January 18, 2011
The Republicans have been ranting for most of the last year about the “job killing” health care bill (now changed to “job destroying” in an effort at promoting comity). As I noted yesterday, reporters are supposed to attempt to verify such accusations, not just repeat them.
The Associated Press made precisely the sort of effort at verification that reporters are supposed to do. They found the Republicans came up a bit short in the evidence department. The best they could do was an analysis from the Congressional Budget Office that estimated that around 600,000 people would opt out of the labor force if they could get health insurance through the new health care system. The reason is that they would no longer need to work for their health care coverage. This is not exactly “job killing” or “job destroying” – after all, the jobs will still be there, it’s just that people will opt not to take them.
In this way we can think of the bill as being job destroying in the same way that winning the lottery might be job destroying. Many people who take home multi-million dollar jackpots opt not to work because they no longer need the money. The Republican methodology would have us worried about “job killing” lottery jackpots.
AP deserves credit for doing the sort of basic fact checking that good reporters do. This sort of reporting provides valuable information to the public.
Addendum:
McClatchey also did its homework.
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