Jonathan Gruber, Voter 'Stupidity', and Immigration

By John Miano on November 17, 2014

The story of Jonathan Gruber's videotaped commentary on Obamacare sheds light on the immigration debate.

Gruber is an MIT professor of economics who collected $400,000 of taxpayer dollars to come up with the plan for Obamacare. Gruber later appeared in a video in which he described the deception used to mislead the American people on the legislation. Gruber describes the how the bill was intentionally written in a tortured way to mislead the public, how "a lack of transparency is a huge political advantage", and refers to the "stupidity of the American voter".

In this response to the video, Gruber has dismissed the statements, made at an academic conference, as "off the cuff". Apparently lying comes as naturally to Gruber as his arrogance. More videos of him making similar comments have appeared.

It is only natural the American media would want this story to go away. It's not the American people who are stupid. The truly stupid ones are the American media, who refused to look at and cover the reality of the Obamacare bill.

It is not just Obamacare.

Look at how the lobbyist establishment in Washington made buffoons out of the media on S.744. They produced a convoluted, 180,000-word bill that takes the tangle of immigration law we have now and makes it more convoluted. (For comparison, the entire immigration system was set up in 15,000 words in the Immigration Act of 1952 and radically transformed in 6,000 words in the Immigration Act of 1965.)

If the media had functional intelligence, they would have reacted in unison to a 180,000-word "reform" bill in unison: "THIS IS NUTS."

The lobbyist establishment knew that all they had to do was provide a short, misleading bill summary and that the lazy media would read no further than that.

In the mind of the American ignorant media, support of S.744 became "being in favor of immigration reform" and opposition to S.744 became "anti-immigration reform".

All lobbyists have to do to get a bill past the American media is make it very long, very convoluted, and misleading. Just provide short summary so reporters do not have to do any real work. It will not be long before these summaries become comic books.

Gruber has taught America a class on why "comprehensive immigration reform" does not reform immigration, why banking reform does not reform banking, and why campaign finance reform does not reform campaign finance.

This provides yet another example of why watching a network newscast only makes you misinformed.