- by New Deal democrat
Remember how the implementation of Obamacare was killing full time jobs? Doomers, both right and left, were sure that full time jobs were evaporating this past summer.
In case you don't, here's an article from August in the McClatchy newspapers:
“Over the last six months, of the net job creation, 97 percent of that is part-time work,” said Keith Hall, a senior researcher at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. “That is really remarkable.”This statistic was quickly seized upon by right wing bloggers as definitive proof that Obamacare was a colossal failure. Here's Ed Morrissey of Hot Air:
Hall is no ordinary academic. He ran the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency that puts out the monthly jobs report, from 2008 to 2012. ...
....
"There's something going on if such a large share of the hiring is part time," Hall said.
The July report only confirms that trend. Only 92,000 full-time jobs were created, while 172,000 part-time jobs got filled (not net numbers). The only major influence in 2013 that differs from the preceding three years of the recovery is the impending ObamaCare mandate on employers, which the Obama administration will try to postpone for a year. The data shows that businesses have already begun to react by minimizing their risk and costs through part-time employment, thanks to the perverse incentives set up by the ACA, and that this will continue as long as the mandate exists.Forbes' Chris Conover was even more dismissive:
Denialism may be too strong a term. But there seem to be a lot of people arguing that Obamacare has little or nothing to do with the rise in part-time employment. Some deny the rise is even happening, while others are content to deny that Obamacare is the culprit. Admittedly, it takes a little detective work, but if we systematically review the available empirical evidence in an even-handed fashion, the conclusion seems inescapable: Obamacare is accelerating a disturbing trend towards “a nation of part-timers"Needless to say, Zero Hedge was all over the story.
And left wing Doomers were just as certain of the fact as their right wing counterparts, if for different reasons, with one Daily Kos front-pager going so far as to call the questioning of the trend in a Marketwatch article "ridiculous."
Yours truly debunked these claims at the time, noting that:
