For most people, they are concerned with balancing their checkbooks and living on a budget. Politicians, don’t have to worry about it. They seem to be living in a fantasy world where balanced budgets don’t exist. Take a look at the current health care reform proposals. They plan on paying for some of it by taking from Medicare. The only problem. Where then will Medicare get its funds?
Moving numbers around to soothe the concerns of the people is a joke. It just doesn’t work. Take for instance your own budget. Wanting a new car? Just take the money from your mortgage budget and allocate it over to fund that new car. It’s just that easy, right? WRONG! But, that’s what the government is trying to do in order to pass their health care reform bill.
Townhall: Talking Points vs. Reality by Thomas Sowell
In a swindle that would make Bernie Madoff look like an amateur, Barack Obama has gotten a substantial segment of the population to believe that he can add millions of people to the government-insured rolls without increasing the already record-breaking federal deficit.
Those who think in terms of talking points, instead of realities, can point to the fact that the Congressional Budget Office has concurred with budget numbers that the Obama administration has presented.
Anyone who is so old-fashioned as to stop and think, instead of being swept along by rhetoric, can understand that a budget– any budget– is not a record of hard facts but a projection of future financial plans. A budget tells us what will happen if everything works out according to plan.
The Congressional Budget Office can only deal with the numbers that Congress supplies. Those numbers may well be consistent with each other, even if they are wholly inconsistent with anything that is likely to happen in the real world.
The Obama health care plan can be financed without increasing the federal deficit– if the administration takes hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare. But Medicare itself does not have enough money to pay its own way over time.
However money is juggled in the short run, the government’s financial liabilities are increased by adding this huge new entitlement of government-provided insurance. The fact that these new financial liabilities can be kept out of the official federal deficit projection, by claiming that they will be paid for with money taken from Medicare, changes nothing in the real world.
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