Jonathan Chait, writing about the same Bush remarks I discussed earlier, revisits the debate about Obamacare and jobs.

Conservatives loudly trumpeted the Congressional Budget Office’s prediction that Obamacare would lead to fewer hours worked. Conservatives often described this as Obamacare “destroying jobs,” but that is not what the CBO actually concluded. It found, instead, that since many people hold onto full-time jobs in order to maintain their employer-sponsored insurance, providing them with affordable insurance outside their employer plan would lead some of them to retire, or work part-time. Liberals consider that result perfectly fine. If a person can afford to retire, or work part-time, or care for their children or an ailing family member, they’re better off doing so rather than having the need for employer insurance dictate their life. Conservatives disputed this conclusion, arguing that the decline of work is a serious societal problem.

Chait should take another look at that CBO report. Here’s a passage from the second and last paragraph of the report’s “overview,” and the only portion of the overview that bears on the law’s effect on people’s willingness to work: “[S]ome provisions [of the law] 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 next page reiterates the point about the structure of Obamacare’s subsidies:

CBO’s estimate that the ACA will reduce employment reflects some of the inherent trade-offs involved in designing such legislation. Subsidies that help lower income people purchase an expensive product like health insurance must be relatively large to encourage a significant proportion of eligible people to enroll. If those subsidies are phased out with rising income in order to limit their total costs, the phaseout effectively raises people’s marginal tax rates (the tax rates applying to their last dollar of income), thus discouraging work.

A few paragraphs later, the report explains that the most important reason CBO expects Obamacare to reduce labor supply is the subsidies it creates for insurance purchased on exchanges. It then analyzes this issue further:

For some people, the availability of exchange subsidies under the ACA will reduce incentives to work both through a substitution effect and through an income effect. The former arises because subsidies decline with rising income (and increase as income falls), thus making work less attractive. As a result, some people will choose not to work or will work less—thus substituting other activities for work. The income effect arises because subsidies increase available resources—similar to giving people greater income—thereby allowing some people to maintain the same standard of living while working less.

Here, finally, the CBO is saying something close to what Chait is saying: Obamacare will let people get what they want while working less, and so they will work less. But this effect is not presented as the only or the most important reason Obamacare will reduce labor supply. In this passage, too, the report mentions how Obamacare’s subsidies are structured in a way that raises the implicit tax rate on work. I don’t see any attempt in the report to quantify the relative sizes of these effects. It’s fair, though, to say that the report does a lot more to emphasize how Obamacare’s taxes make increased labor supply less rewarding than it does to emphasize how it makes it easier for people to get by without paid work. And that certainly seems like a problem (albeit one that, as CBO notes, involves trade-offs).