Does Obamacare exchange an opportunity ladder for a poverty trap?

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James Pethokoukis:

It’s simple: climbing the opportunity ladder into the middle class or higher requires a job. And there’s your trouble with the Affordable Care Act. It slaps working class and low-income families with a big tax increase if they try and climb that ladder. Higher incomes are offset by lower insurance subsidies from government. As a result of steep effective marginal tax rates, some people will work fewer hours. Other will quit the job market completely.

Obamacare supporters call that a feature not a bug. People who are only working to pay for health care will now have the ability to make a different “choice.” Older workers doing physical labor will be able to retire earlier. Moms can switch to part-time work or even stay home full-time. Workers will have more flexibility to change jobs or start a business. So it’s good news … wait … fantastic news that the Congressional Budget Office now says that “more than 2.5 million people are likely to reduce the amount of labor they choose to supply to some degree because of the ACA,” three times more than its earlier forecast.

But even the best-intended, smartly-devised plans often have unintended and harmful consequences. Here is one trade-off, one reality that President Obama doesn’t want to talk about. Keith Hennessey offers the example of a working-class family of four whose sole wage earner makes $35,000 a year and doesn’t get health insurance through a job. The other spouse wants to take a $12,000 part-time job to raise the family’s income. But doing that would reduce Obamacare’s subsidy and raise the family’s effective federal tax rate to 50% from 37%. Yes, the Obamacare subsidies help the family afford health insurance. But there is the trade-off:

Do the benefits of the premium subsidy to this family outweigh the costs of trapping this family at this income level by killing the financial benefit they receive from more work, education, training, or other professional advancement?  … Nobody wants to trap people and discourage further economic advancement, even if they do so by helping that family with generous subsidies.

For that fictional family – and maybe thousands or hundreds of thousands real-life counterparts – Obamacare pulls up the opportunity ladder and leaves them mired in a kind of poverty trap.

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