>> It seems to me that it makes sense to build up revenues to insure that the bill doesn't run up debt the first year its in operation. Whether it will run up debt after 10, 15 or 20 years is yet to be seen. You are assuming it will.....thats your nature......it doesn't come as a surprise. And the frustrating part about it is that it will be very hard to calculate the cost benefits it does create because those are difficult to measure.
It is really interesting to me that Ezra Klein, who led the media's charge on getting health care reform passed, finally managed to do an analysis a few days before the legislation passed.
Strangely, that analysis disappeared from the Internet a couple days later. Why? He blew it. He stated the facts for a change.
Klein, a cheerleader from the outset, had long maintained that reform wouldn't cost anything. Then, strangely, he reported that if revenue and expense were evaluated midway through the first decade, the run-rate for the loss was about $100 Billion/year (thus, 10 years = $1 Trillion). Thing is, he just sort of let that slip out in passing, in no way the focus of the article. After a few readers leveled blistering responses on his blog, the article was gone.
Some smart readers picked up on it -- that Klein had just ADMITTED the first decade cost would be $1 Trillion in increased deficit. It is one of those "unintentional" disclosures the Left just didn't want to come out.
This is a turkey. We're not talking 1 trillion over 10 years. We're taking 3, 4, 5 trillion. CBO has never gotten it right and almost always have missed by several hundred and in some cases more than 1000 percent over a 20-30 years time frame. Look at Medicare's 25 year estimates.
This breaks the country. There is no significant chance it will do otherwise. |
