Grubers snow job will hit Colorado

COMMENTS

By Bill Hugenberg - Thursday, November 20, 2014

Just in case any of Wagners readers are actually interested in facts:

Explainer: What Gruber meant when he said if CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies, by Fact Checker Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, (November 19, 2014).

This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, captured on videotape.

What did Gruber mean when he uttered this words in a now-infamous video that has inflamed hostility to the ACA?

This is a bit of a wonky subject, but we think it is worth explaining, because commentators on both the right and the left have jumped to the wrong conclusion. They assumed Gruber was discussing the fact that the administration had not described penalties for failing to get insurance as taxes, even though the Supreme Court later said Obamacare was constitutional because the individual mandate was indeed a tax.

But thats not correct.

The Facts:

First, from the CBOs perspective, the mandate penalty called in the law a shared responsibility payment was always deemed to be revenue. It did not matter what marketing label it received from politicians; the mandate was considered an involuntary payment, and thus would be considered government revenue. (An example of a voluntary payment is deciding to pay a fee to visit a national park. Those fees are considered an offset of government expenses, as opposed to revenues.)

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Grubers snow job will hit Colorado