The C.B.O.’s Real Message: Six Million Jobs Are Already Missing

In an election year, it was entirely predictable that Republicans would seize on Tuesday’s update from the Congressional Budget Office on the labor-market implications of the Affordable Care Act, and it was just as predictable that the White House and Democrats would seek to downplay its importance. Everything about Obamacare is incendiary, particularly after the troubled rollout of the federal insurance exchange. Things will stay like this until November, and maybe even until November, 2016.

I’ll get to the details of the C.B.O. report, which suggested that by 2017 the A.C.A. will reduce work-force participation by the equivalent of two million full-time workers. But, first, something the C.B.O. said that you probably missed, which is based on actual facts rather than on informed speculation: in the past five years or so—and this has nothing to do with Obamacare—some six million jobs (and workers) have already gone missing from the U.S. economy.

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