Posted on 11/15/2016 10:06:55 AM PST by HarleyD
Jonathan Gruber, a well-known architect of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, caused a ruckus two years ago after he was caught on tape saying “the stupidity of the American voter led us to hide Obamacare’s true costs from the public.” He told the FOX Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo that CEOs are wrong about Obamacare.
The MIT professor sparked a heated debate with Bartiromo after she stated that “businesses are not hiring workers because the legislation is too expensive.”
Gruber had a different take:
“Please don’t use the word ‘fact’ because you’re not saying facts, you’re saying antidotes.”
“I’ll tell you what is a fact,” said Bartiromo. “A fact is economic growth is 2% or lower and the fact is, one of the reasons that economic growth is as low as it is, is because businesses are not hiring workers and not doing activity because of the cost of Obamacare. That is a fact. Do you dispute economic growth?” she asked.
“Economic growth is as rapid as it’s been in eight years…We’re coming out of recession and Obamacare is irrelevant to economic growth. Please, there is no evidence at all, you are totally making a non-facts-based argument,” answered Gruber.
After a back and forth over his comments during the academic conference two years ago, which he said were “taken out of context,” Gruber maintained that “doesn’t excuse” Bartiromo from “denying true facts.”
“All I need are 10 CEOs to come on this show and tell me that’s the reason and then it becomes fact,” said Bartiromo.
“Who cares if some CEO comes on the show and tells you that’s the reason? Look at the data,” said Gruber.
“I don’t need data when I have the CEO telling me, ‘I’m not adding workers because of the cost of Obamacare.’
(Excerpt) Read more at foxbusiness.com ...
Businesses are sitting on a record amount of cash. They aren’t spending it because they don’t like to take risks. They want certainty. When the president can fire an executive and take over his company, GM, or decree against long standing law who will take a haircut, the lenders or the borrowers, then they won’t invest. They won’t hire. They won’t expand. They will sit back and wait for the rule of law to return. Once Trump shows he believes in laws instead of government by personality the companies will start investing and hiring. (Then, all the money that Obama loaded into the economy will cause inflation like we haven’t seen since Germany in the ‘20’s.)
“Well Maria, that is absolutely wrong. That’s not how you consider data,” he retorted.
Well, Gruber may have a point. The testimony of 10 CEOs may not be how he considers data in his parochial and pedantic ivory tower wonky world existence.
In the more practical real world the rest of us are struggling in, however, it does define reality
On a more pertinent matter, why is this guy not under indictment for defrauding the American taxpayer
Antidotal evidence: Obama is repudiated and everyone but the mentally ill feel better.
I’d say the odds are about 50-50 RE: him actually said it vs. some “communications” major not knowing how to use the English language.
Gruber is engaging in sophistry. What a statist, crypto-fascist prick he is.
In macro economics, it is very difficult to prove direct correlation. You can’t ask millions of people why they made one choice over another.
But - we can know many things, via A PRIORI logic. For example, we believe the inverse relationship of price vs. demand to be true. Therefore, if the cost of autos rise, we can reasonably assume that all else being equal, demand for autos will decline. Economists create complex models on exactly this basis.
Conversely, if you put a high Obamacare tax and heavy regulations on new employment, if companies most effected stop hiring, you can easily infer that as a cause.
Denying "true facts" beats putting forth "false facts" any day...
There is no data that can directly link macro job growth/business investment statistics to any specific policy, pro or con, because the model would be extremely complex and there are an extreme number of independent variables that would also play a part, as well as a huge number of poorly understood mechanisms through which they work. This is not science yet, much as with global warming models.
Gruber is just blowing smoke.
Obama does not control the money supply.
Obama does not control the money supply.
Yes, because he’s an MIT professor and consultant to corrupt democrats. So he’s brilliant even if he mangles the language.
Jonathan Gruber best be STFU’ing, IMO. He was under contract for multiple state and government agencies for providing essentially the same work, IMO. To me as a long time FAR subcontractor, he’s got a lot of ‘splaining to do. First thing I’d start with is a full audit of any state or government grants, contracts or sole-source purchase orders he received while at MIT for this ‘brilliance’ in his Obamacare consulting and make him start proving the hours charged matched up with the actual time sheets and hours logged by the people he (and possibly MIT) were billing the government.
My be it that it would all fall apart in the first few days with a good forensic financial auditor familiar with the FARS.
“Anecdotes” of the sort described do state facts. They are not systematic data, but they are facts. If the CEOs are leaders of major corporations, then the “anecdotes” collectively are strong evidence of a trend. Gruber is a lying lightweight.
“how stupid Jonathan Gruber can be and shows how the value of common sense over a degree from MIT.”
Gruber you’re a genius, anecdote not antidote.
Okay, it isn’t the president directly, but the government. The money supply has grown out of control since 2008. Here is a Forbes article on the subject. We will have another recession because of this.
Monetary authorities across the world have poured out huge quantities of money to the point of even negative interest rates. Yet, despite this there has been minimal inflation and economic growth.
What is happening so that this vast money supply has not been economically productive? This is reminiscent of the 30s where monetary policy seemed to fail.
Monetary authorities across the world have poured out huge quantities of money to the point of even negative interest rates. Yet, despite this there has been minimal inflation and economic growth.
What is happening so that this vast money supply has not been economically productive? This is reminiscent of the 30s where monetary policy seemed to fail.
I wish Maria had called him out on those suppositions, after all costs "would have been higher" is not a fact, one could argue costs would have been lower using a different model.
I caught it this morning. Flashes of Gruber’s patented Obama Regime (TM) smugness.
I was yelling at my TV set!!!
The antidote for anecdotes is getting rid of Obamacare!
“What is happening so that this vast money supply has not been economically productive?”
A number of things have combined for the perfect economic storm. Technology has overcome some of the older economics that says cheap labor rules manufacturing. You can get a machine or a program to do almost anything that formerly took either specialized knowledge or an hourly worker. This has resulted in much less employment at the same time governments are forcing employers to pay more to have employees in the form of taxes, like unemployment “insurance” and medical costs. At the same time we hit a depression with mostly liberal governments. Liberal governments are, by their nature, anti-capitalist. Companies are sitting on their investment capital waiting for the return of law so governments won’t sweep in and take their profits. In American companies alone there is an estimated fifteen trillion dollars sitting in cash waiting for Obama to leave office. Other factors are a general contraction in the world economy and a huge over investment in infrastructure and capacity in places like China. This will drive down prices and investment for the next fifty years. (China can make more steel, for example, than the entire rest of the world. What does that do to prices and investment in steel mills in, say America or Canada?) At the same time the middle east is on fire and flooding the world with new immigrants who know nothing that can make them productive. This will hold down employment, along with the Hispanic rush to American shores, for decades.
In short, there are too many unqualified people, too much infrastructure, too many already built structures in the US and China, so where can the economy begin to recover? Manufacturing? Once you have a car, two cars, three cars and two, three or four TV’s and everybody has an iPhone, what do you manufacture?
On top of that we are just entering an era of robotics. Oh, joy.
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