Just a reminder, the stupid people the dude talked about, weren’t ACA supporters. They were the ideologues that would break down into histrionics at the word, “tax.”
The reason the law had to be packaged as it was, with a tax changed into a penalty, was because of the “stupidity” of the histrionic anti-tax crowd. It was political cover.
Remember, the penalty was widely discussed and known. It was just called a penalty. To hear the conservative narrative hitting now, you’d assume they hid the penalty. No, it was in plain sight, it just was called a *penalty *instead of a tax.
The House bill and the Senate bill had enough differences between them that it required a reconciliation effort. That would be a substantial difference.
IIRC, it was the House vote on November 7, 2009 that had to be delayed until a complete copy of the bill could be printed and presented on the House floor. I remember watching the debacle on CSPAN.
This isn’t how I read it - in fact I read it just the opposite. No one on the right voted for the ACA. Gruber’s characterization of hiding what was in the bill was not aimed at opponents of taxes. Those people didn’t vote for ACA. The people that Gruber was referring to were those that were supporters, but only supporters because of the mischaracterization of the ACA.
Unless you’re saying that the ACA opponents would have opposed it MORE if the impacts of the bill were more clearly laid out.
Yes, but inflaming millions of people even further than the round-the-clock FOX News disinformation campaign (death panels, government takeover, socialism, etc) would have made it harder. There are plenty of otherwise reasonable people who take issue with taxes.
I’d assume that most partisan Democrats would be for it regardless. Most partisan Republicans would be against it. It was to provide cover from the largely casually informed wad in the middle that would only make passing it harder. Political label wrangling is a fact of life. That’s why the law is called, “The Patriot Act” and not the, “You Weren’t Using Those Freedoms Anyway, Act.”
I would say that their passions would have been inflamed, yea. Some people were only marginally against the ACA. Adding the tax bogeyman would push some number into Deathpanel For Freedom mode while at the same time pushing some marginal supporters into opposition.
In reality the penalty and the tax are functionally identical. Which is why, I’d say, he’s calling the necessity of labeling it as such, the result of people’s stupidity.
First, at the risk of damning with faint praise, I appreciate that you’re making actual points, not trying to turn the word “dude” into a scandal and the adjectival form of “fallacy” into a gotcha moment. That’s cool.
Second, here’s a contemporaneous account of that November 7 vote. There’s no mention made of what you’re talking about. Can you find a news article that discusses the specifics? Because as I said, my recollection is that this objection to the bill’s passage wasn’t a good-faith objective, instead was a cheap gotcha–there was nothing voted on in the final bill that hadn’t been discussed ad nauseum. If you can show me an account that goes over why this was a specific problem, not a “ha ha, you forgot to print out a copy of the bill we’ve been debating,” I’d love to see it.
The way I read it is somewhere in the middle. It sounds to me like hiding what’s in the bill is aimed at people who like the idea of health care reform but don’t like the idea of taxes, and he’s saying that hiding the taxes made it easier for them to swallow health care reform. He talked about “voters,” not “congresspeople,” in the bits I’ve read. I think he was saying that writing it this way won over some anti-tax pro-reform moderates, people who held a position he considered to be self-contradictory anyway (inasmuch as he believed that increasing taxes was vital to reform), so he didn’t mind lying to them about one part of the bill.
Again, I don’t think that’s okay. I don’t think deceiving people in order to get votes is good practice. I don’t think suggesting government-encouraged euthanasia MIGHT result from the bill is good practice. I think there should be more transparency.
But I also don’t think this is a sign of a cackling cabal behind ACA that planned the whole thing out deliberately to trick people into voting for something they hated.
Are you implying that opponents of the ACA held back in their opposition? That’s not how I remember it. I think your read on who the folks that Gruber was referring to is in error and is precisley the opposite of how you are interpreting the statement. If anyone, it was regarding the casual supporters of ACA who may have flipped their position, casual opponents of ACA who may have opposed HARDER, and probably certain congress folks who were in less safe seats.
None of those people are ‘the ideologues that would break down into histrionics at the word, “tax.”’ as you say.
Okay, you know that praise I just gave you? I’m taking it back: at this point, your continuing misrepresentation of Pelosi, ignoring the context of the speech (in which she made fairly specific points about what would be in the bill) speaks very poorly of you.
Wow–so you think that when I went from saying the argument was a logical fallacy to saying it was fallacious, I was changing from describing it as a logical fallacy to describing it as a plain fallacy?
You really have an interesting way of making your arguments.
Well you initially said “logical fallacy” and when I pointed out that it was not a logical fallacy, you chose not to either back up your initial assertion or retract it. Instead you wormed the word “fallacy” in without the “logical” modifier and tried to slide it by that way, so I noted that those were not the same.
This is where a reality check would be helpful. Did anyone else read my talking about “fallacious slippery slopes” as some sort of sneaky way of talking about fallacies that are not logical fallacies? Am I really so unclear a writer as that? I feel like I’m in Bizarro land.
But speaking of having “nothing to do with the actual post”, when I responded to post #211 it said something completely different from what it says now. At that time it read: “That is not a distinction I was making; it’s a distinction that you’re making in your head in order to say I’m changing my position. I have not changed the way I’ve used the term “fallacy” from the noun form to the adjectival form. You really have an interesting way of making your arguments, dude.”.
I see it’s now been edited to say something else, and the answer to the questioon that now appears is: yes, I do.
Well then why not just back up your claim that a fallacious slippery slope is a “logical fallacy”?
However, unless they are coming up through the sewer and biting people on the ass, Jindal wouldn’t be lying when he was addressing that concern.
The point is that what came about was unrelated to the specific scenario he was trying to address. The claims made by conservatives was that Obama was going to institute a government take over of Health care and form it into a single payer system in which everyone’s healthcare system would change to a government run plan, with government bureaucrat would tell you that you can’t have the procedure your doctor prescribed. Obama wanted to say that wasn’t going to happen, and he was right. However he worded it in such a way that for it to be true, no health plans could change ever. Something it is not within his power to guarantee.
why people view this as more of a problem than an health insurance bureaucrat, whose only goal is to make a profit at your expense, telling you that you can’t have the procedure your doctor prescribed I will never know.
Obama worded it in such a way that for it to be true, no health plans could change as a result of his law. This is how it was intended to be understood and how it was understood by a lot of people (who weren’t paying attention, for the most part).
Nobody understood it to mean that health plans couldn’t drop people for reasons unrelated to the law, and no one would be blaming Obama if they did so.
It’s pretty hard to make sense of, IMO. Normally I just disregard those lines of discussion because they are not productive, but it seems like you are actually interested. So for some odd reason I decided to read this tangent more closely. Here is how it seems to me. In post #181, F-P says:
[quote]
F-P was referring to arguments that say, if X then maybe A and if A then maybe B. Those are slippery slope arguments. Sometimes they are fallicious arguments, and sometimes not. It depends on the content. Your statement seemed to imply that all such arguments were fallicious. Here is the context:
I think that’s the main point of contention. It’s both a mix of the specific Boehner example, and a general discussion on whether slippery slope arguments can be both fallicious and non-fallicious in context.
For the record, I don’t think Boehner’s scenario of recommended euthanasia or whatever he was saying will come to pass. But I do believe that the ACA increases the likleyhood of the government determining what level of care is appropriate and in some cases that could result in less care being available than would be sans the ACA.
I think you may need to go back a bit further than that, for the broader context of the discussion, to see the full relevance.
The difference between a fallacious argument and a logical fallacy, is (to quote my earlier Wiki link) “In philosophy, a formal fallacy is a pattern of reasoning that is always wrong. This is due to a flaw in the logical structure of the argument which renders the argument invalid. A formal fallacy is contrasted with an informal fallacy, which may have a valid logical form and yet be unsound because one or more premises are false.”
A fallacious slippery slope argument would be where someone claims such-and-such might ensue when in reality there’s little or no chance that it will. So the argument that a given slippery slope argument is fallacious depends on the premise (that such-and-such might ensue) being incorrect. If OTOH, the very form of the argument was incorrect, then it would not depend on an the premise being wrong.
In the case of Boehner’s slippery slope argument, his premise is that euthanasia might ensue. This could either be true or untrue. I would guess it’s most likely untrue. LHOD is sure of it. Which is all fine. But at the end of the day, it’s all a matter of opinion. Boehner is an experienced legislator and entitled to his opinion. Let’s assume he’s wrong and his argument is fallacious.
But the context here is not whether Boehner’s concerns were valid. The context here is LHOD’s claim that Boehner’s statement about possible euthanasia amounts to a lie about the ACA. To that end, there’s a big difference between simply claiming his statement was a fallacy - which ultimately boils down to a dispute about the validity of his premise, essentially a dispute about likely outcomes - and claiming that it’s a “logical fallacy”, which would be independent of it. By calling it a “logical fallacy”, LHOD significantly strengthened his case that Boehner was lying about the ACA, since he would be saying something that fundamentally made no sense independent of the validity of his premise. In my estimation, that’s why he chose to call it that, and at any rate that’s why I challenged it. Because it’s incorrect, and there’s no flaw in the logic of that argument, only a dispute about the premise.
When challenged about this, LHOD did not acknowledge this, but simply switched to using a more supportable term. And here we are.
You’re telling me. I’m not really invested in it so much as I have an unfortunate tendency to go after low-hanging fruit arguments, no matter how absurd they are. I thought what I was saying was very straightforward, and I’m astonished that anyone thinks switching from describing an argument as a logical fallacy to describing it as fallacious is a significant switch. Setting aside the objections to what I was saying, was that actually a confusing switch? Did it seem to you like I was changing what I was saying?
Or actually, never mind–as you say, it’s not productive, nor is it especially interesting. Must resist low-hanging fruit.
