Sounds Familiar -- By James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal

A Beltway cliché becomes an ObamaCare excuse.

In his New York Times column today, former Enron adviser Paul Krugman cheers the news that ObamaCare subsidies are expected to have a greater-than-expected disincentive effect on work:

On Wednesday, Douglas Elmendorf, the director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, said the obvious: losing your job and choosing to work less aren't the same thing. If you lose your job, you suffer immense personal and financial hardship. If, on the other hand, you choose to work less and spend more time with your family, "we don't sympathize. We say congratulations."

And now you know everything you need to know about the latest falsehood in the ever-mendacious campaign against health reform.

Although it was charitable of Krugman to warn readers off the rest of his column, those who heeded his admonition not to read on missed his amusingly worded nod in the general direction of reality: "More subtly, the incentive to work will be somewhat reduced by health insurance subsidies that fall as your income rises."

But we want to focus on that "more time with your family." Krugman's voice turns out to be but one in a vast chorus of ObamaCare apologists singing that refrain.

E.J. Dionne, Washington Post: "Oh my God, say opponents of the ACA, here is the government encouraging sloth! That's true only if you wish to take away the choices the law gives that 64-year-old or to those moms and dads looking for more time to care for their children. Many on the right love family values until they are taken seriously enough to involve giving parents/workers more control over their lives."

....

"People who really do decide, as Quindlen put it, that you might be able to have it all, just not all at the same time, are undermined by the fibbers," Henneberger observed back in 2012. Most of the time when someone says he's leaving a job to spend more time with his family, he does so in order to avoid acknowledging that, for one reason or another, he has failed.

It is therefore reasonable to construe the deployment of this excuse by Krugman, Dionne, Fournier and the others as further evidence that ObamaCare is a failing policy.

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