Thursday, February 25, 2010

Health Care “Reform:” The Anti-Jobs Bill

Speaker Pelosi just made the claim that health care “reform” will create 4 million jobs.  She may want to check with Christina Romer, President Obama’s chief economic advisor, on that count; according to a model developed by Dr. Romer, the $729.5 billion in tax increases in the House-passed legislation she helped write (H.R. 3962) would demolish or destroy up to 5,000,000 jobs.

In addition, both the House and Senate bills have various versions of a “tax on jobs” in the form of an employer mandate.  According to an analysis by Harvard Professor Kate Baicker, such a tax would place millions “at substantial risk of unemployment.”  The Congressional Budget Office also issued a report noting that, “a pay-or-play provision could reduce the hiring of low-wage workers, whose wages could not fall by the full cost of…a substantial pay-or-play fee if they were close to the minimum wage,” also found that the cost of such new mandates and taxes would be passed on to workers in the form of lower wages.  In other words, a pay-or-play tax on jobs, in addition to destroying jobs, would drain the paychecks of those low-income workers most in need of additional purchasing power.