You heard it here months ago, and now the mainstream media has figured out that ObamaCare’s 30/50 rule is creating a part-time workforce. Employers must provide expensive health insurance if they have more than 50 “full-time” (over 30 hour per week) employees, so they are holding their workers to 29 hours or less. This is a disaster for lower-income wage earnings who must hold two jobs to get a full week of work; it means more travel time between jobs, less time spent with their families, higher child care expenses, etc. It hurts social mobility because, as Rush Limbaugh nicely put it, careers are being replaced by part-time work. It also hurts productivity and overall economic growth.
I discussed this last November and again in February; The Wall Street Journal and others picked it up over the weekend; maybe we’ll eventually see some Wall Street economists take notice. The April Non-farm Payroll Report showed a 278,000 increase in the number of part-time workers, and there was a two tenths of an hour decline in the length of the average workweek. Why is this happening now when ObamaCare does not take full effect until next year? Because, under the law, the official metric of full-time head-count will be the average number of full-time employees in 2013.
Crack Open ObamaCare and Focus on a Single, Comprehensible Issue
According to the WSJ, some Republicans want to push legislation to correct this specific flaw in ObamaCare while others want to repeal the entire law. I favor eventual repeal rather than reform; it is no more possible to “reform” ObamaCare than to unscramble an egg. But Republicans would be smart to push a “Full-Time Employment Act of 2013” that repeals the “employer mandate” as a way station to full repeal. Here’s why.
The liberal media loves the idea of ObamaCare in the abstract, as a comprehensive package that supposedly helps the poor and uninsured. If Republicans push for immediate repeal they will be characterized as heartless ideologues who don’t care about “working families.” The GOP needs to crack open the package and highlight a single, specific element of the legislation that is egregiously exacerbating the single biggest failing of Obamanomics—weak job growth and high unemployment.
The political genius of Obamacare is that it is too humongous and complex and technical for voters and reporters to understand; as soon as you mention “guaranteed issue” or “community rating” or “insurance exchanges,” TV viewers’ eyes glaze over and they reach for the remote. But the evil effects of the 30/50 rule are so simple and obvious that it has already been mentioned several times on the Sunday shows, by George Stephanopolous and Chris Wallace. And the topic will reappear at the beginning of every month, when payroll employment figures are released.
By attacking this specific element of Obamacare, as a down payment on full repeal, Republicans can focus attention on the law’s many odious unintended side effects. Republicans will align themselves with the interests of lower-income workers (many of them blacks and Hispanics) struggling to make a living in the real world, and against elitist bureaucrats and academic ideologues such as Paul Krugman, who ignores
all factors impacting employment other than fiscal policy.
Copyright Thomas Doerflinger 2013. All Rights Reserved.
