Was Grubber in on it too?
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Rep. Schakowsky's husband, Robert Creamer, used to be the leader of Citizen Action/Illinois. He also founded its predecessor, Illinois Public Action, in which Ms. Schakowsky served as Program Director. He runs a political consulting firm, the Strategic Consulting Group, which lists ACORN and the SEIU among its clients and which made $541,000 working for disgraced former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich.
Creamer resigned from Citizen Action/Illinois after the FBI began investigating him for bank fraud and tax evasion at Illinois Public Action. He was convicted in 2006 and sentenced to five months in federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, plus eleven months of house arrest.
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(From HuffPo) :
Robert Creamer has been a political organizer and strategist for four decades. He and his firm, Democracy Partners, work with many of the country's most significant issue campaigns. He was one of the major architects and organizers of the successful campaign to defeat the privatization of Social Security. He has been a consultant to the campaigns to end the war in Iraq, pass universal health care, pass Wall Street reform, change America's budget priorities and enact comprehensive immigration reform. He has also worked on hundreds of electoral campaigns at the local, state and national level — and served as a consultant to the DNC and President Obama's campaigns in 2008 and 2012. Creamer is married to Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky from Illinois. Arianna Huffington calls his book, Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, a master's class in electoral politics.
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(From Petterico) :
Because it's the number-crunching that allowed the law's authors to write it in a way that would fool the CBO and the American people. And he was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to do this. .....
As the agency put it, "Dr. Gruber developed a proprietary statistically sophisticated micro-simulation model that has the flexibility to ascertain the distribution of changes in health care spending and public and private sector health care costs due to a large variety of changes in health insurance benefit design, public program eligibility criteria, and tax policy."
The model, the Gruber Microsimulation Model, is the coin of the realm, in large part because it is similar to the model used by the Congressional Budget Office. That means administration policy-makers could predict with reasonable certainty how CBO would score legislation. Given that legislation in Washington often falls or rises depending on the CBO score, that made this model a very powerful tool for administration officials.
So it's clear that part of his job was to disguise the cost of the plan by running models similar to what CBO runs. Remember when he said that "this bill was written in a tortured way to make sure" the Congressional Budget Office "did not score the mandate as taxes"? He was right there with the lawmakers, crunching numbers and working with them to make sure that the language of the law was "tortured" to take advantage of what he calls "the stupidity of the American voter."