Following the release of a new report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which found that Obamacare will result in a loss of over two million full-time workers from the economy by 2017, Congressman Sam Graves (MO-06), Chairman of the House Small Business Committee, issued the following statement:
“Today’s CBO report confirms what so many of us have been saying for years: Obamacare is a job killer. The problems and frustrations around an unreliable, unsecure website and an unprepared bureaucracy are just the tip of the Obamacare iceberg. It’s bad enough that millions of Americans have already lost their coverage, and that the president’s line ‘if you like your plan you can keep it’ was named the 2013 lie of the year. Now, millions of Americans face the possibility of losing hours at work, shifting from full-time to part-time, or simply having their job eliminated entirely, directly because of a law that the president said would help them.
“The threat to the economy runs much deeper and the consequences for jobs are much graver. The nation’s economic recovery has a long way to go and this law is a heavy burden on small businesses that offer our best hope for more growth and jobs. The closer we get to full implementation of the law, the clearer the peril of Obamacare is to our nation’s job creators and families.”
The percentage of the American workforce that has a job or is looking for one, known as the labor force participation rate, stands at only 62.8 percent, the lowest in 36 years. There are still over 10 million Americans unemployed, and 8 million more who have part-time jobs but would prefer full-time ones.
Today’s CBO report predicts that the labor force participation rate will continue to drop while the debt and deficits are likely to rise overall during the next ten years. An additional report from the agency found that “employment at the end of 2013 was about 6 million jobs short of where it would be if the unemployment rate had returned to its prerecession level and if the participation rate had risen to the level it would have attained without the current cyclical weakness.”
“These reports should be yet another wake-up call that big-government Washington policies are having, and will continue to have, negative effects on small-town American families,” Graves added. “Our current path is unsustainable. It’s time we replace Obamacare, enact tax and regulatory reform, and help Americans get back to work so that we can grow our economy and revive opportunity for all Americans.”