Opinion Not Fact

Written by an obviously pro life, staunch Republican, the Townhall article “Who Had the Worst Year? Jonathan Gruber” explores two separate events in the political career of Jonathan Gruber, the man who is largely responsible for penning Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Earlier this year, I wrote a post on Gruber’s misfortunate statements surrounding the ACA’s semi-secretive policies, specifically his quote stating that his team used deliberat confusion in the ACA’s wording in order to get it passed. He bluntly and boldly expressed that the general public was too dumb to pass it without this deliberate confusion.

Obviously Gruber is out of touch with the general public and puts his fellow wealthy Americans on a higher pedestal than the average citizen. But what he stated with the ACA isn't some new tricky policy maker’s tactic. Overly wordy and confusing text is a classic way that politicians pass laws. Gruber was frankly just tactless enough to say it. 

Mona Charen smartly uses the current situation with the Affordable Care Act to serve her own agenda, the battle against abortion.  

Charen re-dissects a 10 year old best seller that raised plenty of controversy in 2005. Not so shockingly, she reveals that Jonathan Gruber was a main contributor to the chapter that investigated the correlation to abortion and crime. Gruber (and others) decided that the legalization of abortions had an overall positive influence on the nation, economically, morally, socially, etc. He used concrete (and impressive) numbers to describe just how well off our nation is because most aborted children came from backgrounds more susceptible to crime, poverty, and health problems. He argued that because less of these “lower class Americans” were brought into the world, our nation is better off. 

Not only are these statements highly offensive to low income Americans, but they are inconclusive. When dealing with variables like human life, one cannot predict a 14 billion dollar welfare savings when the life in question never made it to become an American citizen. You cant say you saved money on something that never came into being. Just like you cant predict these substantial savings and lower crime rates and higher test scores, you cant predict that every child would have been a nuisance to society as Gruber implies. How can anyone know whether they had just aborted the next Walt Disney or Albert Einstein or Mahatma Gandhi? 

Whats even more disappointing? Charen uses the same tactics she chastises Jonathan Gruber for. By writing this piece in such a one sided way, she evades fact with opinion and hides her readers from the pure truth of the matter. I wish that I could have decided to agree with Mona Charen on my own, rather than being force fed highly conservative, one sided, and filtered information. Regardless of what I do or do not agree with when it comes to Jonathan Gruber and his skewed comparison of abortion and economics, this text is not a piece of journalism, rather a highly close minded piece of opinion.