Jonathan Gruber’s Mini-Me’s

MIT economist Jonathan Gruber got his 15 weeks of fame in 2014 when videos surfaced in which he candidly admitted to deception, and a jaundiced view of American public opinion, while promoting Obamacare as it traveled its rocky road to passage by Congress.

Actually, Accuracy in Academia has been covering Jonathan Gruber’s “mini me’s” for decades. Just last fall:

• “Once upon a time, there was a saying among the young: ‘The answer is more beer. What is the question?’” I wrote on December 8, 2014. “Substitute the word ‘government’ for the word ‘beer’ and you have what could be the rallying cry for academics today.”   “As for spurring economic growth in general, there is a near consensus among serious economists about many of the policies that are necessary,” MIT economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, and Michael Spence wrote in an article which appeared in Foreign Affairs last summer. “ The basic strategy is intellectually simple, if politically difficult: boost public-sector investment over the short and medium term while making such investment more efficient and putting in place a fiscal consolidation plan over the longer term. Public investments are known to yield high returns in basic research in health, science, and technology; in education; and in infrastructure spending on roads, airports, public water and sanitation systems, and energy and communications grids. Increased government spending in these areas would boost economic growth now even as it created real wealth for subsequent generations later.”  They never actually showed these “known high returns” nor demonstrated how the policies they outline differ from those the federal government has pursued for the past decade.

• “A recent panel discussion at CAP [the Center for American Progress] featured University of Texas sociology professor Becky Pettit who argued that ‘incarceration is deeply concentrated among men, those who are young, and those of color,’” Spencer Irvine reported on December 6, 2014. “She noted out of the 2.2 million inmates in the prison system, ‘approximately half of them are black.’ She claimed that, ‘Among young black men who drop out of high school, over a third are incarcerated on any given day.’  She did not mention that their victims outside the gates are also likely to be black.”

• Garrett Epps, a professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Baltimore, wrote in The Atlantic that: “What’s coming will be painful, frustrating, and dangerous—and it will illustrate a constitutional malfunction unforeseen in 1787. The country will survive, and it’s possible it can even make progress—but at tremendous cost in polarization and missed opportunity. The country is like a car driving with the handbrake on: Any movement forward will be accompanied by smoke and internal damage. So we might profitably put a six-month moratorium on paeans to the wisdom of the Framers,” he avers. Profitable to whom?

• “The Ebola disinformation surfaced in a Liberian newspaper on September 9, 2014, in a letter by an American professor,” Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid reported on October 28, 2014. “The “Dear World Citizens” column, by Dr. Cyril Broderick, has since been picked up by various Internet sites and “news” organizations, including Alex Jones’ Infowars, Global Research, Iranian Press TV, Information Clearing House, and something called 21^st Century Wire. Labeled by some critics as the ‘nutty professor’ and a crackpot, the professor’s ‘research profile’ claims he is president of the International Society of African Scientists. Other local and regional sources, such as ‘Face 2 Face Africa,’ described as “The Premier Pan-African Voice,” have picked up the story. One quoted Broderick as authoritatively explaining “how the deadly disease made its reappearance” through the work of the U.S. Department of Defense. In fact, however, the U.S. has led the effort to contain the Ebola outbreak, even deploying as many as 4,000 soldiers and spending $500 million to fight Ebola in West Africa. Broderick, a faculty member associated with Delaware State University, claims his sources are ‘legitimate.’”

• “Left-wing academics have made great strides: they now notice when things aren’t going well,” AIA staff writer Spencer Irvine reported on October 27, 2014. “The Rubicon they’ve yet to cross: Acknowledging that policies they have supported had anything to do with it and the fork in the road is the Center for American Progress (CAP).” At CAP last fall, “Adriana Kugler, a professor at Georgetown, pointed out that women of color tend to be part-time workers and have less work benefits as a result, such as paid vacations, sick leave and pre-ObamaCare health insurance,” Irvine reported.

And that’s just in one semester!

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