Wednesday, December 23, 2009
What does the health care bill have in common with mortgage-backed securities?
Answer: Both have been scored. The post to read this morning if you only have time for one.
CWCID: Glenn Reynolds.
1 Comments:
By 
, at
Wed Dec 23, 12:29:00 PM:
The CBO process is seriously misleading. Here's another angle to this.
The soon-to-be-reconciled versions of Healthcare provide for new taxes. But these taxes have no necessary connection to the new spending in Healthcare, except that they're included in the same piece of legislation. Congress could just as soon adopt these new taxes as separate legislation to partly reduce the $800 billion annual structural deficit that we already have.
So how can you say that Healthcare will reduce the budget deficit? What's being done will take new sources of taxes and divert them to new uses, when we already have a huge structural deficit. We can't come close to closing this deficit gap on the backs of high earners -- they don't make nearly enough. So at some point, the tax burden will cascade down on lower brackets. You can do the necessary math on a napkin.
I expect these assholes will actually take credit for these new taxes to show a lower deficit in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 ... before the expenditures of Healthcare kick in 2014.
And they're doing this while we have double digit unemployment?
