Obamacare discourages work -- for better and for worse

◼ Obamacare taxes regular working people in all sorts of ways (curbing health-care deductions, taxing home sales, taxing people for not having enough insurance, to name a few). The millions of new subsidy recipients aren’t the disabled who can’t work, nor the unemployed who can’t find work, but people who have jobs and decide to leave them or scale back their hours. - Timothy P. Carney/Washington Examiner @TPCarney

...Partisan sniping will probably prevent a good discussion of the safety net's costs and benefits -- and the value of work. That's too bad, because it's a discussion worth having.

◼ Just when you think the Washington Post has hit rock bottom, they sink deeper into the tar-pit - Doug Ross

◼ Freedom for the job-locked: Dems’ desperate defense of Obamacare-induced unemployment - Jonah Goldberg/National Review Online via AEI

...Democrats insist this is a boon. Indeed, many are talking about it as an act of liberation (which reminds me of an 11-year-old headline from the Onion: “IBM Emancipates 8,000 Wage Slaves”).
House minority leader Nancy Pelosi says the CBO report vindicates Obamacare, because “this was one of the goals: to give people life, a healthy life, liberty to pursue their happiness. And that liberty is to not be job-locked, but to follow their passion.” Pelosi is particularly invested in this view. She’s been mocked for years now for her repeated claims that Obamacare is an entrepreneurial bill because it would let Americans quit their jobs to, among other things, “write poetry.”...