Neil Irwin, writing in the New York Times, mounts the everybody-does-it defense of Gruber. John Sexton makes some good points about that defense at Breitbart. Irwin claims that Gruber was expressing “frustration” about the way politics, or politics these days, leads people to obscure the true costs of their legislative agendas; like Sexton, I don’t detect the frustration in the remarks.

A few additional points:

1) If it’s true that costs are routinely downplayed or hidden in legislative debates, as I suspect it is, that seems like something worth lamenting. It also seems like something the press should be covering, or rather uncovering, in the course of those debates. If everybody does it, that is, maybe the lesson journalists should take is not that it’s no big deal but that it’s a very big deal.

2) Irwin is right that the disguising of costs is a bipartisan practice. But it is not a politically neutral one, in that it tends to facilitate the expansion of the welfare state.

3) Which shows the point of certain types of restraints on government power even when there are ways around those restraints. During the debate over the constitutionality of the individual mandate, for example, it was sometimes claimed that it would be perverse for courts to rule that the federal government cannot order individuals to buy insurance when it can order people to pay tax dollars that it then uses to buy insurance. A no-commandeering rule (or an extremely-limited-commandeering rule), though, keeps the government from taking costs off budget in this manner and may make some government designs politically impossible.