I will give you, fresh from the oven, either a home-baked Toll House chocolate chip cookie or a Krispy Kreme donut. Your choice.

Let’s say you choose the donut.

Now I pour rancid ketchup on the donut and offer you the choice again.

You now choose the cookie.

Based on his press briefing yesterday, the President’s CEA Chairman, Dr. Jason Furman, would say I didn’t kill the donut option because taking the cookie was your choice.

The individual health insurance market subsidies in the Affordable Care Act do two things: they subsidize some low wage workers, and they make work less attractive for those workers by increasing the effective marginal tax rate on higher income.

Because the ACA premium subsidies depend on income, the higher your income, the smaller your premium subsidy. This makes sense if a policymaker has limited resources to spend and wants to help those who need it most. The problem is that it also means that as your income climbs you lose some of those government subsidies. It works the same way as a marginal tax rate increase: you get less net financial benefit for additional income. This is an unavoidable downside of a social safety net based on income.

This downside is independent of what the subsidies are used for. This same problem applies to food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit, low-income housing vouchers, and in fact any government benefit that gets reduced as one’s income climbs. The effect results from phasing out subsidies as income climbs, any kind of subsidies.

ObamaCare’s defenders are taking two tacks today. First, they are emphasizing the significant financial benefits of those subsidized premiums to the people who receive them. That’s totally fair. They are also trying to argue that, when people choose not to work after the government increases their [effective] marginal tax rate, that’s OK because it’s the person’s choice not to work. That is Orwellian.

Here is CBO:

For example, some provisions will raise effective tax rates on earnings from labor and thus will reduce the amount of labor that some workers choose to supply.

If you choose to work less because you want to spend more time with your kids, that’s a good thing. If you choose to work less because the government raised your marginal effective tax rate and made work less financially rewarding, that’s a bad thing.

Here is an example:

• A family of four with one wage-earner has […]