Derek Thompson, here, in "The Spectacular Myth of Obama's Part-Time America":
If you've been paying attention to a certain slice of the financial media—see: Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, and Fox News—you know for a fact that Obama and his health care law have tag-teamed with global economic trends to drive America inexorably toward a part-time economy.
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Beat ya.
We first expressed doubt in the part-time-due-to-Obamacare meme in July 2013, here, because the category "usually work part-time" showed no new highs since passage of the law three years prior.
We began calling the meme a myth in August 2013, here, because average hours worked were not declining, but rising modestly.
In September 2013, here, we pointed out that government statistics will NEVER capture the reduction of part-time worker schedules to 29 hours per week because everyone working 34 hours or fewer is already part-time as far as the government is concerned and those are the people most likely to have their hours reduced. But those workers in the aggregate are too few in comparison to all the full-time workers to reduce average hours worked overall enough to impact that measure. The real scandal is that ObamaCare may be reducing hours for a small segment of the population which is already part-time, but especially retail, restaurant and food service workers. Unfortunately most of the evidence is anecdotal and no one really gives a crap about them anyway, least of all Obama.
And in October 2013, here, we pointed out that part-time for economic reasons was slowly declining despite passage of ObamaCare and had been high in the first place because of the crisis of 2008, something Derek Thompson seems really proud of pointing out now to his middlebrow audience.
So where's my Pulitzer Prize already, huh?
