Originally published November 18 2014
Obamacare architect Gruber boasts that aborting babies has saved the government billions
by J. D. Heyes
(NaturalNews) The architect of the Affordable Care Act who is the focus of much controversy following a series of admissions that the passage of President Obama's signature healthcare legislation could only be achieved by lying to the American people published a paper during the Clinton presidency noting that legalizing abortion had saved Uncle Sam $14 billion in assistance to poor mothers and cut the crime rate.
As reported by WorldNetDaily, Jonathan Gruber, an MIT professor of economics -- who wrote the paper (see it here[PDF]) with fellow economists Phillip Levine of Wellesley College and Douglas Staiger of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government -- "argued... that without the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, 'marginal children' would have been born to many poor mothers."
In addition, the trio argued that statistics indicated that such children would be 70 percent more likely to live in a single-parent home, 40 percent more likely to live in poverty, 50 percent more likely to need welfare benefits and 35 percent more likely to die as an infant.
'Intentionally obscure'
Further, journalist Stephen J. Dubner and economist Steven D. Levitt relied on Gruber's paper in their 2005 bestselling tome Freakonomics to argue that abortion legalization led to a 50-percent reduction in crime in major U.S. cities in the early 1990s.
In recent days, videos of Gruber's remarks at a University of Pennsylvania event last year regarding how his Obamacare legislation was written to be intentionally confusing to congressional bean counters and the American public surfaced, angering millions of people and sending the Obama Administration into massive spin mode. White House spokesman Josh Earnest actually blamed Republicans for Gruber's comments, though not a single GOP member voted for it in 2010. And House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who once famously remarked about Obamacare that "we have to pass it to know what's in it," denied that she even knew Gruber, though she praised his work in 2009.
During his talk at the University of Pennsylvania, Gruber told his audience that the law was intentionally misleading and obscured so that it would pass.
"Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage," Gruber said. "Call it the stupidity of the American voter, or whatever. But basically, that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass."
Republicans and other outraged critics of the massive law have seized on Gruber's comments as further proof that Democrats and the president were never honest with the American people about it. But Gruber is also now being chastised by embarrassed Obamacare allies, including former White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, who is now a political analyst for CNN. In an interview with CNN host Jake Tapper, Carney said Gruber "speaks from the ivory tower with remarkable hubris about the American voter and by extension the American Congress."
Disposing of 'marginal children'
But their denials ring hollow; The Washington Times has reported that Gruber became a multimillionaire because of Obamacare, and at the expense of taxpayers:
This is an extraordinarily lucrative enterprise in the age of Obamacare that Mr. Gruber himself brought about. Individual states have lavished taxpayer cash on Mr. Gruber in return for cookie-cutter reports that describe the impact of Obamacare for each of the several states.
Regarding his abortion paper -- a sanitized version of which was published in the Review of Economics and Statistics in 2009 -- Gruber, Levine and Staiger argued that, in permitting a larger number of "non-marginal" children, future American children would have better odds of being raised in a two-parent family, a better likelihood of graduating college and less of a chance of being on welfare.
"They qualified their argument, concluding aborting 'marginal children' would reduce future welfare costs if there are no geographic or financial restrictions to accessing government-approved and sponsored abortion at will," WND reported.
Sources:
http://www.wnd.com
http://www.nber.org[PDF]
http://www.washingtonpost.com
http://www.mitpressjournals.org
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