Free Republic

Johnathan Gruber is a fascist. He’s willing to put up with a little bit of private ownership but only if the government dictates private transactions. He’s more than willing to help Congress manipulate laws in order to achieve government control. Much of the hubbub over Gruber’s comments on Obamacare manipulations put the blame on him. Make no mistake, calling the American people stupid is on Gruber. However, Gruber isn’t a politician and it’s hardly surprising when an academic with no political experience doesn’t know how to play the game. Academics aren’t nearly as smart as they or the left think...

Sen. Sanders was asked about the new ACA sign up numbers on MSNBC’s The Ed Show. Sen. Sanders (I-VT) said, “It tells us that you have a program that is working well. That they have overcome the problems that they initially had. It tells me that about seventy-five percent of the people on the exchanges think that the healthcare they are getting is good, and I think this is making our Republican colleagues very nervous.” Sanders summed up the entire Republican philosophy, “What these guys want to do is to tell the American people,’Hey you think government can do something...

Jonathan Gruber was “the man” behind Obamacare, according to a former adviser to President Barack Obama. “The problem is not that Gruber helped them put Obamacare together, because he was the man,” Steve Rattner, who worked as Obama’s lead adviser in 2009 for the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry, said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “The problem is what he said in the last two weeks and how the White House has handled it,” Rattner added. Rattner said his influence was enormous. “Jonathan Gruber was, back in the day in 2009, the guru on health care,” said Rattner,...

With limited time still in power, President Barack Obama is staking his final two years on climate change, pushing the issue to the front of his agenda as he seeks to leave an imprint on the world that will endure after he's gone. It's a strategy rooted not only in Obama's long-stated concern about global warming, but also in political reality. The emphasis on climate isn't all by choice. Although Obama has long sought to rally action against climate change, White House aides say the issue has become even more attractive after the election because it's one where Obama has...

Internet users would be forced to pay a new federal tax on their monthly bills if the government approves regulations recently endorsed by President Obama, a member of the Federal Communications Commission predicts. Commissioner Mike O'Reilly addressed what's known as "net neutrality" at a Washington seminar on Friday. That law requires telecommunications companies to pay into the FCC’s “Universal Service Fund” -- and would likely require the same of Internet companies. But O'Reilly says history clearly shows that the fees would quickly be “passed off” to customers, just like they are now on monthly phone bills. “Consumers of these services...

A Massachusetts Health Connector spokeswoman rolled her eyes when asked if the Patrick administration stands by embattled board member Jonathan Gruber, insisting state officials aren’t paying attention to the national firestorm. “Some of your colleagues saw me roll my eyes,” spokeswoman Kim Haberlin told a Herald reporter who asked about Gruber during a press event. Haberlin said there are no plans for Gruber to leave the board. “No, not at this time,” she said. “We’re focused on the next person getting into coverage.” Obamacare czar Maydad Cohen, Health Connector Executive Director Jean Yang and Secretary of Health and Human Services...

President Barack Obama says the American public was not misled about certain provisions of his health care law. A newly surfaced video shows an adviser in the law's drafting, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, saying "the stupidity of the American voter" helped Democrats pass the complex legislation. Gruber made the comment in 2013 but it is adding to conservatives' current call to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

In his latest bid to ease the suffering of the poor — and upend the expectations of the papacy — Pope Francis plans to build showers for the homeless under the sweeping white colonnade of St. Peter’s Square. A homeless man sits close to where the showers are going to be built in St. Peter’s square. Photo via Josephine McKenna/RNS Related Reading VIDEO: Our Neighbors in the Pews by The Editors Left Behind by John A. Zukowski Compassion in the Stacks by Brittany Shoot Forty Shades of Green by Sean McDonagh The Rich Get Richer by Julie Polter Three showers...

WASHINGTON — President Obama will soon announce that the United States will contribute $3 billion to a new international fund intended to help the world’s poorest countries address the effects of climate change, according to a senior administration official. Mr. Obama is expected to make the announcement at a summit meeting of the Group of 20 industrial powers this weekend in Brisbane, Australia, on the heels of his landmark announcement this week that the United States and China will jointly commit to curbing greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade.

Words to live by: Thou shalt not lie. Especially when thou mess with one-sixth of the U.S. economy. And when thou art assuring Americans that thy bill won't kill their health insurance policies. Because when thou gets snared in thy intentional deceptions, there's hell to pay. These are not, though, words by which the Obama administration, Democrats in Congress and their allies sold the Affordable Care Act. We know because MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, a key architect of the act, repeatedly gloated — in video-recorded appearances — that the sponsors lied. Apologists surely will dream up more sophisticated excuses. But...

During their summit meeting in Beijing, President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China made much of their agreement to ease visa restrictions for businessmen, students and tourists. Yet when Mr. Xi was asked at a news conference if he would do the same for foreign journalists, who have had a hard time obtaining permission to work in China, he displayed little patience with such concerns. The Chinese government has regularly declined to process visas for any New York Times journalist. China, with 1.3 billion people and the world’s second-largest economy after the United States, is a major force regionally...

... It looks like a shocking instance of a onetime Obama adviser saying that the administration pulled the wool over America’s eyes in advancing major legislation. That is certainly how many conservatives are interpreting it after a video of the remarks started circulating this week. But here’s the dirty little secret: Mr. Gruber was exposing something sordid yet completely commonplace about how Congress makes policy of all types: Legislators frequently game policy to fit the sometimes arbitrary conventions by which the Congressional Budget Office evaluates laws and the public debates them. Essentially, Congress is obsessed with the government equivalent of...

As if Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts wasn’t a big enough blow to the Obama Administration’s hopes for overhauling the health care system, there was another disclosure last week that eviscerated some of the Administration’s key claims related to cost savings.    It was revealed that last June the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had awarded a no-bid contract worth nearly $300,000 to MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, the Administration’s star witness for the superior cost-containment features of health care reform.  Obama Administration officials, and most of the journalists celebrating Gruber’s findings, had neglected to mention this detail when trumpeting...

....................................... ..............Churchill notes that socialism grafts itself onto nationalism and the particular features of the nations it has infected. In Germany, the Weimar regime was destroyed and Hitler was propelled to power through national patriotism, tradition, and pride combined with discontent about inequalities of wealth. In Russia, the program of Communism was buttressed by national sentiment and imperialist aspirations. The next country Churchill mentions, in a shift that must be shocking to those who wish to read the article as simply a pro-New Deal argument, is the United States, which he says has experienced developments similar to those inspired by...

In addition to CBO, MIT's Jon Gruber has also done a study on premiums. And what does he conclude? He concludes, using Congressional Budget Office data, the Senate bill could mean people purchasing individual insurance would save every year $200 for single coverage and $500 for family coverage in 2009 dollars. Most people think he is one of the best outside experts. He has big computer models. He takes the CBO data and, in some respects, he has helped CBO by giving some information to CBO that it otherwise does not have. Mr. Gruber also points out that people with...

Socialism has embraced Barbie, just in time for Christmas. Mothers, grandmothers and beaming little girls are grabbing armfuls of the dolls in toy stores across Caracas, taking advantage of the government's order that large chains sell the plastic figurines at fire-sale prices during the holiday shopping season. Within minutes, the entire stock was gone, with the dolls selling for as little as 250 bolivars — $2.50 at the widely used black market conversion rate. Venezuela's socialist government has long imposed price caps on essential products, from milk to laundry detergent, and threatened merchants who hoard goods or sell them at...

The Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority (PRA) has received court approval of its seizure of the art studio of James Dupree. It plans to bulldoze it and sell the land to a private grocery chain. Despite renovating a dilapidated warehouse and converting it into an attractive and bustling center for artistic expression, Dupree’s property rights are being sacrificed to the PRA’s vision of what the City needs. “It’s a question of whether the rights of the collective community should take precedence over the rights of a single individual,” PRA Executive Director Ed Covington explained. “Far more people will eat the food sold...

There is a famous thought experiment called the trolley problem, and it goes like this: A runaway trolley is headed toward five people bound on the tracks. You are standing before the switch that could divert it onto another track, where it would kill only one person. Do you pull the switch? The trolley problem is the most flattering possible way to think about the conservative movement’s fanatical commitment to repealing Obamacare. If they pull the switch and repeal Obamacare, or if they persuade five Republican Supreme Court justices to cripple it, they will spare America from the evils of...

Warren was honored Sunday by the ACLU in Beverly Hills along with Participant's Jim Berk, Cyndi Lauper and Cameron Strang Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, regarded by many progressive Democrats as their party's alternative to Hillary Clinton, told attendees at an ACLU gala in Beverly Hills on Sunday that "economic opportunity is slipping further and further out of reach" for average Americans. She said bluntly: "We have to face it: The game is rigged in Congress."

Economic debate since the financial crisis and Great Recession has often focused on issues like monetary policy, fiscal stimulus, unemployment and financial regulation. Yes, these are all important, but in the future we will need to pay much more attention to a relatively neglected field: population economics. Developed countries that can absorb new immigrants at a modest cost should have relatively bright futures. They will help enable a rebalancing of population that will help the entire planet. In contrast, developed countries with relatively inflexible notions of national identity, and thus with strict immigration policies, may shrink in population and lose...