If Bob Yates hasn’t already most adequately and quite succinctly ridiculed Republican Senator Roy Blunt’s effort to avoid the obviously dishonest position of the Ann Wagners in the GOP, who want to assure the gullible masses that, yes, indeed, the most recent CBO report said that 2.5 million people would lose their jobs, Duane Graham at The Erstwhile Conservative has put finis to the task with a full and detailed takedown of the Fox News Sunday interview with Blunt. Graham and Yates both record the shift in Republican rhetoric from a false story about lost jobs to an ugly story about enabling “moochers” who, Blunt and his fellows imply, just don’t want to work. As Graham puts it:

… notice how Blunt, like all Republicans are now doing and will continue to do until election day this November, focuses on those alleged “2.3 million” people who “don’t want to work” or “don’t have to work.” That is essentially the argument that was made more generally during the 2012 election.

Read both pieces. Roy Blunt deserves everything that Yates and Gaham have to say about his despicable performance.

And when you’re done, read a couple of posts from Paul Krugman’s NYT blog to get a better idea about what is fueling Blunt’s nasty little insinuations and why they’re so bogus. According to Krugman, those who leave the labor force will reduce labor input and decrease GDP somewhat, but the fact that wages and benefits are not being paid to those leaving the labor force would perfectly balance the decrease, rendering the effect neutral, were it not that those individuals would also no longer pay the taxes that correspond to their lost labor. He concludes:

So yes, reduced labor supply adds modestly to the true cost of health reform, although it also adds to the benefits. But the key word is “modestly”.

Why, then, are the usual suspects so incensed? Partly because they don’t understand any of this. Beyond that, there’s a moralistic streak: people should be forced to work, for their own good, you see (are there no poorhouses?). And of course, there’s the underlying rage that a disproportionate share of the beneficiaries (though by no means a preponderance) will be Those People.

But when you take paternalism and prejudice out of the picture, what you’re left with is some pretty prosaic economics. Should you care how much other people work? Yes, a little – but not so much that it should change anyone’s views about health reform.

As to whether or not this shift in Republian rhetoric will have the desired effect, Krugman’s analysis of the initial strategic misfire suggests why it will not – at least, with anybody other than the true believers:

The thing is, my read […] is that the CBO affair actually ended up hurting Republicans. By the end of the week a barrage of press reports, plus those mighty figures Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, had effectively changed the story from “CBO predicts massive job losses” to “Republicans lie about CBO report.” In reality, it’s unlikely that it would have mattered at all even if the first story had stuck. But to the extent that such things matter at all, Republicans ended up losing the week.

It’s hard not to conclude that since everyone who’s paying the slightest attention knows that Republicans have been lying vigorously about the whole CBO business, why should they believe anything that mouthpieces like Blunt now have to say, no matter how much more subtle the latest story happens to be? What is even more interesting, though, is the fact that this exact type of talk, the 47% business, is what helped do Romney in back in 2012. Why does Blunt & Co. think it’ll be more successful now?  

It might help that reading comprehension deficit just a little bit.

From Steve Benen:

CBO delivers welcome news to Obamacare backers

02/04/14 05:06 PM

By Steve Benen

….Despite what Americans are being told, the CBO did not find that the health care reform law would cost the nation over 2 million jobs. What it actually said is that the law will empower more than 2 million Americans to leave the workforce if they want to, no longer feeling forced to stay at a job in order to have benefits for them and their family.

Why “Obamacare” critics consider this a bad thing remains unclear….

….This is one of those strange days in which most of the political world seems to have gotten an important story backwards. The Affordable Care Act’s critics have spent the day eagerly touting a CBO report that offers a whole lot of good news for the Affordable Care Act’s supporters – and much of the media has played along in a depressing display.

Indeed, the CBO’s findings – which, again, are readily available online for all to see – actually add fresh evidence that discredits talking points pushed by the law’s detractors….

[emphasis added]

And, true to form, Representative Vicky Hartzler (r) took to Twitter today:

Rep. Vicky Hartzler ‏@RepHartzler

Nonpartisan CBO says #Obamacare will lead to 2.3 million lost jobs. Time for an alternative: [….] 2:48 PM – 4 Feb 2014

And, a few testy replies:

Kanova (D) Mitchell ‏@kanova

@RepHartzler Already proven false by many. CBO never said this. 2:54 PM – 4 Feb 2014

carl klopfenstine ‏@Carl23b4

@RepHartzler When are you crybabys going to do anything but CRY,,?? 3:11 PM – 4 Feb 2014

Footnote 15 on Page 38 [printed] of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report (pdf):

[….] 15. By providing subsidies that decline with rising income (and increase with falling income) and by making some people financially better off, the ACA will create an incentive for some people to work less. For CBO’s full analysis of the effects of the ACA on the labor market, see Appendix C. [….]

[emphasis added]

In Appendix C of the CBO report:

[….] The ACA includes a range of provisions that will take full effect over the next several years and that will influence the supply of and demand for labor through various channels. For example, some provisions will raise effective tax rates on earnings from labor and thus will reduce the amount of labor that some workers choose to supply. In particular, the health insurance subsidies that the act provides to some people will be phased out as their income rises-creating an implicit tax on additional earnings-whereas for other people, the act imposes higher taxes on labor income directly. The ACA also will exert conflicting pressures on the quantity of labor that employers demand, primarily during the next few years.

[….]

The estimated reduction stems almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply, rather than from a net drop in businesses’ demand for labor, so it will appear almost entirely as a reduction in labor force participation and in hours worked relative to what would have occurred otherwise rather than as an increase in unemployment (that is, more workers seeking but not finding jobs) or underemployment (such as part-time workers who would prefer to work more hours per week). [….]

[emphasis added]

Read it and weep, Teabaggers.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently released a report, Estimated Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on Employment and Economic Output from July 2011 Through September 2011 [pdf]:

….CBO estimates that ARRA’s policies had the following effects in the third quarter of calendar year 2011 compared with what would have occurred otherwise:

They raised real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 0.3 percent and 1.9 percent (see Table 1),

They lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.2 percentage points and 1.3 percentage points,

They increased the number of people employed by between 0.4 million and 2.4 million, and

They increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by 0.5 million to 3.3 million. (Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers.)

[….]

From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

New CBO Report: Up to 2.4 Million People Owe Their Jobs to the Recovery Act

Also from the CBO report [pdf]:

Table 2. Estimated Output Multipliers of Major Provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009

[….]

Estimated Output Multipliers

Low Estimate High Estimate

Two-Year Tax Cuts for Lower-and Middle-Income People 0.3 1.5 Division B, Title I: Making Work Pay Credit; American Opportunity Tax Credit

One-Year Tax Cut for Higher-Income People 0.1 0.6 Increase in Individual AMT Exemption Amount

[….]

[emphasis added]

Uh, that means that tax cuts for lower and middle income Americans have a multiplier effect on the economy that is two and a half to three times more than those for wealthy Americans.

And Crossroads GPS, a republican right wingnut astroturf organization, keeps dumppng a ton of money into television ads saying bad things about the ARRA and attacking Senator Claire McCaskill (D) for doing the right thing and supporting the stimulus.  

Roy Blunt tweeted earlier today:

Biden says failing $862B “stimulus” was too small and would have been bigger with more Democrats. The choice is clear on Nov. 2.

Failing stimulus? Guess Roy prefers to ignore the figures from the new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report on the impact of the stimulus on employment and economic growth:

* Raised the level of real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 1.7 percent and 4.2 percent,

* Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.5 percentage points,

* Increased the number of people employed by between 1.2 million and 2.8 million, and

* Increased the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs by 1.8 million to 4.1 million compared with what those amounts would have been otherwise. …

Or maybe Blunt is agreeing with VP Biden that the stimulus should have been larger?  That would certainly also put him in agreement with economists like Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini who are pointing out that the current slowdown in the recovery can be traced to an inadequate stimulus package. Somehow, though, I doubt that our Roy is much swayed by expert opinion, so I think we are left with a nasty little exercise in how to be both dishonest and snide in 140 characters or less.

Blunt is, of course, like the proverbial broken clock that is right twice a day, unequivocally correct that the choice is clear come November. Sadly, though, he seems to be relying on the not unreasonable hope that the Republican effort to obstruct economic progress while muddying public perception will win out. As Paul Krugman observed today:

Since Mr. Obama took office, they [i.e. Republicans] have engaged in relentless obstruction, obviously unworried about how their actions would look or be reported. And it’s working: by blocking Democratic efforts to alleviate the economy’s woes, the G.O.P. is helping its chances of a big victory in November.

Remember when Roy Blunt  let his hair down with conservative talk show host Mike Ferguson, and admitted that he wished the government had never created the Medicare or Medicaid programs?  Or when he declared that:

We’ve had Medicare since 1965, and Medicare has never done anything to make people more healthy.

Of course even the clueless Blunt soon realized that this kind of talk wasn’t going to wash, since most of his natural constituency simultaneously opposes government run programs while demanding that the government keep its hands off their Medicare.  Consequently, he now rarely misses an opportunity to cast himself as a defender of Medicare or to pretend that it is under Democratic attack.

Blunt’s most recent tweets, coming in the wake of the CBO’s evaluation of the Senate Finance Committee’s health care proposal,  attest to his newfound diligence on behalf of Medicare; for example:

Sad day when $829 billion of Medicare cuts & tax increases is a good day for Democrats. I’ll continue opposing these cuts & tax hikes.

and this gem:

If we can find $500 billion in Medicare savings that won’t impact care for seniors, reinvest it in Medicare. It’s on the verge of insolvency

What Blunt is talking about is the fact that savings realized from cutting waste and inefficiency from Medicare spending will be used to help offset the $829 billion that the CBO  estimates to be the cost of Senate Finance committee’s health care reform proposal.  Instead of reforming Medicare (which I thought Republicans wanted to do), expanding health care coverage, and controlling spiraling health care costs, his tweets indicate that he wants to throw more money at Medicare with no concern for reform.  

What is sad about Blunt’s self-righteous piety on behalf of Medicare is that it is completely misplaced.  First of all, according to Factcheck.org’s analysis, contrary to conservative claims, Medicare is not going bankrupt.  Secondly, not only will health care reform not harm Medicare, it  is essential to its on-going well-being, since Medicare’s problems stem from the out-of-control growth of health care costs that reform seeks to address.

Nor are the savings that will be realized from Medicare to be taken from the funds used for senior’s benefits. Everybody has been really clear about this fact, starting with President Obama who has explicitly addressed this claim.  The White House fact sheet on Medicare details the sources of the Medicare savings quite clearly, so there need be no confusion.  

On the other hand, what do Roy Blunt’s claims have going for them?  Nothing more than the fact that they are the utterances of the person who was charged, months ago, with developing the Republican alternative health care reform plan — and who has to my knowledge produced absolutely nothing at all that might fit under that rubric.