New Govt Report: Obamacare to Cost 2 Million Jobs by 2017Melissa Melton The CBO said it wouldnt be because of jobs lost per se, but lost hours adding up to the equivalent of that many jobs gone by then. The figure rises another half a million in lost jobs by 2024. This estimate is three times larger than the CBOs previous estimate back in 2010 after the bill was first introduced. Worse White House Press Secretary Jay Carney tried to spin this new determination in a response by saying things like, At the beginning of this year, we noted that as part of this new day in health care, Americans would no longer be trapped in a job just to provide coverage for their families, and would have the opportunity to pursue their dreams. So Obamacare will afford people the opportunity to pursue their dreams of not being trapped in a job? Right now, more people are dreaming of having a job, period. A fry cook recently confronted Obama over his hours being cut to part-time due to Obamacare; We cant survive, its not livin, the man told the president. Obama did not respond to the comments regarding his healthcare law, but instead replied that hes encouraging states to raise minimum wage. In addition, due to Obamacares structure, people arent exactly inspired to run out and get good-paying, full-time jobs: CBO explained that the Affordable Care Acts subsidy structure subsidies fall as income rises makes work less attractive. Further, some people who earn right around 400% of the poverty level the cutoff for subsidies will have an incentive to earn less. This will be especially true for older workers who will pay up to three times as much as young workers for similar coverage via the ObamaCare exchanges. In other words: The new subsidized insurance exchanges will allow low-income workers to work less while maintaining the same effective income: what economists call the income effect. In addition, because the subsidies decline on a sliding scale as you make more money, that sliding scale means that as workers work more, they make less per hour worked: what economists call the substitution effect. A recent report released by the Corporation for Enterprise Development concluded that almost half of Americans are already living paycheck-to-paycheck. Currently more than half of the states in this country are suffering long-term unemployment, where at least a third or more of the people without jobs havent had one in at least six months. Last Junes jobs report revealed that less than half only 47% of Americans even have a full-time job anymore. On top of all that, Investors Business Daily reports that a pattern has been set in motion which will dry up the Social Security trust fund by 2030: The outlook for less work than expected from modest earners and a greater share of earnings going to those with high incomes looks particularly troubling for the future of Social Security. The retirement programs annual cash deficits will spiral to $313 billion by 2024 from $68 billion in 2013, CBO said. The deteriorating outlook will shrink the trust fund to $2.3 trillion in 2023 vs. the $2.5 trillion seen a year ago, an IBD analysis finds. That likely puts the trust fund on course to run dry in 2030, a year earlier than CBO projected in 2013. (Guess its called a trust fund because you have to trust if you pay money into it, the funds will still be there later) By the way, the government has already announced it is not going to verify annual household income attestations given when signing up for Obamacare until 2015; as Forbes points out, The Obama administration is laser-focused on making sure that enough Americans enroll onto Obamacare-subsidized health insurance platforms, because if they do, it will be politically impossible for Republicans to repeal Obamacare in the future. Further deliberately encouraging tens of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse in order to achieve a political objective is profoundly immoral. Perhaps that explains Jay Carneys attempt to make two million lost jobs in three years sound just swell for a country with an unemployment crisis whereinmost industries have twice as many people searching for a job than available jobs. 