin on hours and employment being up in the sectors of the economy that pay more..” well, okay. There’s actually a pretty plausible way to look at what IBD is reporting. The higher-wage jobs are more skilled, have more ongoing content. They are the ones for which you really need memory. You have an accountant doing an audit, an insurance inspector looking at potential hazards at a work site: for those people, the extra cost of paying isn’t as great as the cost of trying to coordinate two 29 1/2-ers to get the job done. You suck it up and pay. But burger flippers – there is zero improvement in the burger if it is flipped by someone who has a 40 hour week over a burger flipped by a 29 1/2-er. So it does kind of make sense that the impact of the 30 hour requirement would be greatest for the least skilled (and for desperate adjuncts – one of McMegan’s best lines was her statement that the reason academics had the view that the workplace was full of vicious exploitation was that that was what they were used to from the academy). This looks like, once again, gentry liberals doing something which sounds good at cocktail parties, but screws the actual, you know, poor.

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    1. The staggering incompetence of the Dems at all levels in bulldozing this thing through and assuming they could jam the Reeps to fix the inevitable problems, when they had not bothered to get any buy-in whatsoever, is still amazing.

      That just completely ignores the process through which the ACA was drafted. There was a very great effort to get any Republican vote at all. The Republican party united against it and, now three and half years later, the Republican idea of compromise is basically “end the ACA”. And there is no Republican alternative proposal. Obama can’t be faulted for not getting Republic buy-in because there is a well-demonstrated Republican unwillingness to do anything about the huge number of people without health insurance.

      This looks like, once again, gentry liberals doing something which sounds good at cocktail parties, but screws the actual, you know, poor.

      I don’t see how taking a guy making near minimum wage and working 40 hours a week, putting him in a position where he makes near minimum wage for 29.5 hours and week and gets health insurance for 4% of his income (which is what it would probably be in the states that didn’t nix the Medicaid expansion to spite the poor) is screwing anybody poor. By any reasonable valuation of health coverage, your “he’s screwed” scenario is a definite improvement.

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  31. http://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/r14/USA/Politics/2013/1113/Businesses-cut-full-time-workers-to-meet-Obamacare-mandate-study-says-video

    Christian Science Monitor reports Public Opinion Strategies poll: “Although the provision won’t be enforced until 2015, some employers with 40 to 500 workers have already started adjusting for the new landscape, the survey by Public Opinion Strategies found:

    Some 31 percent of franchise businesses and 12 percent of non-franchise businesses say they have already reduced worker hours because of the law.
    About 27 percent of franchise businesses and 12 percent of non-franchise businesses have already replaced full-time workers with part-time employees because of the law.
    Some 41 percent of the non-franchise firms say they already see health-care costs rising because of the law.
    As the franchise firms look toward the future, 28 percent of them say they’ll stop offering health coverage in 2015 because of the law. One-third of franchise businesses already do not offer health insurance.”

    Wikipedia rescues my failing memory from Yes, Prime Minister: “The politician’s syllogism, also known as the politician’s logic or the politician’s fallacy, is a logical fallacy of the form:

    We must do something
    This is something
    Therefore, we must do this.

    The politician’s fallacy was identified in a 1988 episode of the BBC television political sitcom Yes, Prime Minister titled “Power to the People”, and has taken added life on the internet.[1] The syllogism, invented by fictional British civil servants, has been quoted in the real British Parliament.[2][3] The syllogism has also been quoted in American political discussion.[4]”

    That’s how this crapdoodle came into our statutes. We elect politicians to have some reasonable facility of looking into the future for us. This crowd did not. I don’t see how it gets better for them, going forward. Maybe that’s because I am not looking forward very well – we’ll see.

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    1. It was better when it was “Yes, Minister”. After the promotion, it wasn’t as funny.

      Your syllogism seems to be saying when should do nothing, but that really doesn’t even begin to fit here. The entire healthcare system is a product of the government doing something, from making employer-provided health care deducible to paying for all health care for those over 65 to picking-up the pieces when something goes really wrong with someone who couldn’t afford regular, preventative healthcare. I don’t believe doing nothing is a realistic option and certain nobody in the Republican party who had to run for an election proposed doing “nothing” in any way that would take a dollar of benefits from the pockets of the senior citizens who vote for them.

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  32. “..The retailer denied speculation from customers and the media that the decision had anything to do with the costs of Obamacare. “Forever 21, like all retailers, staffs its stores based on projected store sales, completely independent of the Affordable Care Act,” the company said on Facebook. ..”

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/16/forever-21-memo_n_3769605.html

    There was a great moment in the Mondale-Reagan debate when Mondale looked at the camera and said, ‘so, what are you going to believe? Him, or your own eyes?”

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  33. Harry Truman, he said: “Give me a one-handed economist! All my economists say, On the one hand on the other”

    Here is Samuelson, saying that Obamacare (or, as Obama would call it, the Affordable Care Act) has likely made some negative difference, partially masked by the ongoing recovery: “..I don’t dispute the White House study’s accuracy, but I do doubt the sweeping conclusions being drawn from it. A study from the San Francisco Federal Reserve fortifies my convictions. It’s usually cited in the ACA’s favor, concluding that the law won’t erode full-time work much. The increase in part-time jobs “is likely to be small, on the order of a 1 to 2 percentage [points] or less.” But that few percentage points amounts to between 1.4 million and 2.8 million more part-time jobs. Not trivial.

    The ACA’s hiring disincentives are one factor among many (greater risk aversion, sluggish consumer spending, deadlock in Washington) deterring job creation. The effect is probably less than the ACA’s most rabid opponents assert but more than the law’s uncritical apologists assume. It may grow with time.”

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/robert-j-samuelson-is-obamacare-a-job-killer-yes-and-no/2013/10/30/71b4f3d0-416c-11e3-8b74-d89d714ca4dd_story.html

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  36. Just off the phone with my sis – she’s been a big Obamacare backer (Affordable Care Act as it is referred to by the Administration) and is semi-retired, working about 3/5 time. If she works a thousand dollars worth less, this coming year, she gets a subsidy on her coverage, worth about six thousand dollars. So, that’s not in the 29.5 area, but it is a huge incentive to work less.

    The sloppiness of design in this thing is unbelievable. At all levels, the bad news keeps coming out.

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  37. Investor’s Business Daily is still at it cataloging employers who have cut employees’ hours: http://news.investors.com/politics-obamacare/121913-669013-obamacare-employer-mandate-a-list-of-cuts-to-work-hours-jobs.htm
    They are up to 388 now, and some of the numbers are very large. Looking at the list, it’s very heavy on restaurants, public school aides/janitors (like the aides in Laura’s kid’s school whose cuts convinced her that this was real) and university. I see adjuncts at several of the Virginia colleges and universities at which I’ve been looking for my soon-to-be college students.
    I realize that this doesn’t loom very large compared to the rest of the train wreck which is Obamacare, but it is clearly real.

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  39. Investor’s Business Daily is even more bloody minded than I am on this: here they are, day after xmas, writing about Obamacare’s disastrous choice to have middle-middle class people subsidize lower-middle class people, with folks who make well under 100 thousand on the hook to pay 25 per cent of income for coverage: http://news.investors.com/politics-obamacare/122613-684287-obamacare-middle-class-subsidy-cliff-for-older-americans.htm. Colored charts! It’s all good. Yah, this is more fun than Goatse.

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    1. From davey’s article:

      “An IBD analysis finds that middle-class households in their late 50s and early 60s could spend 25% or more of their income on health care — before their deductible is exhausted and ObamaCare’s benefits kick in.”

      This is more than possible, given the combination of high premiums and very high deductibles.

      The ACA as currently framed is very likely to contribute to a lot of medical bankruptcies among people in that demographic, as the amounts of money involved get into low five-figures very quickly. It’s weird that nobody noticed that I’ve read noticed that feature of the law before. It turns out that for a lot of people, the ACA is going to work like a really, really expensive catastrophic plan that happens to cover a few freebies (like Sandra Fluke’s birth control pills).

      Speaking of other things that people didn’t notice, I was talking to my dad a day or so ago and I think the ACA is going to have some unforeseen impact on Social Security enrollment. My parents have successfully made it from uninsured for a long, long time to enrolled in Medicare. My dad told me that you can’t sign up for Medicare without signing up for Social Security first, so they signed up for both, even though under normal circumstances, at least one of them might have waited to start Social Security (there are pluses and minuses to starting SS early or late). If they hadn’t signed up for Social Security and then for Medicare, they would have found themselves trapped in the exchanges. So, brace yourselves for “unexpected” surging Social Security and Medicare enrollments.

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  40. One of the interesting things about this article is that Staples seems to have figured out that they will get attacked if they admit to cutting hours in response to Obamacare, so they are claiming that that’s not the reason. http://consumerist.com/2014/01/10/is-staples-cutting-employee-hours-ahead-of-affordable-healthcare-act/
    I don’t believe Staples. As Walter Mondale said, in the midst of his debate with Reagan: “What do you believe, him, or your own eyes??”. Unfortunately for Mondale, people believed Reagan.

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  41. Unlike the Staples people, the people at UTEP don’t seem to be afraid to tell the press that Obamacare is why they are screwing their adjuncts. The good news is, 65 new full time positions, because they have lost adjunct hours.
    http://www.elpasoinc.com/news/local_news/article_67454d40-8128-11e3-ba8a-0019bb30f31a.html
    Note the sales clerk: “..he doesn’t plan to buy health insurance, even though it’s required under Obamacare. “I’ll just go to Juárez if I get sick,” he said.”

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  47. “The University is responding by seeking lower cost insurance and asking for approval to provide these workers a cheaper plan. It is also exploring cutting the hours of 50-75% these 8,586 employees to keep them under 30 hours per week.

    The University hopes that by reducing the number of qualified employees’ hours (similar to Darden restaurants pilot program that it later reversed) and offering a lower cost plan – the cost impact could be reduced to $11-22 million per year. I would brace for a $30-50 million impact.”

    Obamacare (ACA) to Cost UNC $47 Million per Year

    So that would be 4-6 thousand people having their hours cut.

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  48. The UNITE HERE union is hating on Obamacare, and in their presser they say:
    Moving to Part Time Work: The Administration’s experts say employers won’t follow the
    incentives and drop coverage. But they also told the nation that employers would not cut
    workers’ hours to get below the 30-hour per week threshold for “full time” work, even as
    388 employers announced hours cuts since early 2012. You can find their presser through:
    http://www.ralstonreports.com/blog/union-research-document-says-obamacare-will-hasten-income-inequality#.Uxs3VfldUzx

    The 388 number is interesting, they are clearly using the work of Investors’ Business Daily, so at least the proggies at UNITE HERE find it credible.

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  57. http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/11/24/unable-find-full-time-work-millions-stringing-together-part-time-jobs/FkZdQfH1NQXsiWRpQttjoI/story.html

    “..The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, may be contributing to some employers’ reluctance to hire full-time workers because the law requires businesses with more than 50 full-time employees to provide health insurance or pay a government fee. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia recently released a survey of employers that found 5 percent of employers would increase part-time hiring in response to the new health care act, while 11.3 percent said they would reduce full-time hiring…”

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