CBO says ACA kills jobs — are you surprised?

Were you waiting for the other shoe to drop with the Affordable Care Act? It did today with the announcement by the Congressional Budget Office providing an estimate on the effect of the ACA on jobs. The hullabaloo about employers cutting the long-held standard 40-hour workweek to beat costs of the ACA has now hit the fan. According to the CBO, those lost work hours due to the ACA will amount to job losses equivalent to more than 2 million jobs by 2017. Previous reports from the CBO estimated job losses due to the ACA at approximately 800,000 jobs.

Total hours worked will drop as much as 2% from 2017 to 2024 because of the ACA. A strange irony in this politically-charged drama is that the CBO expects less work hours to fall almost entirely on low-wage employees, a group that the ACA was designed, in large part, to help.

Today’s CBO report is one more piece of bad news for the president’s troubled signature legislation that continues to spew a negative narrative and bad public relations.

Davidson, CEBS, is founder of Davidson Marketing Group, FutureOffice Network and FONHR. He is also on the faculty at the Sheldon B. Lubar School of Business at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Reach him at craigd@davidsonmarketing.com.