Friday’s employment report showed that the U.S. job market continues to add jobs at a moderate pace. Employers are creating enough jobs to slowly reduce the unemployment rate, which fell to 7.4 percent — the lowest it has been since December 2008.
But many of the jobs added in recent months have been part-time, and this has led critics of Obamacare to argue that the implementation of health-care reform is the culprit. Because the legislation (officially the Affordable Care Act, or ACA) requires employers with at least 50 full-time workers to offer them health coverage or pay a penalty, the bill’s detractors claim that it creates a disincentive to hire full-timers and that you can already see the shift to part-time work in the data.
Read Full Article »