December 23, 2013
When people just start making things up it usually means that they don’t have much of an argument. That appears to be the case with the bashers of Obamacare over at the Wall Street Journal.
Robert Grady, a managing director of a private equity company and top adviser to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie told readers:
“For most of this year, the overwhelming majority of jobs added to the U.S. economy have been part-time, not full-time. Gallup’s payroll-to-population ratio, the proportion of the American population working full time, has dropped almost two full percentage points in the last year, to 43.8%.”
These are great numbers because they can be easily checked. If we go the Bureau of Labor Statistics website (Table A-8), we find that the number of people listed as part for economic reasons fell from 8,138,000 in November of last year to 7,719,000 in November of this year, a decline of 419,000.
The number of people opting to work part-time rose from 18,594,000 in November of last year to 18,876,000 in November of 2013, a gain of 282,000. If we add the drop in part-time for economic reasons to the gain in voluntary part-time, we get a drop in total part-time employment of 137,000.
By comparison, total employment (Table A-1) rose from 143,277,000 last November to 144,386,000, a gain of 1,109,000. Okay, so we have that part-time employment fell by 137,000 while total employment rose by 1.1 million, how do Grady and the WSJ get that part-time employment is exploding because of Obamacare?
Hey, night is day, black is white, up is down, meet the just make it up crew at the WSJ.
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