CBO: Obamacare enrollment down, jobs being lost, deficit down but will skyrocket

The federal budget deficit will fall sharply through 2015 before surging again in the decade to come. Obamacare enrollment is well below expections and Americans will see even fewer jobs.

photo: photologue_np via Flickr

The Congressional Budget Office’s new economic report says the health care law will cause Americans to work fewer hours – enough to be the equivalent of 2 million fewer jobs in 2017.

The projected budget deficit in 2014 is $514 billion, according to CBO, the lowest level during President Barack Obama’s presidency and well below the $1.4 trillion deficit in 2009.

According to CBO, the deficit will mushroom to more than $1 trillion by 2022. The increase is almost entirely due to the cost of Social Security benefits, health care programs, and interest payments on the national debt—without those three items, federal spending as a percentage of GDP is actually lower than at any time since 1940, when reporting of such data began.

Obamacare will cost the country jobs, but emphasized the changing employment picture “stems almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply, rather than from a net drop in businesses’ demand for labor.”

In 2021, the CBO expects Obamacare will have reduced the number of hours Americans are working equivalent to 2.3 million jobs. The CBO’s previous estimate was 800,000.

CBO also projected that signups for new insurance under the health law will be one million fewer than expected in 2014.

“Claims that the Affordable Care Act hurts jobs are simply belied by the facts in the CBO report,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said in a statement. “CBO’s findings are not driven by an assumption that ACA will lead employers to eliminate jobs or reduce hours, in fact, the report itself says that there is ‘no compelling evidence that part-time employment has increased as a result of the ACA.’ While many factors affect job growth, the actual performance of businesses refutes those who predicted that the Affordable Care Act would dramatically hurt the economy.”

photo by photoSteve101 via Flickr