25 Jun 2015

Potpourri

Potpourri 18 Comments

==> Corie Stephens argues that feds honestly had no idea the states wouldn’t just roll over and enact ObamaCare exchanges. I would love to see your links to the best articles making the other side’s case, i.e. claiming that it was a typo.

==> If the claims in this post are right, the alleged “97% consensus” paper is downright fraudulent.

==> This is why I don’t post at Reason…

==> Michael Malice’s luck runs out. Tom Woods is mercifully quick in his justice.

18 Responses to “Potpourri”

  1. E. Harding says:

    #2 Holy crap! Even I didn’t think the authors would stoop so low!

    • Tel says:

      I’m going to make a guess you don’t read a whole lot of John Cook’s work?

  2. Major.Freedom says:

    #3: This is why I use VPN.

  3. Matt M says:

    I never comment at reason because their comments system is terrible and not very user-friendly at all. Ended up being pretty lucky for me!

  4. khodge says:

    Reason is not one of my regular blogs but I didn’t see any problem with that that post had that would cause you to not post there.

    • Dan says:

      He was making a crack about the government going after people who commented on Reason.

      • Bob Murphy says:

        Dan Cotterdan never realized that he would one day have to explain my jokes to people on the Internet. (He does this all the time on Facebook, khodge.)

        • Dan says:

          I’m used to it. So much of my humor is deadpan that people who don’t know me can never tell if I’m being serious or not.

          • Dan says:

            In other words, I feel your pain when your jokes miss the marks with someone and feel compelled to respond. On the bright side, my deadpan humor has come in handy. I once worked with a good friend at a restaurant and we got into a war over who could convince the other people we worked with of the most absurd “facts” about each other. I had everyone believing he had hair plugs among other nonsense stories I came up with about him.

            • Grane Peer says:

              Ha, I do the same thing. I convinced one of my coworkers that his brother was sleeping with his girlfriend I convinced another guy that our employer was using us to traffic narcotics. I got another guy to think that one of our coworkers was a DEA informant. A young kid started with us recently, too much fun to list!

        • khodge says:

          Thanks Dan & Bob. Alas, I know the problem all too well, even when I fail to catch someone else’s humor.

  5. Keshav Srinivasan says:

    I think it’s pretty clear that Congress did not intend to restrict subsidies to state-run exchanges. Apart that statement of Gruber in 2012, I’m not aware of a single Obamacare supporter or reporter who remotely hinted, at any point between the time Obamacare was proposed and the time it was enacted, that the subsidies were going to incentivize states to establish exchanges.

    As far as Jonathan Gruber goes, I think in that 2012 statement he was just misremembering things. He discusses how all in the models he did, he always made the assumption that subsidies would be available in all states, even in models that allowed for the possibility that not all states would set up exchanges:

    http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/07/gruber-it-was-just-mistake

    • Bob Murphy says:

      Well I think he’s lying, Keshav. I’m not saying I bet my life on it, but that’s what I think. If he had gone with my option #2, I would’ve reserved judgment. But there’s no way the guy in that video is hazy on what the details were, or that seeing that video a couple of years later he has no recollection of what made him speak with such confidence about it.

      He was clearly lying after he got busted on the other videos, and told the Republican congressperson that he was just trying to make himself sound smart and that there had been no deception involved. No, he got caught being frank on those other videos, realized how much damage that would cause the ACA, and so lied about it later. Same thing here, is my opinion.

      And in fact, since he did NOT go for my option #2, now I’m more sure that Option #1 is right.

      Last thing: The fact that other pro-ObamaCare people weren’t aware of this subtlety means just about nothing to me. Nobody read the legislation, not even the people who voted for it. So it doesn’t shock me that Krugman or Yglesias wouldn’t know about this.

      (Oh, in this answer, when I refer to Options #1 and #2, I’m talking about my latest post in which I put the actual video of Gruber.)

      • Keshav Srinivasan says:

        Well, isn’t the fact that his modeling always assumed that everyone gets subsidies, even in models where some states don set up their own exchange, indicative that he did genuinely believe that that everyone would get subsidies?

        Also, if this provision were meant to be an inducement to the states to set up their own exchanges, then wouldn’t you expect people to know about it? It wouldn’t be much of a threat if none of the states knew the threat exists. I assume whoever drafted the language would make some statement in the press or in a hearing that they’re incentivizing states to set up their own exchanges.

        • Bob Murphy says:

          Keshav wrote:

          Well, isn’t the fact that his modeling always assumed that everyone gets subsidies, even in models where some states don set up their own exchange, indicative that he did genuinely believe that that everyone would get subsidies?

          It’s not been established as a fact, unless you’ve gone and actually perused his models. Just because Jonathan Gruber said something after a really awkward video of him surfaces, doesn’t mean we can trust his ex post explanation. He was clearly lying to do PR after the other (more famous) videos broke, denying that he was saying in those videos what he very clearly was saying, so it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if he is lying about his modeling, knowing that Kevin Drum certainly isn’t going to fact-check him on it.

    • Tel says:

      I’m not aware of a single Obamacare supporter or reporter who remotely hinted, at any point between the time Obamacare was proposed and the time it was enacted, that the subsidies were going to incentivize states to establish exchanges.

      What they did was pretend that this was not a federal healthcare takeover, instead it was supposedly a voluntary “opt in” program on the part of the states. That’s what the provision was designed for.

      But then the states resisted, so the feds just broke their own law and decided it would be a federal healthcare takeover, then they asked for forgiveness after the fact.

      There’s a good discussion on Cato, worth a listen.

      http://feeds.cato.org/~r/CatoDailyPodcast/~5/Sw5I0wBhaUA/Supreme-Court-Backs-Obamacare-Taxes-Subsidies.mp3

  6. Tel says:

    This has been going around, don’t bother reading the words too closely (hint you can probably figure out how it ends). Just the overall coolness, how to add excitement to an economics article.

    http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-krugman-battles-austerians/

    Strangely though Bob Murphy hasn’t achieved street fighter status yet, those mainstream gatekeepers sure are tough.

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