Unemployment Rate In 2014 Increases, Can Obamacare Make It Worse?

As the unemployment rate in 2014 increases by a little, some are wondering whether or not Obamacare will cause it to become worse over the next several years.

In a related report by The Inquisitr, in January the unemployment rate dropped to 6.7 percent, although some claimed this was due to people giving up on the US economy and leaving the job market. But some experts last month instead blamed the polar vortex for not seeing the strong gains they were hoping for:

“[Polls] showed 601,000 people could not get to work because of the weather, the highest level for February since 2010. Economists said job growth in February would have been as high as 200,000 if not for the weather.”

The interesting part about the unemployment rate is how it’s determine. The Labor Department said 175,000 jobs were added, which beat expectations of only 149,000 jobs. But even though there was increase in jobs the unemployment still rose the unemployment rate does not include those who give up on joining the US workforce.

Heritage Foundation Chief Economist Stephen Moore believes this is indicative of the real unemployment rate being worse than the official numbers:

“The long-term trend now for five years has been very disappointing job growth. We’re at about half the level of job creation that we should be at. The real unemployment rate, when you include people who have given up looking for work or people who are underemployed, is close to 11 percent. Those are really lousy numbers, and it’s hard to put any lipstick on this pig. We’ve got an economy that’s just not growing fast enough. It’s not creating the jobs we need. We need about 250,000-300,000 jobs a month.”

This comes at time when the Congressional Budget Office is projecting that Obamacare will “reduce the American workforce by the equivalent of 2 million full-time workers in 2017,” due to creating “a disincentive to work.” Moore believes nothing will be done in this regard because Republicans “don’t want to do much of anything” and currently lack a “positive solution for growth.” Of course, he also believes everything President Obama and the Democrats are suggesting are bad for the economy. What do you think?