"Imagine how much better [the US labor market] might do if ObamaCare weren't encouraging employers to hire so many part-time workers", crows The Wall Street Journal here in "Part-Time America" by Steve Moore, the lead story at Real Clear Markets this morning.
Too bad it's all a lie. I say "too bad" because I'd like to blame ObamaCare for everything that's wrong with the labor market, too, but it just isn't so. Employers aren't hiring "so many part-time workers" any more now than they were before ObamaCare was passed in March 2010, but you wouldn't know that from the charts presented in The Wall Street Journal because they don't go back before the recession began. The Journal is cherry-picking the data to show that the swings in the metric have been wild since ObamaCare passed. There's a reason for that. The long term charts show that the high level of part-time for economic reasons is an artifact of the recession, and has been trending lower ever so slowly since it ended. Equally disturbing is the Journal's attribution of a recent relatively small surge in the metric to ObamaCare when we've had much larger drops in the measure after the bill's passage. ObamaCare has had nothing to do with either, and it's transparently political to carp in this way. And it's embarrassing.
Print your story, Steve Moore, when part-time for economic reasons hits 9.5 or 10 million, and we'll talk then.
