Monthly Archives: November 2014

Another Installment of the Obama Recovery

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The number of part-time workers who’d rather work full time remains heavily depressed. Here are some numbers, via Nick Timiraos in The Wall Street Journal.

  • 3 million full-time workers hired just this year, but the number of full-time workers is still around 2 million shy of the level before the recession began in 2007
  • number of workers who are part time for economic reasons is 4.5% of the civilian workforce, down from a high of 5.9% in 2010 but well above the 2.7% average in the decade preceding the recession

Yeah, we’re doing wonderfully well. Sure.

To Gruber

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We’ve seen now a number of instances where Jonathon Gruber, MIT economist and Obamacare architect, is on record as having said we Americans are too stupid to understand Democrat policies and that it’s entirely appropriate for Democrats to lie to us in order to get their policies enacted.

We’ve seen Gruber express regret over his choice of words while explicitly, in a Ronan Farrow interview, standing by his underlying principles: we’re dumb, and it’s OK to lie to us in the furtherance of the greater Liberal good.

We’ve also seen the Democratic Party leadership—indeed, nearly all Democrat politicians—be utterly silent on the matter. By their broad, steadfast silence, they demonstrate that not only do these Democrats condone Gruber’s characterizations and view of lying, they consider these two things, the stupidity of Americans and the propriety of lying to us, to be core principles of the Democratic Party.

Their silence, though, isn’t quite universal. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) has come out to deny knowing Jonathon Gruber.

She claimed she doesn’t know who he is, and that he didn’t help write the law. “Let’s put him aside[.]”

Never mind that then-Majority Leader Pelosi extensively cited Gruber’s pseudo-analysis of Obamacare while it was being developed.

Never mind that then-Majority Leader Pelosi cited Gruber by name as well as cited his “analysis” in a press conference she held while Obamacare was being developed.

In short, the Democratic Party, through their national spokesman, Congressman Pelosi, are Grubering the whole sordid affair.

Democratic Party Principle

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A couple days ago, one of Obamacare’s primary architects, Jonathan Gruber, said this about the need for the tactics used in order to get the thing passed.

This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in—you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed…. Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass…. Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.

Despicable as that is, though, what really bothers me are two other things.

In a subsequent interview with MSNBC‘s Ronan Farrow, Gruber had this exchange with Farrow regarding those remarks:

“Do you stand by the comments in that video?,” MSNBC host Ronan Farrow asked Gruber, referring to a video of Gruber explaining how a lack of transparency helped Obamacare pass into law.

“The comments in the video were made at an academic conference,” Gruber said. “I was speaking off the cuff and I basically spoke inappropriately and I regret having made those comments.”

Notice that: Gruber regrets the remarks, but he does not at all regret the underlying principle he espoused. He stands by his claim that Americans are too stupid to understand the issues at hand, and he stands by his claim that it’s entirely appropriate to lie to us in order to get his way.

The other thing that bothers me is the lack of senior Democratic Party officials’ repudiation of Gruber’s underlying principle. I’ve not seen even any rank and file Democrat repudiating it. Apparently, this is a principle of the Democratic Party at large—we’re dumb, and it’s OK to lie to us to get past the impediment to their policy enactment that our dumbness presents.

Anything to Avoid Controversy

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The Montgomery County school board voted Tuesday to eliminate all references to religious holidays on school calendars, beginning in the 2015-16 school year. That includes Christmas and Easter, as well as Jewish holidays like Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah.

Their excuse? The board superintendent, Joshua Starr, said the board should remove all religious holiday references because local Muslim leaders had requested equal billing for Eid al-Adha.

The Muslim leaders’ request might hold water were there a significant number of Muslim students in the district. However, in response to these leaders’ own request that “families…keep students home on Eid al-Adha,” the absentee rate on the appointed day wasn’t different from any other day’s absentee rate.

Aside from that, though, this board simply chose to surrender the community’s Judeo-Christian heritage in order to avoid controversy.

What lesson is these folks’ timidity teaching those children?

Why Is This Bad?

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Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen said Friday the central bank could trigger some financial turbulence when it starts raising short-term interest rates from near zero, where they have been pinned for six years.

The Fed will try to limit such volatility by communicating its interest rate plans clearly, Ms Yellen said….

She’s nominally talking about the volatility arising from the Fed not being entirely clear about its market moves monetary policy strategy in order to avoid “disrupting” financial markets, but she’s really talking about volatility throughout our economy, not only the financial markets.

Democracies, especially republican democracies, are at their noisiest when they’re at their most robust. So, too, are economies at their freest and most robust when they’re at their noisiest. It is, after all, the creative destruction of a free market that creates the broadest opportunity and the broadest prosperity. It is exactly that creative destruction that is stifled by a government that sits on and suppresses market volatility.