Quote:
Originally Posted by scottw
Krauthammer has a great article today Obamacare must go 
"dems have a strange way of reducing the deficit"
Suppose someone — say, the president of the United States — proposed the following: We are drowning in debt. More than $14 trillion right now. I’ve got a great idea for deficit reduction. It will yield savings of $230 billion over the next 10 years: We increase spending by $540 billion while we increase taxes by $770 billion.
He’d be laughed out of town. And yet, this is precisely what the Democrats are claiming as a virtue of Obamacare. During the debate over Republican attempts to repeal it, one of the Democrats’ major talking points has been that Obamacare reduces the deficit — and therefore its repeal raises it — by $230 billion. Why, the Congressional Budget Office says exactly that.
Very true, and very convincing. Until you realize where that number comes from. CBO director Douglas Elmendorf explains in his “preliminary analysis of H.R. 2” (the Republican health-care repeal): “CBO anticipates that enacting H.R. 2 would probably yield, for the 2012-2021 period, a reduction in revenues in the neighborhood of $770 billion and a reduction in outlays in the vicinity of $540 billion.”
As National Affairs editor Yuval Levin pointed out when mining this remarkable nugget, this is a hell of a way to do deficit reduction: a radical increase in spending, topped by an even more radical increase in new taxes.
Why Everything Starts with Repeal - Charles Krauthammer - National Review Online |
As former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin and scholars Joseph Antos and James Capretta note, “
Only in Washington could the creation of a reckless entitlement program be used as [an] ‘offset’ to grease the way for another entitlement.” I would note additionally that
only in Washington could such a neat little swindle be titled the “CLASS Act” (the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act).
