Obamacare to hurt employment in Nevada

Much has been speculated about Obamacare, or if you prefer the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, from the implications that the federal government can mandate US citizens to buy a product offered by a preferred list of vendors to the massive tax increase that will begin to appear as more parts of the bill come on line. One thing that hasn't been mentioned is the impact on employment or should I say unemployment.

Nevada has been among the nation's leaders in the awful statistic of unemployment rate, currently around 14%, well above the national average. Senator Reid campaigned on how much he helped the country, to bad he forgot to send any assistance to Nevada. In fact, Congress has done nothing to stem the tide of unemployment; they only seem to care about "saved" jobs, which no one has been able to measure. Now with Obamacare will there be any light at the end of the tunnel of high unemployment? It doesn’t look like it. Obamacare will put a burden on business with a whole new slate of penalties, taxes and regulations. This increase in cost will most likely be offset by cutting the easiest area to save money, labor costs. Another cost to business is providing an approved plan and approved employer contribution and those businesses will face a tax of approximately $2,000 per employee. A bill designed to help small business, will actually hurt expansion; as soon as an employer crosses the threshold of what the government determines as a small business, they could be burdened with the tax for every employee, not just the new one. This could be as much as $45,000 imposed on a business for doing well and trying to expand.

The effects of Obamacare would even be to create a disincentive to work. As the Nevada Policy Research Institute points out, by increasing the value of leisure and decreasing the value of labor it puts the low end worker (400% of federal poverty level) in a high implicit marginal tax bracket, effectively 53% to 62%, obviously a serious deterrent to work. But how many jobs are we talking about? In Nevada, estimates are around 6,700 jobs lost, most of them on the low end scale. Nevada doesn't even account for 1% of jobs nationwide, where the losses are estimated between 670,000 and 788,000 and a permanent increase of about .5% to the nation's unemployment rate.

It's not a surprise that the supporters of this bill would like to keep this information from the public with a majority of Americans against the bill and a number of states expressing their sovereignty by challenging the legality of Obamacare.

For references and links for the above article, please check my article in the Las Vegas Examiner.