Posted on 10/12/2021 9:23:42 AM PDT by Kaslin
Only An Idiot Would Believe Congress’s Spending Spree Will Cost ‘Zero’ The Biden administration insists the spending bill independent experts believe could cost $5.5 trillion over a decade will actually cost 'zero.' Is this how stupid they think Americans are?
In a word, hardly. Multiple elements in the history of Democrats’ last big spending bill, Obamacare, have turned it into a budget buster, suggesting that Biden’s “zero” legislation will follow the same fiscally irresponsible path.
First, the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress employed numerous fiscal gimmicks. While drafting the bill, they delayed implementation of the bill’s main provisions from 2013 to 2014, lowering the upfront spending.
In his September 2009 speech to Congress, Barack Obama claimed his proposal “will cost around $900 billion over ten years.” Not only did the final legislation come in hundreds of billions over his claim, it also counted the law’s Medicare savings as both funding Obamacare and extending Medicare’s solvency—a budgetary trick refuted by both the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Medicare actuary.
Another Obamacare gimmick came in the CLASS Act, a long-term care program. Kent Conrad, then the Democratic chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, famously called CLASS “a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing Bernie Madoff would have been proud of,” because it would generate a mirage of surpluses in its initial ten-year budget window, only to run huge losses in future decades. When in 2011 the Obama administration couldn’t certify CLASS’s actuarial soundness, the program never got off the ground, and $70.2 billion in phony “savings” suddenly evaporated.
Democrats plan to employ many similar gimmicks in their current spending spree. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, suggested lowering the bill’s cost by cutting programs from ten years to five—with every expectation that future Congresses will extend them.
Democrats also are counting on funny money from “dynamic scoring,” making the illogical and contradictory claim that expanding the welfare state will increase economic growth and tax revenue. And the Treasury Department proposed that one tax increase—closing the loophole that Biden himself exploited to reduce his family’s payroll taxes by nearly $517,000—get deposited into the Medicare Trust Fund, reprising Obamacare’s double-counting scheme.
The second ding on Obamacare’s soundness comes from provisions repealed by subsequent Congresses. Repealing the health insurer tax and the medical device tax, as a bipartisan spending bill did in 2019, lowered insurance premiums, but also added to federal deficits.
Congress also repealed two other Obamacare provisions—the “Cadillac tax” on high-cost employer insurance, and a cap on per-beneficiary spending in Medicare—with the potential to lower long-term health costs and contain entitlement spending. Both provisions had significant flaws. For instance, the unelected board was directed to enforce the Medicare spending cap in ways that could have impaired access to treatments.
Lawmakers, including Republicans, should have insisted on creating better alternatives before repealing these cost-containment provisions outright. They did not.
Obamacare’s third fiscal flaw comes via provisions that future Congresses will likely need to revisit. While providing a one-time increase in the number of hospitals’ patients with health coverage, the law reduced their Medicare payments in perpetuity.
Every year since Obamacare’s passage, the Medicare actuary has released reports calling these productivity adjustments unsustainable. The most recent version noted that within two decades, the perpetual payment reductions would cause one-third of hospitals and 60 percent of nursing homes to lose money, “raising the possibility of access and quality-of-care issues for Medicare beneficiaries”—issues that Congress would have to address.
Finally, the estimates of budget scorekeepers can miss the mark, sometimes wildly. A December 2017 Congressional Budget Office analysis demonstrated that CBO greatly overestimated enrollment in and federal spending on subsidized coverage in Obamacare’s exchanges, while underestimating enrollment and costs in “free” Medicaid coverage in states that chose to expand that program.
Recall too that while CBO claimed the federal takeover of student loans would save $58 billion over ten years at the time of its inclusion in Obamacare, an Education Department analysis last year concluded that this “pile of toxic debt” could cost taxpayers $435 billion.
As Democrats attempt to enact a second Great Society agenda, the Medicare program they want to expand provides a cautionary tale. In 1965, Medicare coverage of physician services was estimated to require “federal appropriations of about $500 million a year from general tax revenues.” Last year, general revenue transfers to Medicare Part B totaled $328.4 billion—an 76-fold increase, even after accounting for inflation.
It seems that no matter the president, nothing becomes so costly as a “free” government program.
No one is expected to believe it. Its just to provide a coordinated talking point for state-run propaganda media.
There you have it in a nutshell. Brandon thinks we are all idiots.
Let’s go Brandon!
The Fox News white house reporter, although the only one who even asked about it, didn’t get to the crux of the stupid presumption it will cost nothing.
There is no free lunch.
These are the idiots that enabled it.
Dan Sullivan (R-AK) Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) Mike Crapo (R-ID) Roy Blunt (R-MO) Richard Burr (R-NC) Deb Fischer (R-NE) Lindsey Graham (R-SC) Rob Portman (R-OH) Thom Tillis (R-NC) Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) Jim Risch (R-ID) Chuck Grassley (R-IA) Bill Cassidy (R-LA) Kevin Cramer (R-ND) Roger Wicker (R-MS) Mitch McConnell (R-KY) John Hoeven (R-ND) Susan Collins (R-ME) Mitt Romney (R-UT)
They knew when they voted for the Trojan horse they were enabling the bigger worse one.
And the idiot’s name is one Joseph Stolen aka Joe Dementia aka Dementia Joe.
according to biden,there must be 81 million idiots out there.
Only an idiot would believe any of the 9% (NINE percent) designated for infrastructure would actually go to any roads, bridges, airports, ports or any infrastructure of any kind.
These people are despots. They’re grifters. They pushed out the president with the help of the media brainwashing the idiots who believe any of this pack of lies.
We have a country full of idiots who pay no taxes and love getting government checks. Definition of perverse incentives.
But of course the feckless msm won’t grill spaki on any of it.
Problem is, we have a lot of idiots voting - often multiple times in the same election ( and perhaps more than a few with actual IQs of literally 0). I have been waiting for the day the Democrats over estimate the stupidity of the American voter for a long time. Perhaps we have finally reached that point
I think everyone knows that the spending has already been far too massive.
The shutdown we are seeing in delivery of anything, I believe, is because people know that their goods are already grossly undervalued. The Inflation tune has started in musical chairs and nobody wants to let go of their chair.
"It's time that millionaires and billionaires and trillionaires and bazillionairs pay their fair share"
But the IRS needs to look at all bank transactions over $600... Just Because!
Well Said! LOL
Brandon is well represented across the country. Welcome to idiocracy. 😲
But the fool on the Hill
Sees the sun going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning ‘round
The press will 'buy' this lie because Brandon's thugs gives them leaks that cost the American taxpayer billions of dollars to gather.
Think of the press(USA Today, New York Times, Washington Post) not so much as silly and goofy but as corrupt and bought..( yeah, "press/MSM" - your 'sources' are intelligence thugs selling what they don't own (theft) and democrat war rooms paying for stories any using every other unethical tactic YOU so haughtily reject)
Kinda like buying stolen property...
Put them all on the S-— List..
Unfortunately our country is full of idiots.
Defund D.C.!!
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