From the nice folks over at National Review, the truth about ObamaCare, the CBO, and monetary shell games.
Too much meat here for just a few pull quotes. Read the entire article.
Enjoy:
Obamacare: Cooked Books You Can Believe In
‘Not one dime’ will be added to the deficit? Not exactly.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could use a $100 bill to buy groceries and then deposit that same Benjamin in the bank to help pay your monthly credit-card statement? Regular Americans would call this either magic or fraud. Washington Democrats call this “health-care reform.”
Obamacare rests upon such double counting. It repeatedly shanghais taxpayer funds for Obama’s plan while simultaneously shielding that same money for Medicare, Social Security, and other programs. Such chicanery may explain why only 32 percent of adults support Obamacare, according to a new Investor’s Business Daily/TIPP survey.
“You can’t count a dollar twice,” Sen. Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) observed at President Obama’s February 25 reform summit. “Common sense tells you that. You don’t even have to have an accountant tell you that.”
Team Obama clearly ignored Grassley. They should not count a dollar twice. And yet they do.
The health-care-reform bill that Senate Democrats passed last Christmas Eve, for instance, would drain $464.6 billion from Medicare’s coffers to underwrite Obamacare.
However, if “these Medicare cuts are improving the solvency of Medicare,” Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) explained, “then you can’t use that money to spend on the creation of another government program.” Ryan, the House Budget Committee’s top Republican, said on February 28’s Fox News Sunday: “You can’t count it both for paying benefits and reducing the deficit.”
The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office likewise warned last December 23 that Obamacare’s putative savings “would be received by the government only once, so they cannot be set aside to pay for future Medicare spending and, at the same time, pay for current spending on other parts of the legislation or on other programs. . . . To describe the full amount of [Hospital Insurance] trust fund savings as both improving the government’s ability to pay future Medicare benefits and financing new spending outside of Medicare would essentially double-count a large share of those savings and thus overstate the improvement in the government’s fiscal position.”
Consequently, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) predicts: “Taxpayers will be left holding billions in debt bonds to the Medicare Trust Fund that must be repaid.”
The Senate’s Obamacare bill would take $52 billion in anticipated Social Security revenues and divert them to offset Obamacare’s overall net cost. But wait: Those who have been promised future Social Security payments expect that $52 billion to be available to prevent their pension checks from bouncing. These $104 billion in political pledges cost only $52 billion.
This bill also includes something called Community Living Services and Support. This “CLASS Act” would offer long-term-care insurance with premiums invoiced immediately, but with benefits commencing in 2016. In the interim, the CBO expects a $72 billion surplus to accumulate. Congressional Democrats already have dedicated that sum to counterbalance and thus lower Obamacare’s perceived cost. But the Treasury needs that same $72 billion to finance the CLASS Act’s medical services. So, which is it?
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D., N.D.) described this scam in the Washington Post as “a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing that Bernie Madoff would have been proud of.”
Conrad is right. At its core, Obamacare relies on Madoff-style accounting. The convicted swindler routinely took cash belonging to one group of investors and used it to pay off a different set of stakeholders. When the investors requested their money, it already was gone.
Future retirees similarly will demand their Medicare benefits. But much of that money already will have been swiped for Obamacare. And that’s when this double counting will sparkle in all its crooked splendor.
So what would uncooking Obamacare’s books do to its price tag?
The CBO says the Senate bill would reduce the federal deficit by $132 billion in its first ten years. Congressman Ryan disputes this figure without blaming CBO. Like a scale that dutifully measures something as weighing twelve ounces, whether gold or lead, CBO loyally accepts the assumptions in the bills it analyzes, no matter their luster.
“If you take all the double counting out of the bill,” Ryan told Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace, “this thing has a $460 billion deficit in the first ten years, a $1.4 trillion deficit in the second ten years.”
President Obama claims his proposal “does not add one dime to the deficit.” In truth, Obamacare just keeps the red ink coming. And it does so as deviously as possible.
— Deroy Murdock is a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University.
I think this is quite relevant:
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=G44NCvNDLfc
Fiscal irresponsibility is the faulty foundation that trips up Socialist Governments. Hiring government workers depletes the private worker pool, thus creating an inverse equation, with workers who produce a product on one side of the equal sign and workers who draw a government check on the other. On the surface there seems to be no ill effect: until you realize that government workers do not produce a quantifiable product, thus a smaller and smaller private sector that actually produces a product, has to become more efficient to take up the slack created by non-producing government workers. They, the producers must also endure an ever increasing strain on their paycheck to pay for the ever increasing tax load tallied to pay for ever increasing group of government workers, the non-producers. Yes we all know the argument about police and fire and the public employees that are essential; that is not the issue, the issue comes about when a state like California has one bureaucrat for every three students in the public school system. I don’t think they are sitting at round tables with third graders helping them with advanced Algebra; no, they are an army of seat warmers collecting a parasitic paycheck and producing a continual drain on a stressed system
Eventually, once the inverse equation increases to a certain point, the equation or country is no longer viable. For example, it is easy to see that 10% of a country’s workers who produce a product cannot support 90% who don’t, such a situation would be in chaos. The International Socialism of Obama proposes that we increase the non-producing side of the equation and disregard the equation and prove that history has been wrong in condemning every Socialist Government to economic failure.
He believes the dynamic nature of the American people will prevail over the normally ruinous economic policies of Socialism; after all, we can always lock away our failures so that no one can see them, much like Obama has hidden his past from public scrutiny. Unfortunately, the US Markets and more importantly the markets of the world are not so easily deceived as the American Lemming; the markets are ruthless and cold, the expect you to produce or die, with no pity for the weak and stupid, the very foundation that Obama has used to build his pathetic Socialist Political Vision.
This Health Care Frau or Scam, with white Lab coats provided, will stress the system exponentially, without even addressing one of the most flagrant problems, that of tort reform. Of course trial lawyers like the fraud John Edwards are major contributors to the Democrat coffers, so there will be nothing done to relieve the strain. No the problem will be increased until there is a financial meltdown and the ultimate opportunity for the Progressive Socialists to seize complete control of the nation’s wealth
The whole Obamacare episode is just a symptom of an out of control federal government that has been spending at unsustainable levels for the last few decades. Obama just upped it a notch or two (or three) and has decided that spending and crippling levels of debt aren’t a problem. You’re talking about people that view money as an abstraction and spend accordingly. The reality is that the political process in this country is broken and that more than likely the United States will have to default on debt at some point in the future. Obamacare will just put us there sooner.
A.C.
Nice post on this topic. It amazes me that people seem to miss the basic economic rules that are broken in discussing Obamacare. They are playing with our money, and cooking the books so that the masses don’t really have a clue as to how much it really costs until the time comes to actually pay for it.
Skookum
Nice post. Just how many americans do you think actually understand that? I think the answer is: not enough. If you take away from those that produce towards the GDP, or even add minimally to it, but expand the takers of that GDP dramatically, it’s not hard to see that eventually you will have to take more from the producers in order to pay for the ones who only take.
Er, yeah. I saw that Ryan interview and Chris Wallace toasted his chestnuts on an open fire. At one point, Wallace asked him specifically where his actual calculations were and why his numbers were so different from the CBO. And, he asked, didn’t the GOPers say that the CBO numbers were the ones to watch? Ryan hemmed and hawed, but refused to answer.
I look at it this way: the CBO accounting rules are consistent. You may not like them, but they are consistent. When the cons refused to take Obama’s pie in the sky numbers as gospel, they said “The CBO numbers are the golden rule.” But now that the CBO numbers show that the Senate bill will reduce the deficit, cons break out the alchemy to try to prove that 2 + 2 + 8. Sorry, cons. Where the numbers are concerned, you have no credibility. So y’all better come up with a different spin. This one ain’t workin’.
Nice comment, Skooks. Very nice.
A sane, logical person knows this bill is not deficit neutral. Bribes…er…sweetheart deals are still in as are abortion availability through insurance companies with premiums paid for with taxpayer dollars via subsidies. Trying to reason w unreasonable people is pointless. Let them hang themselves.
@BRob:
I notice that you have no refutation for any portion of the article that I posted.
That math stuff is hard…when you need to use your toes.
You sad, silly little man…all you have is slur and invective.
PS…Quite a non-endorsement of ObamaCare by the bishops over the weekend, eh?
BRob, still trying to spin the CBO report as positive. How about this: Let’s assume, and it is a pretty BIG assumption, that the CBO numbers are correct on the bill. By trusting in their numbers, you must also trust their numbers when it comes to the deficit, which I don’t as they make assumptions that are patently false, such as allowing Bush’s tax cuts to expire and claiming that as a plus on the books with all disregard to the adverse effects of those tax hikes in the future. But even assuming they are correct about that, if we take the ten year projections on both, we go from around nearly $10 Trillion additional debt to somewhere just north of $9 Trillion in additional debt and around $1 Trillion or so additional interest added to the debt. So we are talking about, at best, a ten percent savings of the amount we will be overextending ourselves and financing over the course of a decade.
Of course, this is all under the assumption that the CBO’s numbers will add up to generally what they project for the future. The problem is that they rarely do, and when the books get cooked as much as the Obamacare books have been, I dread to think of what the actual decade long period will look like, especially if Obama starts getting his other legislation through like cap and tax, illegal amnesty, etc.
B-Rob,
It is a real shame they didn’t teach math at your high shcool in Clevecago. I guess it’s not on the curriculem at Brown University either. Most adults need it at some point or another, (balancing checkbooks, doing their taxes, etc.) Do you advise your imaginary legal clients to skip these activities, or to employ the Obama method of accounting using magic math?