Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Democrats are trying to sell their health reform plan by claiming that it will reduce the deficit. Apart from it being a terrible strategy to draw attention to our already out-of-control deficits, it is an absurdly inaccurate claim. The Congressional Budget Office has released a report directly contradicting this claim by showing that the proposal would add around $89 billion to budget deficits in its first 10 years. Deficits would increase dramatically in the following years.
Furthermore, Democrats are outright misleading the American public by advertising the cost of their plan to be only $849 billion over its first 10 years. According to the CBO analysis, only 1 percent of the costs will have even started to accumulate during the first 4 of those 10 years, so the “first 10 years” metric is misleading in itself. When taking a more honest look at the costs, the CBO’s numbers read quite differently (from the New York Post):
As the CBO analysis indicates, the bill’s real 10-year costs would start in 2014. And in its true first decade (2014 to 2023), CBO projects the bill’s costs to be $1.8 trillion — double the price Reid is advertising.
And that’s even though the CBO optimistically assumes the government-run “public option” wouldn’t cost a cent.
Over this same 10-year span, the 2,074-page bill would hike taxes and fines on Americans by $892 billion — more than the alleged price of the bill.
Why then are we adding more entitlement programs that we cannot afford? How are we going to pay for this? Of course, the answer is, and has been for some time, to simply borrow more from other countries like China (from the National Review):
Consider next the matter of debt. Obama inherited the Bush budget deficits — and then drove them through the roof. Indeed, he is on schedule not only to run up consecutive trillion-dollar-plus annual shortfalls, but also in his tenure nearly to match the aggregate debt piled up by all previous administrations combined.
A large portion of the new Obama borrowing has to be covered abroad, mostly through Chinese and Japanese purchase of U.S. government bonds.
The Obama administration expects to borrow yearly hundreds of billions of dollars from the Chinese to expand American health care. In some sense, therefore, 400 to 500 million Chinese — most of them without much access to even rudimentary medicine, doctors, and hospitals — will be working overtime to loan Americans enough money to ensure universal access to hip replacements, gastric bypasses, and flu shots.
Cut through the soaring rhetoric: We are left with an America that assumes the world’s less well-off will directly subsidize our own better-off.
No wonder that Obama has cooled his rhetoric on Chinese smoky coal plants, Tibet, mercantile trade policies, and human rights. All such idealism falls before America’s voracious appetite for borrowed cash.
Obama’s Entitled America
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Democrats are trying to sell their health reform plan by claiming that it will reduce the deficit. Apart from it being a terrible strategy to draw attention to our already out-of-control deficits, it is an absurdly inaccurate claim. The Congressional Budget Office has released a report directly contradicting this claim by showing that the proposal would add around $89 billion to budget deficits in its first 10 years. Deficits would increase dramatically in the following years.
Furthermore, Democrats are outright misleading the American public by advertising the cost of their plan to be only $849 billion over its first 10 years. According to the CBO analysis, only 1 percent of the costs will have even started to accumulate during the first 4 of those 10 years, so the “first 10 years” metric is misleading in itself. When taking a more honest look at the costs, the CBO’s numbers read quite differently (from the New York Post):
Why then are we adding more entitlement programs that we cannot afford? How are we going to pay for this? Of course, the answer is, and has been for some time, to simply borrow more from other countries like China (from the National Review):