When we all said it would end up being a job killer, we weren’t kidding:
Private-sector job creation initially recovered from the recession at a normal rate, leading to predictions last year of a “Recovery Summer.” Since April 2010, however, net private-sector job creation has stalled. Within two months of the passage of Obamacare, the job market stopped improving. This suggests that businesses are not exaggerating when they tell pollsters that the new health care law is holding back hiring. The law significantly raises business costs and creates considerable uncertainty about the future. To encourage hiring, Congress should repeal Obamacare.
The report goes on to detail just how Pyrrhic a victory ObamaCare may turn out to be. It empowered government and if it stands would permanently shift our politics leftward, which the left loves, but has put the economy in serious peril, which is kicking dents in Obama’s approval rating and re-election effort. In the near term ObamaCare has shifted the national debate rightward as fears of encroaching government and the dangerous national debt have fueled the rise of the Tea Party.
Back to Heritage’s report, businesses say that ObamaCare is a major reason they’re still not hiring.
In a recent survey, 33 percent of business owners said the health care law was either their greatest or second-greatest obstacle to new hiring.[11] Federal Reserve officials report similar concerns. Dennis Lockhart, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, reports that:
In addition to slow and uncertain revenue growth, contacts in this recovery are frequently citing a number of other factors that are impeding hiring. Prominent among these is the lack of clarity about the cost implications of the recent health care legislation. We’ve frequently heard strong comments to the effect of “my company won’t hire a single additional worker until we know what health insurance costs are going to be.”[12]
ObamaCare was and is a job killer, as was predicted. The Democrats have only themselves to blame, since they wrote it up in backrooms, didn’t let the American people see what was in it, and passed it along party lines. They own it. Pelosi even promised ObamaCare would create 400,000 jobs almost immediately:
Of course, she also told a different audience that they could quit their jobs but keep their health coverage, thanks to ObamaCare.
Kind of a mixed message there, but business apparently didn’t miss its meaning.
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