Tag: ACA

Wingnuts are gullible! How GOP’s bubble of ignorance keeps leading to humiliation

Why does the right keep falling for false stories about poverty and social programs? Hint: An ideological fixation

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Source: Salon.com

Author: Brian Buetler

“Looking back on the events of last week, I’m struck by how lucky Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., was to be awarded the uncoveted early-Thursday speaking slot at CPAC Thursday morning.

Because though kicking things off at a three-day event like CPAC means speaking to smaller audiences and fewer cameras, it also means that there are three days of intensifying stagecraft ahead of you to distract attention from whatever errors you might make.

And Paul Ryan made a doozy of an error. It attracted plenty of coverage anyhow, but probably would’ve attracted more if it hadn’t happened before all the jousting began. In case you missed it, Ryan recounted a story he heard secondhand about a poor child who felt bad about being on a subsidized school lunch program while other kids brought their lunches to school in brown bags, to serve the argument that parents who can’t afford to bag their children’s lunches for them don’t care about their kids as much as better-off parents do.

The view he expressed is strange enough. Being an impoverished parent isn’t actually coterminous with being a “poor” parent, in the normative sense of the word. And even though children on school lunch programs are surely stigmatized by their peers in some communities, the solution is to combat the stigma, not to moot it by just letting those kids go hungry.

But as you’ve probably heard by now, the story he told never happened. He recapitulated the erroneous testimony of a fellow social spending scold without vetting her story, which she had taken from some pro-social spending literature and tortured beyond recognition.

For someone like Ryan who often treats politics as a contest of character, that’s a pretty epic blunder. He’s since apologized for not checking his facts, which undoes some of the damage. But that mainly just changes the frame of the story. In addition to making an incredibly questionable moral argument, he also exposed the depths of his most politically problematic ideological fixation. Either he doesn’t care about truth, or his faith in the ubiquity of poverty traps and dependency and so on is so strong that he sees no reason to doubt any corroborative anecdotes, no matter how apocryphal.

This is a familiar epistemic problem, but I’m bringing it up now because it has metastasized into a national campaign strategy.

If you’re sure your ideas are correct and confident your solutions are the right ones you’ve already erected a significant barrier to self-examination. And when admitting error carries enormous financial, personal and ideological risk, it feels easier not to check. You’re shocked when your candidate loses, because none of your friends voted for the other guy. And you just pass along stories they tell you about the soul-crushing nature of welfare, or the horrors of the Affordable Care Act, without bothering to apply a smell test.

Combine that instinct with a well-heeled, amoral campaign apparatus and you get a bunch of Americans for Prosperity ads that wither under scrutiny.

For instance: “A Dexter cancer patient featured in a conservative group’s TV ad campaign denouncing her new health care coverage as ‘unaffordable’ will save more than $1,000 this year under the plan, The Detroit News has learned.”

(They’re referring to Julie Boonstra, whose story we’ve examined multiple times, and have confirmed what I and others long suspected.)

That’s not to diminish the annoyance and uncertainty she felt when her old plan was eliminated, but to say that the premise of her complaint about her new plan is wrong. AFP probably doesn’t care; it’s just as likely that they never bothered to check. Here’s what Boonstra had to say.

When advised of the details of her Blues’ plan, Boonstra said the idea that it would be cheaper “can’t be true.”

“I personally do not believe that,” Boonstra said.

Of possible relevance to her incredulity: “Boonstra is the ex-wife of Mark Boonstra, the former Washtenaw County GOP chairman whom Gov. Rick Snyder appointed to the Michigan Court of Appeals in 2012.”

Back East, AFP found similar ACA victims. “Two New Hampshire women featured in a major television advertising buy critical of Democratic Reps. Carol Shea-Porter and Ann Kuster’s support for the Affordable Care Act are state Republican activists.”

Again, I don’t think the collapse of these stories suggests that nobody is genuinely worse off because of Obamacare. Slate’s Dave Weigel found some that seem to fit the bill in Florida just last week! But there aren’t as many as Republicans would have you believe, and inconveniently they are unlikely to be older people with preexisting conditions, because the law is designed to make sure people like that aren’t left behind. Conservatives aren’t venturing very far outside of the movement to find them, though. Because on the right, a story about a child who feels unloved due to his family’s poverty must be true, in the same way that a story about Obamacare hurting a cancer patient can’t possibly be false.”

Brian Beutler

Brian Beutler is Salon’s political writer. Email him at bbeutler@salon.com and follow him on Twitter at @brianbeutler.

Emphasis Mine

See: http://www.salon.com/2014/03/11/gops_sick_welfare_obsession_how_a_bubble_of_ignorance_keeps_leading_it_astray/

When You Hear Conservatives Talking About Religious Liberty, Watch Out

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Source: Alternet

Author: Bob Shryock

“At the dawn of the Tea Party revolution, many conservatives were optimistic. The prevailing attitude among reporters and insiders alike was that the Republican Party had shed its misguided moralism and embraced hard-nosed economic realism as its core platform. Political author Dick Morris wrote, “No longer do evangelical or social issues dominate the Republican ground troops….There is still a litmus test for admission to the Republican Party. But no longer is it dominated by abortion, guns and gays. Now, keeping the economy free of government regulation, reducing taxation, and curbing spending are the chemicals that turn the paper pink.”

New York Times reporter Kate Zernike, author of Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America, agreed. “For decades, faith and family have been at the center of the conservative movement. But as the Tea Party infuses conservatism with new energy, its leaders deliberately avoid discussion of issues like gay marriage or abortion.”

Yet despite its focus on libertarianism, this new Republican bloc has spent the last three years fighting with unprecedented aggressiveness on the very social issues it was supposedly unconcerned with. Between 2011 and 2013, Republicans enacted 205 anti-abortion laws, more than they had in the prior 10 years combined (189). The Kansas house passed a bill that would give any individual, even essential government employees and hospital workers, the right to deny service to gay people. Though the bill did not pass the senate, similar bills are being introduced in at least nine other states, according to Mother Jones.

So what had changed? More than anything, it was the way that opposition to abortion and gay rights was justified: in the words of BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins, “in terms of protecting religious freedom instead of enforcing ‘family values.’” This change made Republicans appear more moderate, but actually signaled a rightward shift. Conservative ideas of religious liberty posited that the government’s eventual goal was the oppression of conservative Christians, and compromise on any religious liberty issues—which encompassed abortion, gay rights, and the Affordable Care Act—would be a violation of Christian faith. The notion of religious liberty thus gave small-government politics a cosmic imperative.

The Rhetoric of Religious Liberty

In the last few years, Republicans have become more and more focused on not “paying for abortions.” In February, Jeff Jimerson, one of the chief petitioners for a ballot measure in Oregon that would outlaw using state funds to pay for an abortion, summarized this view in the New York Times. Jimerson said, “We don’t want to make this a pro-life thing. This is a pro-taxpayer thing. There are a lot of libertarians in Oregon, people who don’t really care what you do, just don’t make me pay for it.”

Jimerson’s views happen to be in line with the official 2012 GOP platform, which opposed “using public revenues to promote or perform abortions or fund organizations which perform or advocate it” and said the party would not “fund or subsidize health care which includes abortion coverage.”

On the surface, this position may seem a softer stance, perhaps one that could offer a place for abortion rights with a conscience exemption. This makes it all the more strange that the last three years have seen renewed anti-abortion efforts at the state level. Stranger still, the laws passed during the last three years have done very little to block the government from funding abortions: the four most popular restrictions in 2013 were laws that limited insurance coverage, banned abortion pills, instituted 20-week bans, and restricted the function of abortion providers.

How did opposing paying for abortions lead to the largest anti-abortion rights push in memory? According to New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters, “by framing the abortion debate in terms of fiscal conservatism, [Republicans] can make a connection to the issue they believe will ultimately decide who controls Congress next year — the Affordable Care Act.”

Eric C. Miller, professor of communication ctudies at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, noted in an analysis of a recent Bobby Jindal speech that, “When he takes up the claim that ‘the freedom to exercise your religion in the way you run your business’ is ‘under assault,’ for instance, you can bet that he’s talking about abortion. You can also bet that a Hobby Lobby anecdote is about to drop. Here the freedom to run a business according to conscience routinely stands in for the less marketable freedom-to-not-provide-comprehensive-health-insurance-for-female-employees.”

Besides worrying that the ACA’s contraception mandate would force religious employers to fund birth control, conservatives also expressed concerns that the ACA would create a “ financial windfall” for Planned Parenthood, and that it would “ entangle taxpayer funds in abortion coverage.”

All of these concerns can be encompassed by objections to the state funding abortion. Because of this, legislation that attempts to prevent government funding of abortion is often also anti-Obamacare legislation. As Jimerson’s petition website claims, “This initiative would prohibit public funds in Oregon from being used to pay for…government-subsidized health insurance plans created by ObamaCare.”

Still, why all the anti-abortion laws that seem to have no connection to the ACA? In fact, the fight against the ACA has simply caused conservatives to connect liberty with anti-abortion laws more generally, not just ones that directly deal with “paying for abortions.”

The evangelical Christian minister David Barton said that people who are “pro-abortion” are really “pro-socialism.” This is, “they’re pro bigger government, less individual rights and responsibilities.” In Barton’s mind, pro-choice ideas are always connected to big government liberalism, and libertarianism is thus pro-life. In this environment, fighting government, fighting the ACA, and fighting abortion have been so connected that a blow against abortion rights is a blow against the ACA, and also the (imagined) repressive state, even when the specifics of the law have everything to do with restricting individual freedom and nothing to do with the ACA at all.

Religious Liberty Justifies New Anti-Gay Movement

In 2013, a new brand of “religious liberty” stories circulated around right-wing news outlets. Townhall.com told readers about an “ Air Force Officer Forced to Remove Bible From Desk,” a Fox News article titled “Soldier Who Read Conservative Books Now Faces Charges” gained 12,000 likes, and “Investigation: Bakery Forced to Make Lesbian Wedding Cake” made headlines at WorldNetDaily. “ Judge Orders Wedding Cake Baker to Serve Gay Couples,” wrote the Drudge Report in December. According to Todd Starnes, a Fox News journalist who popularized many of these stories, “Christians are trading places with homosexuals,” that is, events like the repeal of don’t ask/don’t tell had flipped the narrative of oppression and oppressor.

Accoroding to Starnes, the government was now in the process of staging a war on Christianity. Ken Klukowski, a professor at Liberty University, at the time the director of the Family Research Council’s (FRC) Center for Religious Liberty, accused President Obama of “Chicago-style thuggery” toward Christians in an interview with the Christian Post last October. Retired Lt. General and Family Research Council vice-president William Boykin accused Obama of, in the words of a Christian Post reporter, supporting a “large and secretive Marxist movement seeking to remove all dependence on God and references to the deity from civil society.”

The FRC, an organization focused narrowly on abortion and same-sex marriage, could thus say without irony, “Our message is simple but enormously important: Everything we care about hinges on religious liberty.” Republican advocacy groups weren’t the only ones obsessed with the idea: every major Republican presidential candidate in 2012 claimed religious freedom was under attack.

The rhetorical transformation did not go unnoticed. Jay Michaelson of Political Research Associates wrote in a report titled “Redefining Religious Liberty” that “Religious conservatives have succeeded in reframing the debate, inverting the victim-oppressor dynamic, and broadening support for their agenda” and that the religious liberty argument represented a “key front in the broader culture war designed to fight the same social battles on new-sounding terms.”

It may have sounded nicer, but the practical implication of religious freedom rhetoric was a more virulent homophobic agenda. Michaelson wrote that this new discourse should not be understood “as an attempt to create not religious exemptions” but rather “ the evisceration of civil right protections themselves. If any individual or business can refuse to recognize a person’s civil rights on the pretext of religious belief, those rights are functionally meaningless.”

Religious Liberty Rhetoric Leads to Government Shutdown

On the eve of the government shutdown, Representative Michelle Bachmann told a reporter from the Washington Examiner, “This is historic, and it’s a historic shift that’s about to happen, and if we’re going to fight, we need to fight now.”

Less than a month prior, Bachmann stated, on the radio show of Olive Tree Ministries’ Jan Markell that Obama’s actions as President signaled the rapture: “Rather than seeing this as a negative, we need to rejoice. Maranatha, come Lord Jesus, his day is at hand…. When we see up is down and right is called wrong…these days would be as the days of Noah.”

Bachmann wasn’t the only one to view herself as what the Daily Beast’s Joe McLean called a “ modern prophet of the apocalypse.” Four days later, Ted Cruz said at the FRC’s Values Voters Summit that America was “a couple of years” away from the “cliff of oblivion.”

Apocalyptic ideas have been part of America since its founding, and among conservative Christians, they’re experiencing something of a renaissance. According to author Chip Berlet, “Since the early 1990s, a sector of the political right in the United States has embraced a specific set of conspiracy theories revolving around government plans to impose tyranny.”

In the ’90s, this synthesis of evangelical Christianity and anti-government paranoia was restricted to the margins: militias, homeschoolers and scattered megachurch pastors. But they gained a wider audience through media: radio shows, websites and books, most notably, the apocalyptic thriller series Left Behind, by Tim LaHaye. In Left Behind, satanic forces and government forces literally mix—the antichrist, Nicolae Carpathia, ascends to power by becoming president of the United Nations, and uses that role to bring the world under his control, all with the aid of the (mostly liberal) folks who hadn’t been raptured. Left Behind sold 63 million copies. Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell said Left Behind had a greater “impact on Christianity” than “any book in modern times, outside the Bible.”

Today’s conservatives may not have quite so dramatic a vision of the apocalypse, but Tea Partiers like Bachmann and Cruz seem to have internalized the idea that, to borrow a phrase from progressive Christian blogger Fred Clark, “the abolition of all religion…is exactly what [liberals] are hoping for.” They’ve also made use of the conservative infrastructure LaHaye helped to construct: a group he founded, the Council for National Policy, called the “most powerful conservative group you’ve never heard of” by ABC, designed and built the government shutdown.

According to the Nation’s Lee Fang, the CNP’s ad-hoc coalition, the Conservative Action Project, “initially floated the idea of attaching funding for Obamacare to the continuing resolution, and followed up with grassroots organizing, paid advertisements and a series of events designed to boost the message of senators like Ted Cruz.” The justification for these actions was, in the words of the Conservative Action Project, the Affordable Care Act’s “ unprecedented  attack on life and religious liberty.”

For conservatives, religious liberty was built on an anti-government, apocalyptic attitude, which posited what Eric C. Miller calls an “overarching conspiracy.” Conservative religious liberty claims rely on the idea that people in power really do desire the end of, or at least dramatic restrictions on, conservative Christianity.

Jay Michaelson wrote, “One recurring theme in the right-wing literature is the sense of a ‘coming storm’…Like the red menace, the secularist danger is imminently looming. The metaphors are appropriately biblical: soon there will be a flood of litigation, a firestorm of controversy. Indeed, these apocalyptic pronouncements resonate closely with…Christian Reconstructionism/pre-millennialism specifically. The ‘coming storm’ and the End Times are not distant from one another.”

Rob Shryock is a freelance journalist covering topics such as evangelical Christian culture, religion in the military and Islamophobia. He frequently writes for Religion Dispatches.

Emphasis Mine

See: http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/when-you-hear-conservatives-talking-about-religious-liberty-watch-out?akid=11561.123424.lwfyaK&rd=1&src=newsletter965135&t=5

Republicans Are Officially Out Of Obamacare Attacks

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Source: National memo

Author: @LOLGOP

It may take a few more elections for Republicans to figure this out, but health care just isn’t a good issue for them.

You can understand why they’re confused.

In 2010, their histrionic “OMG! Death panels!” Obamacare attacks were a small part of a massive landslide victory that owed more to the economy cratering than anything else. And the most successful tactic was going after Democrats for “cutting” Medicare by reducing overpayments in the Medicare Advantage program, reversing a strategy that the left employed successfully for decades.

Four years later, Republicans have two huge problems: They can’t say how they’d replace Obamacare, but they have said how they would ruin Medicare.

After taking the House in 2011, Republicans elected with a mandate to protect Medicare passed a budget from Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) that would gut the program and pass massive costs on to seniors by turning the program into mostly privatized “voucher” system. In 2013, Ryan proposed similar cuts that would remake America’s health care system for seniors, along with the same reforms of Medicare Advantage that they ran against in 2010, in an effort to endorse a plan that would balance the budget in 10 years.

So what are Republicans doing in 2014, as they’re supposed to be laser-focused on what a disaster Obamacare is?

A new memo from House Minority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) says the GOP will focus on cuts to Medicare Advantage.

The only problem?

Emphasis Mine

see: http://www.nationalmemo.com/republicans-officially-obamacare-attacks/

New poll: Americans optimistic about Obamacare, overwhelmingly oppose GOP position

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: The Jed Report, via Daily Kos

Author: staff

(N.B. The term ‘Obamacare’ is a conservative term for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) used by it’s GOP conservative critics.  As the ACA succeeds, will these critics still want their arch enemy’s name on it?  It might also be noted that as the law addresses health care insurance, not health care itself, ‘health care law’ may be a bad frame.)

“CNN has a very interesting new poll that not only debunks the notion that Americans have already decided Obamacare is a failure, but also reveals that Americans overwhelmingly oppose the GOP’s conservative critique of the health care law.

According to the poll (pdf), which surveyed American adults between Nov. 18-20 with a margin of error of ±3.5 points:

  1. Most Americans believe Obamacare’s current problems will be solved. 54 percent say they believe current problems will be fixed, compared with 43 percent who say they won’t be.
  2. Most Americans believe it’s too early to judge whether Obamacare is a success or failure. A total of 53 percent think it is too early to say whether Obamacare is a success or failure. A total of 39 percent think it’s a failure and 8 percent already think it is a success.
  3. Most Americans do not support conservative critiques of Obamacare. According to the poll, 41 percent of Americans think Obamacare is too liberal, slightly more than 40 percent who support Obamacare. But 14 percent think it’s not liberal enough.

As you might expect, the poll’s crosstabs show that most Republicans are certain Obamacare can’t be fixed and has already failed, but outside of the GOP universe, people aren’t merely open to Obamacare, they are optimistic about its prospects and want it to work.

Obviously, it doesn’t matter how open or optimistic the public is if the Obama administration can’t ultimately deliver on the promise of Obamacare, but if they do, most Americans are on their side. Republicans have bet everything on failure. If they lose that bet, it will be an absolute political nightmare for them—and it should be.”

ORIGINALLY POSTED TO THE JED REPORT ON WED NOV 27, 2013 AT 09:41 AM PST.

ALSO REPUBLISHED BY DAILY KOS.

Emphasis Mine

see: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/11/27/1258749/-New-poll-Americans-optimistic-about-Obamacare-overwhelmingly-oppose-GOP-position

 

No, Obama Didn’t Lie to You About Your Health Care Plans

The claim that President Obama lied in saying that people could keep their insurance looks like another Fox News special.

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Source: Alternet

Author: Dean Baker

“President Obama has been getting a lot of grief in the last few weeks over his pledge that with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in place, people would be able to keep their insurance if they like it. The media have been filled with stories about people across the country who are having their insurance policies terminated, ostensibly because they did not meet the requirements of the ACA. While this has led many to say that Obama was lying, there is much less here than meets the eye.

First, it is important to note that the ACA grand-fathered all the individual policies that were in place at the time the law was enacted. This means that the plans in effect at the time that President Obama was pushing the bill could still be offered even if they did not meet all the standards laid out in the ACA.

The plans being terminated because they don’t meet the minimal standards were all plans that insurers introduced after the passage of the ACA. Insurers introduced these plans knowing that they would not meet the standards that would come into effect in 2014. Insurers may not have informed their clients at the time they sold these plans that they would not be available after 2014 because they had designed a plan that did not comply with the ACA.

However if the insurers didn’t tell their clients that the new plans would only be available for a short period of time, the blame would seem to rest with the insurance companies, not the ACA. After all, President Obama did not promise people that he would keep insurers from developing new plans that will not comply with the provisions of the ACA.

In addition to the new plans that were created that did not comply with the terms of the ACA, there have been complaints that the grandfathering was too strict. For example, insurers can only raise their premiums or deductibles by a small amount above the rate of medical inflation. As a result, many of the plans in existence at the time of the ACA are losing their grandfathered status.

In this case also it is wrong to view the insurers as passive actors who are being forced to stop offering plans because of the ACA. The price increases charged by insurers are not events outside of the control of insurers. If an insurer offers a plan which has many committed buyers, then presumably it would be able to structure its changes in ways that are consistent with the ACA. If it decides not to do so, this is presumably because the insurer has decided that it is not interested in continuing to offer the plan.

As a practical matter, there are many plans that insurers will opt to drop for market reasons that may or may not have anything to do with the ACA. It’s hard to see how this could be viewed as a violation of President Obama’s pledge. After all, insurers change and drop plans all the time. Did people who heard Obama’s pledge understand it to mean that insurers would no longer have this option once the ACA passed?

If Obama’s pledge was understood as ensuring that every plan that was in existence in 2010 would remain in existence, then it would imply a complete federal takeover of the insurance industry. This would require the government to tell insurers that they must continue to offer plans even if they are losing money on them and even if the plans had lost most of their customers. This would at the least be a strange policy. It would be surprising if many people thought this was the meaning of President Obama’s pledge.

Finally, there will be many plans that insurers will stop offering in large part because of the changed market conditions created by the ACA. For example, last week the Washington Post highlighted a plan for the “hardest to insure” that was being cancelled by Pathmark Blue Cross of Pennsylvania.

This plan is likely being cancelled because it is unable to compete with the insurance being offered through the exchanges. The exchanges charge everyone the same rate regardless of their pre-existing health conditions. A plan that is especially designed for people who have serious health conditions would almost certainly charge a far higher rate. If these high-priced plans no longer exist because they cannot compete with the exchanges would this mean that President Obama had broken his pledge?

On closer inspection, the claim that President Obama lied in saying that people could keep their insurance looks like another Fox News special. In the only way that the pledge could be interpreted as being meaningful, the pledge is true. The ACA does not eliminate plans that were in existence at the time the bill was approved.

If we want to play Fox News, President Obama also promised people they could keep their doctor. Since 2010 tens of thousands of doctors have retired or even died. Guess the pledge that people could keep their doctor was yet another lie from the Obama administration.

Emphasis Mine

see: http://www.alternet.org/no-obama-didnt-lie-you-about-your-health-care-plans

 

Ranks of part-time workers still high. Obamacare not to blame, experts say

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Source: http://www.cleveland.com

Author: Oliveria Perkins

“Megan Conway’s part-time waitressing job was great for extra money when she was a college student, but now with a degree and $40,000 in student loans, she thought she would have a full-time, professional job by now.

Conway is considered an involuntary part-time worker, or someone who really wants full-time work.

Recessions often give rise to more involuntary part-timers as employers cut back workers’ hours and on hiring of  full-timers. But during recoveries, the ranks of such workers usually drop. However, during this recovery, their numbers have remained stubbornly high, though the unemployment rate has dropped.

“It has definitely made me a little angry,” Conway said of being unable to land a full-time professional job. “I feel that I did everything right. I networked. I even took an unpaid internship to get experience. I am a hard worker.”

At least two issues have pushed the plight of part-timers into the foreground. One is the discussion about whether the  Affordable Care Act, or ACA, also know as Obamacare, is leading to more part-time workers. The act requires employers  to provide health care to many employees averaging at least 30 hours a week. Critics of ACA say employers are only hiring part-timers as well as reducing the hours of an increasing number already on their payrolls  to avoid providing medical insurance.

The second issue has to do with the proliferation of part-time jobs. Three out of four jobs created between December 2012 and July 2013 were part time, according to the federal Current Population Survey. The Labor Department defines part-time as working fewer than 35 hours per week. Some of these part-timers, like Conway, are recent college graduates who have had to resort to working menial jobs. She has been looking to work in the nonprofit sector since graduating in 2009 with a degree in that field. However, Conway is happy to have her job at a chain restaurant. Since she has been there several years, Conway makes more than minimum wage, and she has benefits.

Even more of these involuntary part-timers are those who once held full-time jobs, said Rebecca Glauber, a University of New Hampshire professor who recently published a paper on the topic.

“A lot of people lost their jobs during the recession, and if they were finding jobs, they were only finding part-time jobs,” she said.

Glauber found that the involuntary part-time employment rate more than doubled between 2007 and 2012. For women, it rose from 3.6 percent to 7.8 percent. For men, it went from 2.4 to 5.9 percent.

She found it was the largest five-year increase in involuntary part-time employment since the 1970s.

The share of the employed working part time was about 17 percent in 2007, said Rob Valletta, research advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, who just co-authored an Economic Letter about the increase in part-time work. By 2009, that figure had increased to nearly 20 percent, and has remained at that level. The recession began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009.

While the share has remained constant, the demographics of these workers have changed. Valletta said they — like Conway — are now more apt to be the “prime” working age group of 25-to-54-year-olds. In the past, part-timers were more likely to come from the smaller pool of 16-to-24-year-olds.

“Many in the pool of prime workers, perhaps are very experienced and can only find part-time work,” he said. “Many have families to support, creating a source of hardship. One can argue that this shift can be obscured because the overall amount of part-time work occurring in the economy has been stable.”

Frederick “Rick” King worked about a decade at the family-owned chain of local music stores where he sold software and keyboards until the business closed about five years ago. He now works part-time at a chain drug store, a position he has held about a year.

“Most of the jobs being generated in this economy aren’t for adults like me with a decent work history,” King said. “I’m almost 50 years old, I don’t want to wait tables. That is for someone in high school or college who can survive on a part-time job.”

Most of the jobs created during the economy have either been higher paying ones, like nursing or other professions requiring specialized degrees or training, or they have been lower-paying jobs, like many in food service and retail that often are part-time.

“There has been a hollowing out of the middle,” Glauber said. “Involuntary part-time employment appears to be strongly correlated with economic vulnerability and hardship.”

Glauber found that in 2012, one in four of these workers lived in poverty; while only one in 20 of full-time workers did.

King said he doesn’t make enough to support his family. They are only making it because his check is combined with that of his 23-year-old son, also a part-time worker and a disability check a younger son receives. He said a disability keeps his wife from working.

King’s hopes rose recently when he applied for a full-time position at his company. The job went to someone else.
Structural or short-term changes?

More than 8.2 million people were considered involuntary part-time workers in July, virtually unchanged from a year earlier, according to the Labor Department. Nearly 2.6 million wanted full-time work, but couldn’t find it. The remaining became part-timers after employers cut back their hours.

The combined trends of the ranks of part-time workers not dwindling, 75 percent of the newly created jobs being part-time and the economy creating relatively few mid-level jobs, have caused many to question whether structural changes are occurring to the labor market. Will part-time work supplant a substantial number of full-time jobs?
“There may be a structural component to elevated part-time employment, but it is still too soon to tell,” Valletta said.
He believes lasting changes are unlikely. Valletta said such high rates of part-time workers have occurred before. In 1983, the share of people working part-time was slightly higher than the most recent peak, which fell back then as the economy improved.

“No one would argue that the labor market is anywhere recovered,” he said of the current recovery. “The elevated level of part-time work is just a reflection of this, and will likely get reversed over the next few years.”

Valletta said part-time employment had dropped among some demographic groups, including married women between 25 and 54, with more than a high school diploma. Less educated workers haven’t seen the same decreases.

Glauber also believes an improved economy is essential to lowering involuntary part-time work. But she said that will only happen for many of these workers if the recovery revs up instead of just creeps along as it has been doing.

The case of adjunct faculty may offer a point to ponder about the proliferation of part-time employment. Long before the recession, colleges and universities began hiring adjuncts in lieu of creating tenure track positions. On many campuses they make up a substantial portion of the teaching staff.

David Wilder, an adjunct art history and art professor, is a committee co-chair in the Ohio Part-time Faculty Association, an advocacy group. Since the recession, college enrollment has increased, but he said that hasn’t led to more permanent opportunities for these part-timers. He said reversing the trend of colleges favoring the creation of more part-time positions, has been difficult to reverse. Having even a chance at tenure has become an elusive goal for these instructors.

“It is said that the longer you spend teaching as an adjunct, the less chances you have of full-time employment,” Wilder said.

“A perverse moral system seems to have been fostered that views with suspicion those who’ve gone a long time without being hired on a full-time basis,” he said. “This is despite the fact that a few decades ago, faculty acquiring tenure was fairly common.”

Obamacare appears to be a factor in adjuncts at some institutions getting fewer hours. In April, the University of Akron decided to limit part-time instructors to eight credit hours per semester to avoid increasing health care costs. Officials said about 400 part-time faculty were typically teaching more than eight credit hours, and providing health care to them would be nearly $4 million.

Is Obamacare leading to more part-timers?

Several experts say what happened at the University of Akron doesn’t appear to be the norm.

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., analyzed the number of hours people worked for the first half of this year  to determine if employers were cutting workers back to under 30 hours to avoid paying health care.

He and Helene Jorgensen found that the percentage of workers putting in 25 to 29 hours was up, but so were those putting in 30 or more hours. The only drop was in those working 20 hours or fewer.

“There is some rise in the share of workers working 25 to 29 hours,” Baker said. “The reason is not that they are being cut from longer hours. The reason is there is a gain in the 25 to 29 category at the expense of workers working shorter hours.”

Linda Blumberg, a senior fellow in the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., said it is premature for employers to make decisions now about cutting workers’ hours to avoid penalties, since implementation of that provision of the ACA has been put off until 2015.

“There is a lot of complexity to this law, and there is a lot of misinformation,” she said. “A lot of employers don’t understand what is going on.”

Employers who don’t provide health care for employees working an average of 30 hours per week or more could be subject to a $2,000 fine, but only if certain conditions are met.

For example, the law only applies to employers with at least 50 employees. Companies that don’t now offer coverage to these 30-hour-plus workers are the only ones that might be affected. Blumberg said the “vast majority” of larger companies now offer coverage to at least some of their workers, and many already offer  coverage to many part-timers. For the most part, a company would only incur penalties for not providing coverage to employees between 138 and 400 percent of poverty. And only if at least one of the employees in that income group gets subsidized coverage through the new insurance marketplaces, or exchanges.

Blumberg said the many media reports and blog posts that have focused on Obamacare leading to more part-time work miss a key issue about running a business.

Tiffani Lanier went to Millennia Cos. in Independence believing  that she had only signed on for a temporary assignment helping to reorganize files. Still, she was conscientious.

Cheryl Wszeborowski, the human resources and payroll director at the housing management company, took notice.

“We are a growing company, creating new positions frequently,” she said. “So when I find someone who has a great attitude and who is willing to learn, I will work hard to find a full-time position in our company for them.”

Lanier was permanently hired as an accounting clerk. She wanted full-time work when she took the temporary assignment. Lanier said she is glad she didn’t turn it down.

“Even if it is a part-time or temporary position, there is nothing wrong with trying it,” she said. “If I hadn’t accepted it, I wouldn’t be where I am now.”
Valletta of the San Francisco Fed said high numbers in the part-time pool often point to a skills mismatch between job seekers and available openings.

King, the drug store part-timer, said that after being laid off from the music store he got an Associates degree in graphic arts, but hasn’t been able to get a job in the field because of limited openings. He still holds out hope that he will.

Conway, the part-time waitress, said she still has a passion for nonprofit management. However, after dozens  of interviews and no job, it was time to reconsider her career choice. Conway remembers being upbeat when she got an interview for a part-time volunteer coordinator’s position. She was told 400 people had applied.

She didn’t get the job.

“It was kind of getting ridiculous,” she said of the several jobs for which she was a finalist. “I kept being told: ‘You’re a great candidate,’ but I wasn’t getting hired.”

Conway is now studying to become a registered nurse.
“I know only two people my age who have like amazing jobs — and they are in health care,” she said. “Everybody else is struggling.”

Emphasis Mine

see: http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2013/09/ranks_of_part-time_workers_sti.html