The Administration has already missed many deadlines imposed in ObamaCare. Know that Obama’s own number crunchers have said that the bill will cost more than originally estimated to implement and will not decrease the deficit, this may be a good thing. When will there be a consensus for repeal?
Posts Tagged ‘deficit’
Administration misses ObamaCare deadlines
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010Ignoring the problem won’t make it go away
Friday, May 21st, 2010An editorial from Investors Business Daily paints an accurate picture of our budget situation – Congress admits that they will fail to pass a budget this year, and no one sees this as a problem despite record annual deficits and a growing federal debt? Here’s their policy: ignore it and it will go away.
Results of YouCut
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010Rep. Eric Cantor is doing something that the Democrats in Washington have failed to do – he is listening to the people. His new program – YouCut lets citizens vote on various programs to be cut fro the federal budget. You can vote online at http://republicanwhip.house.gov/YouCut/. This weeks winner: Emergency Contingency Fund for State Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Programs. This emergency welfare has been used to buy iPods in some cases. Jim Talent was a leader in welfare reform in the 1990′s. Congress reigned in programs without disrupting benefits for those who needed it. This program undermines the good, bipartisan work of the 1990s reforms.
Another health care broken promise
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010We know the health care bill will not reduce the deficit as President Obama claims. Here is yet another broken promise from President Obama on the health care law: you may not be able to keep the health plan that you currently enjoy. As it becomes clear that the bill will not accomplish what its sponsors wanted, shouldn’t there be consensus for repeal?
Deficit drives public policy
Monday, May 17th, 2010Here is yet another way the deficit is driving policy in Washington. I can guarantee you that the provision driving the paperwork avalanche was put in the health care law for one reason and one reason only: the Congressional “scoring” organizations – the government bodies that compute the cost and revenue raised by proposed legislation — were willing to score it as raising money because it supposedly tightens compliance and will capture revenue that is leaking out of the system. If you want to pass something in Washington, all you have to do is get it scored as raising money in a way that Congress can say is not a tax increase. It doesn’t matter whether the measure actually will raise the money; it doesn’t matter how unfair or unenforceable it is, or what effect it has on small business or the economy. In fact, we have no idea what the effect of this provision will be, except that it will hurt the economy, demoralize small business, and add to the perception that everyone in the Congress is crazy.
This is why I say that, increasingly, the debt is running national policy. Yet the Obama Administration is, every day, digging us into a deeper and deeper hole – to the detriment of its own practical interests and objectives. Why would people who want government to grow pursue policies which bankrupt the government? What do they think is going to happen? It is the triumph of ideology, inexperience, and incompetence over reality.”
“Doc Fix” wasn’t fixed
Thursday, May 6th, 2010The doctor pay issue is one reason why it was patently obvious the health care bill was not “deficit neutral.” The sponsors of the bill figured proposed Medicare cuts as “savings” but never counted likely extra Medicare expenses — the most prominent of which was this doctor pay issue — as costs. It would be like “balancing” your family budget by assuming you would eliminate expenditures that you intended to keep and ignoring extra expenditures you surely would make.
The debt finally draws attention
Monday, April 5th, 2010Note this title from an article in the SF Chronicle: “National debt seen heading for crisis level.” So someone has noticed? Let me repeat what I said in National Review Online: there will never be a health care benefit because the President and the Congressonal leadership have spent all the money. True, even they can’t tell you what they spent it on; certainly not on defense, or transportation infrastructure, or stockpiling vaccines in case of a terrorist attack using bioweapons, or even on their own top priority, which was health care. But it’s gone.
The federal government doesn’t have to balance its budget, but that doesn’t mean there is no limit to what it can spend. The limit is what it can borrow at low interest rates. It is reaching that limit, and certainly will have reached it long before the planned implementation date of the “historic” health care benefit, which will turn out not to have been a “big bang” as the article says, but a dud.
Remember two things as you read the article. First, the numbers which the article uses are the Administration’s own projections. The actual situation will certainly be even worse than that. Second, none of the projected deficits include the cost of the health care bill, which was supposedly “paid for”.
We will be producing more on the deficit throughout April.
Health care debate continues
Thursday, March 18th, 2010David Lightman of McClatchy Newspapers gives a good update on the current state of the health care debate. Note also that President Obama’s ratings are dropping further. All this is interconnected. When a President promises not to sign a bill if it increases the deficit, he is saying that reducing the deficit is very important to him. When he subsequently pushes the bill even though it is plain it WILL increase the deficit, then he has deceived voters about both the bill and his real position on the deficit. And when voters don’t trust you anymore, then changing your message has no impact on their opinion — because they no longer believe what you are saying.
Death Spiral for the Federal Budget
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010The whole health care debate is moving further and further away from reality.
Yesterday the Moody’s rating agency announced that, to preserve the government’s AAA rating on its debt, the United States needs to make deep spending cuts, or, as Moody’s put it “fiscal adjustments of a magnitude that, in some cases, will test social cohesion.” Losing the triple A rating will substantially increase the cost of further borrowing and the interest payments the government will have to pay, which will in turn worsen the debt picture, which will cause the rating to go down further, which will raise the cost of borrowing further, etc.
It’s the death spiral for the federal budget.
So it doesn’t really matter how Congress votes. There will be no health care legislation because there is no money left. Budget cuts are coming, by compulsion if necessary. The creditors of the United States, not the government, will be in control of fiscal policy. But the Administration and Congressional leaders are proceeding as if reality isn’t happening. I honestly don’t know what words or messages can penetrate their state of denial.
