8 Replies to “Two-minute Grubering [Darleen Click]”

1. Drumwaster says:

   November 19, 2014 at 2:06 pm

   It’s not like every Republican and a clear majority of Americans couldn’t see through the scam being perpetrated, after all, not a single Republican voted for it. Not one. In either chamber. In fact, when Massachusetts voted in Scott Brown to be the 41st vote against it, Harry Reid and his cabal had to strip out the entire language of a budget bill – introduced in the House as the “Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009” (H.R. 3590) and passed without a single opposing vote, which, given the actual bill, is not surprising – sent up by the House, replace it with the text of ObamaCare and vote on it using reconciliation procedures (which only requires a basic majority). And the resulting Charlie-Fox only passed in the House by a 219-212 vote, since more than 30 Democrats voted against.

   Since that time (Obama signed it into law on March 23, 2010), the Democrats have: a) lost the House in the 2010 midterms (64 seats changed hands in the House* and 7 in the Senate); b) lost the Senate in the 2014 midterms (12 more seats in the House and at least 8 more in the Senate, with one more election pending), raising the level of control in the House to levels not seen since Truman (the high water mark was 300-132 back during the early 1920s) and almost as high as Bush-43 during the height of his popularity in the Senate, when there were 55 GOP Senators (the high water mark in the Senate was 61-11 during Grant’s first term).

   * – the largest single shift of seats in the House since the House was created, both in terms of totals numbers and percentage of seats

2. bgbear says:

   November 19, 2014 at 2:18 pm

   You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time

   “We need to concentrate on that middle group” – Jon Gruber

3. geoffb says:

   November 20, 2014 at 10:49 am

   Earlier this week I saw this in a NYT piece.

   [I]t is difficult for too many other experts to categorically refute Mr. Gruber’s work, since he has nearly cornered the market on the technical science behind these sorts of predictions. Other models exist — built by nonprofits like the RAND Corporation or private consultancies like the Lewin Group — but they all use Mr. Gruber’s work as a benchmark, according to Jean Abraham, a health economist at the University of Minnesota and former senior economist in both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations.

   “He’s brought a level of science to an issue that would otherwise be just opinion,” Mr. Cutler says. “He’s really the only person who has been doing all this careful modeling for so long. He’s the only person you can go to for that kind of thing, which is why the White House reached out to him in the first place.”

   Mr. Obama had made health care reform a cornerstone of his campaign, and wanted to announce a credible proposal quickly after taking office. But members of the Obama administration’s transition team said they had inherited an executive branch that had vastly underinvested in modeling research on health care, especially compared to the technical modeling that had been done in areas like tax policy.

   “Creating a good model from scratch would have taken months, maybe years,” said Lawrence H. Summers, who was the director of President Obama’s National Economic Council and had advised Mr. Gruber on his dissertation when they were at Harvard.

   Mr. Gruber had already spent years researching government mandates, starting with his 1991 dissertation about how mandated employer benefits cut into workers’ wages.

   Now that makes it sound like the WH and the Democrats were using the Gruber model to tweak what they would put into the Obamacare law because Gruber’s model most accurately predicted what the CBO score would be. Gruber the genius modeler. Now today sdferr sent me a piece which throws a different light on this.

   Two well-placed sources on Capitol Hill say that the Congressional Budget Office effectively used Jonathan Gruber’s model to score Obamacare. That model favors government mandates over market competition and claims that essentially the only way to achieve a large reduction in the number of uninsured Americans is to impose an Obamacare-like individual mandate. Moreover, because the model that the CBO used in scoring Obamacare is the same one it uses today, any alternative to Obamacare that doesn’t include an individual mandate — which is to say, any conservative alternative — would be scored by the CBO as falling well short, in terms of coverage numbers, of Gruber’s preferred legislation.

   So it isn’t that his model best predicted the CBO score, his model was the one the CBO used and so the assumptions built into Gruber’s model determined what would score best in the law. The model designed what would be in the law. The model, designed by Gruber? or whoever was the law and still determines what could ever be made into a new law.

4. geoffb says:

   November 20, 2014 at 10:50 am

   I’m sorry for the long italic blockquotes but this is a bit more complex than a Tweet can hold.

5. McGehee says:

   November 20, 2014 at 11:32 am

   He rigged the game.

6. helloiamamotherlessfish says:

   November 20, 2014 at 12:53 pm

   Jerrymandering, Gruberrigging.

   Tomato, tomahto.

7. guinspen says:

   November 20, 2014 at 12:55 pm

   Sure wish I’d said that.

   …

8. guinspen says:

   November 20, 2014 at 12:57 pm

   Gerry, even.

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