Of the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do, their chiefs were two hundred; and all their kinsmen were at their command — 1 Chronicles 12:32
WASHINGTON — Seeking an elusive middle ground, President Barack Obama is proposing a 2014 budget that embraces tax increases abhorred by Republicans as well as reductions, loathed by liberals, in the growth of Social Security and other benefit programs.
The plan, if ever enacted, could touch almost all Americans. The rich would see tax increases, the poor and the elderly would get smaller annual increases in their benefits, and middle income taxpayers would slip into higher tax brackets despite Obama’s repeated vows not to add to the tax burden of the middle class. His proposed changes, once phased in, would mean a cut in Social Security benefits of nearly $1,000 a year for an average 85-year-old, smaller cuts for younger retirees.
Obama proposed much the same without success to House Speaker John Boehner in December. The response Friday was dismissive from Republicans and hostile from liberals, labor and advocates for the elderly.
As usual, Obama is as politically brilliant as he is completely morally depraved.
He recognizes that the elderly now overwhelmingly vote Republican – because as stupid as our elderly are today, they are smarter than the young punks whom Obama owns.
Obama realizes what many Democrats in their districts don’t: that the elderly aren’t Obama worshippers.
And that therefore the elderly are blasphemers who deserve to die.
What group DOES vote for Obama? The ignorant young punks.
And what do the ignorant young punks want?
They want socialism. They want Obama to take care of them.
What is getting in the way of the godless socialist State that the young want? Old people – and the benefits being consumed by old people.
How can young people get free health care when the old are getting most of the government bennies? How can young people ever hope to have a viable Social Security system when the system promised to the elderly is bankrupting America?
The answer is that if you kill off all the elderly, you can make the same false promises to the young that the FDR generation of Democrats once made to the elderly of today.
I’ve been pointing this fact out in previous articles:
You can find these quotes along with many others in the articles above, but let me start with the words of lifelong Democrat and Obama supporter Robert Reich:
“Thank you so much for coming this afternoon. I’m so glad to see you and I would like to be president. Let me tell you a few things on health care. Look, we have the only health care system in the world that is designed to avoid sick people. And that’s true and what I’m going to do is that I am going try to reorganize it to be more amenable to treating sick people but that means you, particularly you young people, particularly you young healthy people…you’re going to have to pay more.
“Thank you. And by the way, we’re going to have to, if you’re very old, we’re not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It’s too expensive…so we’re going to let you die.”
And here’s now-former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s brother, Ezekiel Emanuel, whom Obama appointed as OMB health policy adviser in addition to being picked to serve on the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research:
“When implemented, the Complete Lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated… The Complete Lives system justifies preference to younger people because of priority to the worst-off rather than instrumental value.”
“Attenuated” means, “to make thin; to weaken or reduce in force, intensity, effect, quantity, or value.” Attenuated care would be reduced or lessened care. Dare I say it, in this context it clearly means, “rationed care.”
And “rationed care” means death panels. Which again for the record überliberal Paul Krugman says are an essential part of ObamaCare - all previous Democrat lies to the contrary.
I’ve been saying it all along.
I couldn’t understand why Democrats refused to take ANY of the corrective actions necessary to save Medicare – which will go bankrupt and collapse by 2016. And now Social Security – which is now in debt to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year. A few minor changes could have saved these programs – but Democrats are in lock-fascist step determined NOT to allow those changes.
Understand: my PARENTS are on these programs. As terrible and as godawful as these programs are given the private-sector alternatives that Democrats refused to allow or even consider, they were the only path for my parents’ – and millions and millions of other people’s parents’ – retirement. Republicans proposed to gradually phase in reduced benefits beginning for those who had at least ten working years remaining to prepare alternative strategies (which would also give the country time to prepare those alternatives). Current retirees would have been untouched.
Democrats refused to make any changes and falsely and frankly demonically demagogued the lie that Republicans were trying to kill old people (again, their changes wouldn’t have affected ANY “old people.” I couldn’t understand why Democrats would allow the systems that THEY created to simply implode.
If we just made a few minor changes, we could keep these programs going. It is insane that Democrats refuse to make those changes. The reason that Europe is going through all the “austerity” crap is because they did what the Democrats are doing now in America; they refused to make minor changes and then they went bankrupt and now there is no way out of their crisis.
I now DO understand the reason Democrats won’t make the changes we need when there’s still time to make those changes: Democrats plan to turn on the elderly whom they promised they would take care of through these programs. When they collapse – and they surely will – Democrats will “pivot” to the young voters and leave the elderly to die.
Democrats seized power by lying to the people who are now “the elderly.” They can now leave those elderly to perish and sell their lies to a whole new generation of truly stupid young people.
Barack Obama realizes that he will profit politically if he wages his style of fearmongering and divisive campaigning and pits the young against the old (just as he pitted minorities against white people and women against men and the poor against the rich). He realizes that he doesn’t need the elderly any more than he needs white people or the rich.
By increasingly pointing out that the elderly have an obligation to die so that the young can inherit the earth (and the socialism), Obama knows he can seize the young vote for the Democrat Party. He will promise them the benefits that used to belong to the elderly. Which means the elderly have got to go.
I’ve pointed this out again and again: D. James Kennedy prophetically warned:
“Watch out, grandpa! Because the generation that survived abortion will one day come after you!”
You’re about to pay for your wickedness and selfishness in allowing the holocaust of 56 million murdered babies since Roe v. Wade in 1973, old people. The day is coming when you are going to be told to shove off and die with dignity so that young Obama voters can take your place.
And you are going to deserve it, even as God begins to stockpile His wrath against the final and most wicked generation of Americans who will vote for your deaths by the millions the same way you voted for babies’ deaths by the millions.
You watch with growing horror, elderly Americans: Obama is going to use his mastery of political rhetoric – based entirely on his never EVER underestimating the stupidity and wickedness of the America people – to slowly begin to turn on you. It will be just like homosexual marriage – or as great American pastor John MacArthur called it, “the Party platform of Romans Chapter One - in which Obama begins by unequivocally stating that he is opposed to it (see here and here), and then saying he’s ”evolving”in spite of what he’d promised, and finally claiming that he is completely for what he had previously said that he was completely against. And then he’ll claim that anybody who used to hold the very position that he himself used to hold is evil. He’s going to frame turning on the elderly in “moral” terms, as an obligation to young people who are being deprived of benefits. And when he’s got the young behind him, he will demand that you perish in miserable deaths due to medical neglect and the confiscation of benefits that you banked your retirements upon.
Because this is God damn America, and you helped set it up.
Now you get to find out what it’s like to be “aborted.” Because it’s coming for YOU. You’re going to be the next group of death camp Jews. You’re going to be the next group of non-humans to perish.
God damn America. God damn the Greatest Generation. That’s where Obama is heading.
The beast is coming. And you aint seen NOTHING yet as to the liberal holocaust that is going to overtake this wicked land.
You want to know what else I’m predicting, since I’ve been dead solid perfect in all my forecasts about how a truly evil and demonic Democrat Party would destroy our health care system and murder millions of helpless Americans? Try this one on for size: as we all know, elderly people tend to vote Republican, while younger people tend to vote Democrat. And here we have these young Democrats left holding the bill for an incredibly costly ObamaCare fascist takeover.
And the costs are going to go up because of all that expensive treatment of the elderly – who tend to vote Republican.
So you just watch while the most wicked political party since the Nazis – and if there were an “National Socialist American Workers Party” the way we had a “National Socialist German Workers Party” (Nazi Party) you can bet your farm that it would be the same socialist cockroaches filling its ranks – begins to treat old people like Jews and tell them they need to die so that the young generation can live.
The Democrat Party is ultimately going to “pivot” to the young and turn on the elderly. And treat them like Hitler treated the Jews and like Obama has treated the rich.
Mind you, they won’t admit they’re going to do that now; just like they wouldn’t admit that ObamaCare would drive up the cost of healthcare when they were lying to you to sell their abomination.
ObamaCare started out as a 2,000 page monstrosity. It has now grown like a cancer to well over THIRTY THOUSAND PAGES as the regulations are being furiously written and added in to this demonic legislation.
In a nutshell, as you get older, you start having more health problems requiring more trips to the doctor and more medical care. But ObamaCare understands that you’re probably retired and you’re a useless eater and it’s time for you to shove off and die with dignity. So fascist Democrats want to cut off spending on the elderly and apply it to younger proletariats who are working for the sake of Dear Leader and are therefore eligible to continue to live.
Clinton economist and Obama advisor Robert Reich had already said this on the record about the future of ObamaCare:
“Thank you. And by the way, we’re going to have to, if you’re very old, we’re not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It’s too expensive…so we’re going to let you die.”
“I urge that the government should indeed focus on life-years rather than lives. A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people.”
He wrote:
“Other things being equal, a program that protects young people seems far better than one that protects old people, because it delivers greater benefits.”
I documented how Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel - the brains behind ObamaCare as Obama’s health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of Obama’s Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research - described how the system would systematically deny resources to the elderly in order to focus on younger people:
“When implemented, the Complete Lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated… The Complete Lives system justifies preference to younger people because of priority to the worst-off rather than instrumental value.”
“Attenuated” means, “to make thin; to weaken or reduce in force, intensity, effect, quantity, or value.” Attenuated care would be reduced or lessened care. Dare I say it, in this context it clearly means, “rationed care.”
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel included a chart with his work (available here), which shows how he wants to allocate medical resources under a government plan:
When you’re very young, or when you start reaching your 50s and 60s, you start receiving less and less priority.
So, I understood what the Democrats would in fact do – because ObamaCare was an abomination for the elderly from the very start. But I didn’t understand the political mechanism. I didn’t understand how the VERY SAME PEOPLE who gave the elderly all these unsustainable healthcare benefits (via Medicare and Medicaid) would be able to viciously and barbarically turn on those people who voted for them and ultimately gut the health care benefits that they depend on to live.
I didn’t understand politically how Democrats could spend seventy years erecting unsustainable benefits for the elderly, and then turn on the very elderly they had supposedly erected all these benefits for and actually continue to get re-elected.
I do now: Democrats have a new coalition to win. They have the young. And since the elderly have started increasingly voting Republican as they start to see what’s coming, they can throw the old under the bus to be crushed by the wheels.
The young who now support Democrats are demanding affordable healthcare.
And the only way for that to happen is for the elderly to be cut off. Because it is simply a fact that people use up most of the healthcare resources they will ever need when they get old. And now that Democrats have brought all of these costs into “government,” they have to reduce the cost burden in order to stave off obvious bankruptcy and national implosion.
So what’s going to happen is Democrats are going to increasingly begin to argue that inexpensive healthcare is a moral imperative. But that the elderly are useless eaters who have already produced all the benefit for society that they ever would in their time and that it is time for them to die with dignity so the next generation can have access to have the same access to healthcare that the elderly once enjoyed (before the Democrats who gave them all these benefits decided it was in their cynical political benefit to take those benefits away).
And as I have documented, we’re already seeing that mindset come out of ObamaCare. It’s what ObamaCare always was for those with ears to hear.
How do Democrats pay for the massive and unsustainable costs of ObamaCare for the young when they have already created massive and unsustainable costs for caring for the old with Medicare and Medicaid? Answer: they turn on the cost of the previous programs that they created when demagoguing those previous programs was the way to lie and pander to their last voter constituency. They plunder the care for the old that they previously promised to pay for the care for the young that they are promising now.
So now – as Democrats continue to solidify their young electorate – you will start to see Democrats increasingly disparage “the greatest generation” as being people who are frankly unworthy of all the healthcare resources they are consuming.
So when I heard career liberal and Democrat strategist Bob Beckell say the following on Bill O’Reilly’s program last night, I took notice (at the 00:09:55 mark of the program)
00:09:55 Last night about this great america in the 50s, we were dragged into fighting the Nazis. Somehow you made this myth about this last generation. You and Tom Brokaw, the greatest generation. The fact is –
00:10:07 Bill [O'Reilly]: You’re ranting now.
And, yes, of course he was ranting. But he was plainly stating his belief that old people aren’t that great and they shouldn’t get any credit for rising up and defeating the Nazis.
As long as the elderly are “the greatest generation” Democrats can’t turn on them. But dehumanize them, say they didn’t do anything great, that they aren’t any more deserving than anybody else, and that they are now a burden and that they should die with dignity – that’s the ticket.
And that’s what you will increasingly see as Democrats “pivot” to the young and abandon the elderly.
Watch for a lot more of that to happen.
Years ago, the great preacher D. James Kennedy prophetically warned:
“Watch out, Grandma and Grandpa! Because the generation who survived abortion will one day come after you!”
We have now aborted more than 56 million innocent babies in America. Democrats are responsible for every single one of those lives – and one day they will burn in hell for a trillion years to the trillionth power of years for every single nano-second of every single one of those lives that thse babies would have lived if they hadn’t been snuffed out in the womb.
And this same, depraved, barbaric wickedness that characterized the Democrat Party’s hatred for babies will be applied to their hatred for the elderly very, very soon.
And now we’re about to see the most wicked generation of Democrats in history cynically abandon their promises to one group who depended on their promises in order to appeal to a different group who haven’t experienced the wickedness of Democrats so they can stay in power.
This is what the Bible predicted about the final generation before the beast came:
But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God–having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them. — 2 Timothy 3:1-5
This wicked generation of youth who vote Democrat after surviving Democrats’ attempts to murder them in their wombs will vote to turn on their own parents in a way completely unprecedented in all of human history. And the Democrats will enable them to do it unlike any previous generation in history.
It will take a generation this wicked to believe in the Democrat Party’s lies even as the very same Democrats prove once and for all what demonic liars they were all along.
It’s a truly fascinating thing. Had we “gone over the cliff,” do you know what would have happened? We would have returned to the Clinton tax rates.
What is truly remarkable is that the Clinton tax rates are now nearly universally viewed by Democrats as having been 98% pure, distilled evil. Because the Democrat Party has now been saying that Americans can’t afford to pay the stupid and evil tax rates that Democrats once demanded they pay.
But what would have been stupid and evil and harmful to the American economy for 98% of the population is in fact true for 100% of the population. It is simply a gargantuan lie to try to argue that the laws of economics – that when you tax something you invariably get LESS of it – is true for 98% but is a lie for 100%.
Yes, it is a fact of history that the Republican Party under George W. Bush saved America with the tax cuts that helped the middle class grow more and spend more. And it is now a fact of history that Democrats are now implicitly saying that the Clinton tax rates were 98% evil and counterproductive to a growing economy. Democrats were completely wrong about their high tax rates; but Democrats are liars who won’t EVER admit they were wrong. Instead they merely continually shift their demonization and demagoguery to a different target without ever admitting that it was only a relative few years ago that Democrats were attacking the middle class with high taxes that are suddenly now universally recognized as evil.
Isn’t it amazing how Obama, the Democrats and the mainstream media propaganda actually just claimed credit for 98% of the Bush tax cuts while still blaming Republicans as evil for creating the very thing that Democrats are on record as now being 98% for? How does this kind of falsehood pass for truth???
And keep in mind that Bill Clinton – who largely presided over a good economy with the help of Republicans who controlled both the House and the Senate – said “the era of big government is over.” Obama reversed that and now America will pay dearly for it.
It is a fact of history that Democrats are now demanding that we keep 98% of Bush’s tax cuts while simultaneously taking credit for them. While amazingly still saying that the Bush tax cuts – which they now say were 98% good – are still evil.
Democrats claim that their tax hike on the rich, on the other hand, will generate $620 billion in additional revenues. Here’s the first problem with the deal that Republicans were trapped into: no it won’t.
History is now replete, full, satiated, gluttonously gorged with examples of Democrats’ stupid tax claims doing the very opposite of what they claimed it would do. The most infamous example is the luxury tax or so-called “yacht tax” on the rich. Democrats assured Americans that the rich could certainly pay a little more (there’s a line that stupid people keep arguing, isn’t it?) to own luxury items. Democrats saw the government getting more and the rich paying “more of their fair share” (there’s another stupid line of demagoguery for you). What in FACT happened was that it turned out that, guess what, rich people AVOID TAXES just like everybody else tends to do.
The nation’s luxury-boat builders, many clinging to their businesses after two years of plunging sales, finally got some good news last week.
President Bush, in his budget proposals, asked Congress to repeal the 10 percent luxury tax on yachts priced at more than $100,000 (and also on private planes that cost more than $250,000). The repeal, which Congress is likely to approve, would be retroactive to Feb. 1.
Since the tax took effect in January 1990, hundreds of builders of large and small boats have spoken of it as a stake driven into the heart of an industry already suffering from the recession, tighter bank rules on financing and fallout from the gulf war.
In the last two years, about 100 builders of luxury boats — recreational craft costing more than $100,000 — cut their operations severely and laid off thousands of workers. Some builders filed for protection from creditors under Chapter 11 of the Federal Bankruptcy Code.
Now, sales personnel and owners of marine companies are hoping they will be swamped by buyers who have held off in the expectation that the tax will be repealed.
The 10 percent tax applies to the amount of the cost above $100,000, so that a boat selling for $300,000 carries a $20,000 luxury tax. That tax is in addition to any state and local taxes. [...]
Also, boat prices have dropped as much as 40 to 50 percent, interest rates have fallen and some lenders have begun to offer financing, though on very strict terms.
In 1991, sales of luxury boats dropped 70 percent from 1990′s level, while overall boat sales fell 18 percent. Relies on Foreign Customers
“The luxury tax really hurt us,” said William J. Healey, the president of the Viking Yacht Company in New Gretna, N.J.
He gestured toward a few big luxury boats being built there. A 50-foot boat costing $800,000 is bound for Italy; a $1 million yacht may be sold in Japan. A 65-foot motor yacht costing $1.3 million is bound for Greece.
The business from overseas, developed in the last two years, is enabling Viking to limp along, its work force cut to 150 workers from 800. “Very fortunately, it has helped us weather the downturn,” Mr. Healey said as he pointed to two production lines that have been inactive for several years.
Domestic demand fell so sharply that a year ago Viking shut an operation in Tampa, Fla., that employed 800 workers. The plant was built in the boom of the 1980′s, when most boat makers could not keep up with demand.
Yeah, that’s right, stupid liberal. Raising taxes on the rich a few percent won’t hurt anybody. They can afford it.
And if you’re either stupid or demon-possessed, you still believe that damn Marxist class warfare lie. But people who prefer the truth and have a clue about something called “history” sure don’t.
There’s a second and even more harmful reason that Obama won’t raise more revenue as he falsely claims: because he’s going to be targeting and attacking the small businesses that create jobs. Yes, it’s true on one level that 97% of small businesses won’t see their taxes shoot up and force them to lay off workers and cut back to pay the dictator. But as is often true, another word for “lie” is “statistic.” Because here’s the thing: THAT THREE PERCENT OF THE BUSINESSES DO MOST OF THE ACTUAL HIRING.
Out of 27,281,452 total firms, 21,351,320 are listed as “nonemployer firms.” Which means that 78.23 percent of all small businesses hire ZERO employees. So when Obama says that 97% of small businesses won’t be affected by his tax hike, please understand that the whopping majority of those businesses that won’t be affected aren’t hiring anybody. Another 3,617,764 small businesses have no more than four employees. Those small businesses that hire zero workers plus those small businesses that hire no more than four workers constitute 91.5% of ALL small businesses.
Here’s a more relevant way to look at it. When you consider the businesses that employ more than four people, you are looking at businesses that hire 94.97 percent of ALL the workers who work for small businesses. And while not all of the small businesses that hire between 5-9 employees are going to be paying higher taxes as a result of Obama’s class warfare on small businesses, most of them do. And virtually none of the businesses that hire more than ten employees are going to earn less than $250,000 a year.
So, yeah, the kid who is an “independent contractor” working his paper route won’t be paying more taxes under Obama’s class warfare plan. That’s great. But the overwhelming majority of small businesses (defined as businesses employing 499 or fewer workers) are going to get the crap beat out of them.
So Obama and Democrats like to point out that 97% of small businesses won’t be affected by their tax hikes. But more than 78% of small businesses in his “97 percent” figure are “nonemployer firms” and hire ZERO workers. So no jobs. And when you look at the businesses that hire workers, you are looking overwhelmingly at the businesses that are going to be hit by these new tax hikes. That is simply a FACT. And it is simply a FACT that they are going to be forced to raise their prices to accommodate their rising costs of doing business, which will in turn reduce demand for their products or services, which will then in turn force them to lay off workers because of aforementioned reduced demand.
So what Obama and the Democrats just did is savagely attack the only people who have any chance at creating more job opportunities and bringing the US economy off its back and onto its feet again.
Keep in mind that in pimping his ObamaCare, Obama promised that premiums wouldn’t go up; he promised that if you like your doctor, you could keep your doctor; he promised that he wouldn’t tax the middle class. He lied about EVERYTHING. And he is lying to you now. Because he has over and over again demonstrated that he is a liar without shame, without honesty, without decency and without integrity.
But we’re just getting warmed up describing how truly godawful this “deal” is.
Obama – even on his regime’s own calculations – will only get 8 1/2 days of additional tax revenue by attacking the rich and sabotaging the US economy by hurting job creators. The problem when you consider Obama’s trillion-plus dollar deficits every single year of his entire presidency is that he refused to do a damn thing about the OTHER 356.5 days of the year.
We raised $1.8 trillion in income tax revenue in 2012. It will be a very interesting thing indeed to see if we raise $2.42 trillion as the Democrats claim. I bet we won’t be anywhere near that because it was a lie from the beginning.
If Obama is a one-term president, which he himself by his own rhetoric said he ought to be, he will have added more than $6 trillion to the debt in his four years by the time he leaves office. The same man who viciously demonized his predecessor for adding less than $5 trillion over EIGHT years. The national debt is over $16 trillion now, and it’s going to keep piling on and piling on until January 2013. With at least $500 billion in interest to pay on top of that.
Again, Barack Obama is a liar and a hypocrite without shame, without decency, without honor and without integrity. He is shameless. The Democrat Party is shameless. And the mainstream media which protects both with their propaganda machine are shameless.
The U.S. fiscal gap, calculated (by us) using theCongressional Budget Office’s realistic long-term budget forecast — the Alternative Fiscal Scenario — is now $222 trillion. Last year, it was $211 trillion. The $11 trillion difference — this year’s true federal deficit — is 10 times larger than the official deficit and roughly as large as the entire stock of official debt in public hands.
It’s funny, in a sad, pathetic, ironic sort of way: Democrats demonize Republicans for trying to protect America and her interests abroad with a strong national defense. But the only thing the Constitution specifically ordered the federal government to “provide for the common defense.” And note that word, “provide.” It means, “pay for to provide.” The same liberals who demonize us for doing what common sense and the Constitution alike command us to do point to the phrase “promote the general welfare.” Do you get that difference between “provide” and “promote.” If you ask me to provide something, I’m on the hook for it in a financial way. That’s what it means to be a provider. If you want me to promote something, I’m going to say nice things about it and cheerlead for it. But that’s all. And so like everything else, Democrats turned the Constitution, basic morality and true Christianity on its head and made what is wrong right and what is right wrong.
If liberals were actually to “promote the general welfare,” they would cheerlead the private economy and encourage growth by keeping taxes low for those who are willing to work hard so they can keep what they earn. And then, with the minimum size and minimum amount of regulation, they would get the hell out of the way.
What Democrats “promote” is the general cancer instead.
And that mindset became a rotting cancer that is just about to consume and kill the patient America.
This nation is doomed. And if you voted for Obama, you are one of the people who doomed it. We cannot possibly pay these debts that will ultimately bankrupt this country but only after our children and their children are forced to bear the burden and suffer because of your self-righteous and sanctimonious greed a.k.a. “your entitlement mindset.” And one day you will stand before a holy God and answer for the fact that you are a toxic human being whose soul swims in every kind of lie. Because that’s what Obama voters are: bad people who hate the truth and who prefer lies. Aside from your dishonesty, you are greedy and hypocritical - feeling yourself entitled to seize other people’s money when you would scream if your own money were taken from you. And aside from your dishonesty, greed and hypocrisy you are hurting the poor who ought to be helped. Because as I pointed out above – and thoroughly document with the article I linked you to stating it – when you seize the wealth of private citizens who overwhelmingly worked hard and then planned well and then worked hard some more to get that wealth, you end up hurting the very poor you falsely profess to be helping. Because you force businesses large and small alike to reduce their workers. You rob the poor of dignity by preventing them from being able to find jobs. And then you cynically exploit their desperation to get them to vote Democrat so they can be on welfare for life as long as they continue voting Democrat. Oh, you will one day be forced to give an account for all of it, rest assured. And you will be giving that account to a Someone who knows the truth from all of your lies and your slander.
In sixty days this “fiscal cliff deal” that the mainstream media is so damn giddy about will come boomaranging back in the form of a massive political crisis caused by Obama’s morally insane and fiscally evil out-of-control spending binge.
Republicans were maneuvered into an impossible rhetorical battle against a master demagogic rhetorician. They were demonized as “the party who was willing to force everybody’s taxes to go up over the wealthiest two percent of the country.” When how the hell were the Democrats not “the party who was willing to force everybody’s taxes to go up over the wealthiest two percent of the country”??? Weren’t Democrats threatening to go off the cliff unless they got to attack the top two percent of earners? How were they not doing the very thing they slandered the Republicans for doing???
This country is going to shut down in sixty days over that “spending issue” that Obama and the Democrats absolutely refused to deal with. Because this “deal” did nothing to slow down the debt, nothing to slow down Obama’s shocking deficits, nothing to avert a debt ceiling showdown and nothing to avert the REAL fiscal cliff of Obama’s sequestration plan.
The markets that stupidly surged today will just as stupidly collapse then. Because anybody who isn’t a fool should see this confrontation over insane and immoral debt coming.
Meanwhile, it is God damn America, full speed ahead to ruin. And then the Antichrist and the Tribulation will come.
“The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents – #43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.” — Barack Obama, 3 July 2008
Obama gives us the relevant numbers himself: Bush gave us $4 trillion in debt over eight years and that was so irresponsible and such a failure in leadership that it’s “unpatriotic.” Those are Obama’s own words that he was elected under. And Obama started out with a national debt of $10 trillion and promised the American people he would cut the deficit in half during his first term.
That deficit that Obama promised to cut in half was $455 billion. That is a fact as can be seen below. Not only did Obama NOT keep his self-righteous, lying, hypocrite promise to cut the deficit in half in his first term, he has more than doubled that deficit each year of his presidency and one year MORE THAN TRIPLED it. And not only has Obama given us trillion-PLUS dollar deficits every single year of his presidency, but in fact he has created the disastrous future of trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see until America collapses.
It’s not just that Obama is a liar; he is a truly demonic liar. And Obama has been “governing” or “leading” by counting on his ability to lie faster than the other side can correct his lies.
It has become very difficult to estimate Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s deficits. Because they have wickedly refused to even BOTHERto pass a budget as required by law for 1,224 days. Republicans in the House have done their job every year they have governed, both during the time that they controlled both branches of the Congress in 2006 (when the final Republican congressional budget under Bush was just $162 billion) and since they retook the House in 2010. But Democrats who control the Senate have refused to do their duty and pass ANY budget at ALL.
That. Just. Happened. There’s been a bit of waffling on when exactly it occurred between last Friday and Tuesday, but regardless, that ship has sailed.
Total U.S. government debt eclipsed $16 trillion for the first time Friday, new government data show, as total federal borrowing continues marching toward the $16.394 trillion borrowing limit.
The Treasury Department said total government debt hit $16,015,769,788,215.80 on Friday, up $25 billion from the day before. The amount of federal debt subject to the borrowing limit is actually slightly less, as it doesn’t include several types of borrowing, and it stood at $15.977 trillion on Friday.
Ah yes, remember when Obama promised he’s cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term in office? Heh, that ol’ chestnut. In actuality, President Obama has added over $5.4 trillion to the debt during less than four years in office, more than any other president and approximately a trillion more than President Bush during his full two terms in office. So, there’s that.
If Obama is a one-term president, which he himself by his own rhetoric said he ought to be, he will have added more than $6 trillion to the debt in his four years by the time he leaves office. The same man who viciously demonized his predecessor for adding less than $5 trillion over EIGHT years. The national debt is over $16 trillion now, and it’s going to keep piling on and piling on until January 2013. With at least $500 billion in interest to pay on top of that.
The U.S. fiscal gap, calculated (by us) using theCongressional Budget Office’s realistic long-term budget forecast — the Alternative Fiscal Scenario — is now $222 trillion. Last year, it was $211 trillion. The $11 trillion difference — this year’s true federal deficit — is 10 times larger than the official deficit and roughly as large as the entire stock of official debt in public hands.
This election isn’t a “do-over.” The odds are that Obama has already fatally wounded America with his insane spending and his bizarre “logic” and his constant fracturing of America on the basis of race and gender and income. But if you vote for Obama now, you are literally voting for the suicide of America.
TAPPER: One of the concerns about health care and how you pay for it — one third of the funding comes from cuts to Medicare.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: “Right.
TAPPER: A lot of times, as you know, what happens in Congress is somebody will do something bold and then Congress, close to election season, will undo it.
OBAMA: Right.
TAPPER: You saw that with the ‘doc fix.’
OBAMA: Right.
TAPPER: Are you willing to pledge that whatever cuts in Medicare are being made to fund health insurance, one third of it, that you will veto anything that tries to undo that?
OBAMA: Yes. I actually have said that it is important for us to make sure this thing is deficit neutral, without tricks. I said I wouldn’t sign a bill that didn’t meet that criteria. The full transcript of the interview can be read here.
-Jake Tapper
Democrats live by the mantra, “Facts are terrible things. And they have to be buried at all cost.”
Especially when that “cost” comes out of the guts of Medicare.
If Barack Obama wins in November, I just saw how it will happen:
While searching for this article as a man who has written about this subject before, I did a Yahoo search with the following keywords: Paul Ryan Medicare budget doesn’t take benefits from people over 55. I chose those keywords because in point of fact it is absolutely TRUE that Paul Ryan’s budget not only does not take one penny of benefits from those who are already ON Medicare, but from those who are ten years away from retirement.
All the articles on the first page that Yahoo fed me were biased toward the left. That was no accident. If you are looking for the truth, you can still find it in America; but you have to sort through a lot of lies from the mainstream media in order to find it. Mark Twain famously quipped that a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth could put its boots on. The mainstream media has done everything it could to HIDE the truth’s boots. But the lies are like paved superhighways.
Too many Americans believe things that are simply blatantly false because they’re too ignorant, too lazy and too apathetic to take the time to search for the truth that the left is trying to keep the people from seeing.
I’m looking for specific facts that my keywords plainly describe, but the mainstream media and internet search engines like pro-liberal Google and Yahoo say, “No! You can’t see those! You have to look through all of these lies first, and then good luck finding what you’re looking for while we try to prevent you from succeeding.”
Contrary to the false and frankly demonic ad featuring a Paul Ryan-lookalike pushing an elderly woman in a wheelchair off a cliff, Paul Ryan’s plan does not affect people who are 55 or older. They can keep their current plan exactly as it is. In describing his proposal, Ryan puts it in black and white:
Let me be clear, nobody age 55 or older will see any changes to the way Medicare currently operates.
Democrats are not merely being dishonest in the way they are misrepresenting the Ryan plan for Medicare; they are being demonically dishonest.
Do you want to know who is ripping off Medicare for people RIGHT NOW? Barack Obama is ripping off Medicare. The Democrat Party is ripping off Medicare – to the tune of $716 BILLION from a Medicare program that is already massively threatened by bankruptcy:
Last week, a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report updated the amount of money Obamacare robs out of Medicare from $500 billion to a whopping $716 billion between 2013 and 2022.
According to the CBO, the payment cuts in Medicare include:
A $260 billion payment cut for hospital services.
A $39 billion payment cut for skilled nursing services.
A $17 billion payment cut for hospice services.
A $66 billion payment cut for home health services.
A $33 billion payment cut for all other services.
A $156 billion cut in payment rates in Medicare Advantage (MA); $156 billion is before considering interactions with other provisions. The House Ways and Means Committee was able to include interactions with other provisions, estimating the cuts to MA to be even higher, coming in at $308 billion.
$56 billion in cuts for disproportionate share hospital (DSH) payments.* DSH payments go to hospitals that serve a large number of low-income patients.
$114 billion in other provisions pertaining to Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP* (does not include coverage-related provisions).
*Subtract $25 billion total between DSH payments and other provisions for spending that was cut from Medicaid and CHIP.
In total, Obamacare raids Medicare by $716 billion from 2013 to 2022. Despite Medicare facing a 75-year unfunded obligation of $37 trillion, Obamacare uses the savings from the cuts to pay for other provisions in Obamacare, not to help shore up Medicare’s finances.
Medicare is on the verge of bankruptcy, not in a thousand years or even fifty years; but in FOUR YEARS. It will go broke by 2016 on its current path if you understand that Obama took money out of the program but is disingenuously counting that money twice as if you can Rob Peter to pay Paul but somehow Peter and Paul both have all of Peter’s money.
You need to realize just how much dishonesty is going on in the government bean-counting: our real debt isn’t the $15.9 trillion you hear about; our real debt is $222 trillion. It went up $11 trillion from last year. And it is going to keep going up until America implodes into chaos and anarchy.
We are facing disaster. We’ve got to start making cuts or Medicare along with our entire government system will financially implode.
Democrats are demonizing ANY change in Medicare. And in so doing Democrats are demanding that Medicare go bankrupt and that senior citizens die deaths of medical neglect.
Paul Ryan is saying we’ve GOT to make changes in this program in order to save the Medicare system. Please stop letting the media and the Democrat Party lie to you and read what Paul Ryan is actually saying.
Ryan’s Medicare reform plan is demonized as a “voucher system.” It is not. But you should understand that Ryan is trying to allow people to take better advantage of a fact that neither the government nor the insurance companies want you to know about: that paying cash provides the best discount of ALL for medical care; and that if people were allowed to be able to make their own choices and negotiate their own prices for care, patients would pay LESS even as the doctors and medical professionals were able to earn MORE:
Here is an article from the Los Angeles Times – hardly a conservative think tank, lefties – that underscores this simple FACT:
Many hospitals, doctors offer cash discount for medical bills The lowest price is usually available only if patients don’t use their health insurance. In one case, blood tests that cost an insured patient $415 would have been $95 in cash.
May 27, 2012|By Chad Terhune
A Long Beach hospital charged Jo Ann Snyder $6,707 for a CT scan of her abdomen and pelvis after colon surgery. But because she had health insurance with Blue Shield of California, her share was much less: $2,336.
Then Snyder tripped across one of the little-known secrets of healthcare: If she hadn’t used her insurance, her bill would have been even lower, just $1,054.
“I couldn’t believe it,” said Snyder, a 57-year-old hair salon manager. “I was really upset that I got charged so much and Blue Shield allowed that. You expect them to work harder for you and negotiate a better deal.”
Unknown to most consumers, many hospitals and physicians offer steep discounts for cash-paying patients regardless of income. But there’s a catch: Typically you can get the lowest price only if you don’t use your health insurance.
That disparity in pricing is coming under fire from people like Snyder, who say it’s unfair for patients who pay hefty insurance premiums and deductibles to be penalized with higher rates for treatment.
The difference in price can be stunning. Los Alamitos Medical Center, for instance, lists a CT scan of the abdomen on a state website for $4,423. Blue Shield says its negotiated rate at the hospital is about $2,400.
When The Times called for a cash price, the hospital said it was $250.
“It frustrates people because there’s no correlation between what things cost and what is charged,” said Paul Keckley, executive director of the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, a research arm of the accounting firm. “It changes the game when healthcare’s secrets aren’t so secret.”
Snyder’s experience is hardly unique. In addition to Los Alamitos, The Times contacted seven other hospitals across Southern California, and nearly all had similar disparities between what a patient would pay through an insurer and the cash price offered for a common CT, or computed tomography, scan, which provides a more detailed image than an X-ray.
Health insurance still offers substantial value for consumers by providing preventive care at no cost and offering protection from major medical bills that could bankrupt most families.
But cash prices — typically available for hundreds of common outpatient services and tests — have a real appeal to millions of consumers who are on the hook for a growing share of their medical costs as employers and insurers cut back on coverage and push more high-deductible plans.
Some doctors are trying to spread the word about cash prices and they’re urging patients to pressure hospitals and insurers to offer a better deal.
[...]
In the view of Robert Berenson, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and vice chairman of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, big hospitals are exerting their market power to charge ever-increasing rates and major insurers go along with it because they can pass along the costs to employers and consumers. Insurance industry officials say that health plans negotiate the lowest prices they can, but that they also need to include prominent hospitals favored by customers in the network, and those institutions can command higher prices.
Hospital executives say they don’t like to charge insured patients more, but say that’s a result of the country’s broken healthcare system.
At Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, where Snyder got her CT scan, the hospital’s chief financial officer said insured patients like her pay more to subsidize the uncompensated care given to the uninsured and low reimbursements for Medicaid patients.
”We end up being forced to charge a premium to health plans to make the books balance,” said John Bishop, the hospital’s finance chief. “It’s a backdoor tax on employers and consumers.”
Those higher prices charged by hospitals and other medical providers drove up healthcare spending at double the rate of inflation during the recession even as patients used less medical care, according to a new study by the Health Care Cost Institute.
Snyder, the salon manager, stumbled across the two-tier system accidentally. She has filed suit against her insurer, saying she hopes her case will lead to more disclosure of the price options, and ultimately lower treatment costs for patients.
The Long Beach woman said she sought treatment in 2009 for a pain in her abdomen. First her doctor ordered a CT scan of her abdomen and pelvis at Liberty Pacific Medical Imaging, an independent facility near Long Beach Memorial.
She got approval from Blue Shield, and she paid the negotiated rate of $660. Snyder underwent surgery on her colon, and her doctor ordered another CT scan in January 2010 because she felt lingering pain.
This time, her surgeon referred her to the hospital’s imaging center. Snyder said she assumed her bill would be about the same because it was the identical test. Instead, Blue Shield’s rate with Long Beach Memorial was $3,497 and the insurer told Snyder she owed $2,336, records show.
Incensed by having to pay nearly four times as much for the second scan, she started searching for an explanation. That’s when she discovered that the hospital’s cash price was less than half what she owed through her insurance.
In a complaint filed last month in Orange County Superior Court, Snyder accused Blue Shield of unfair business practices, breach of good faith and misrepresentation over her medical bills. The suit seeks class-action status on behalf of other Blue Shield customers.
A spokesman for Blue Shield said the case has no merit and the nonprofit insurer negotiates the most favorable rates it can.
In a court filing, Blue Shield said it “cannot promise or represent that there could not be providers who will charge someone less out-of-pocket cost for a service than she would pay if the Blue Shield contract rate applies.”
Snyder said she went back to work last year at a hair salon in Seal Beach, partly to help pay her insurance premiums of $700 a month.
”It kills me that I’m paying that much in premiums,” she said, “and it’s better to pay cash out of my own pocket.”
Health-policy experts say the growing awareness of cash prices should accelerate the trend toward increased disclosure of all types of medical costs. But entrenched interests are likely to resist.
”The insiders in the healthcare industry don’t want to lose control over this information,” Keckley said. “But price transparency is inevitable.”
So even if you want to demonize the Ryan Plan as a “voucher system” as DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz does, please understand that if you had a damn voucher, you could save massively over what the corrupt boondoggle system the Democrats created back in 1965 is charging today.
This is crucial for you to understand: a liberal will read this article and say that it’s the insurance companies’ fault and that Republicans are in the pockets of the insurance companies. That is a LIE. Republicans have been trying to reform the health care system by allowing insurance companies to offer plans across state lines. Here is a Wall Street Journal article arguing for that very thing; here is a Daily Kos article blatantly acknowledging that Republicans want to allow competition across state lines. Democrats have stopped them at every single turn in order to force insurance companies to be forced to pay for sex change operations and the like. What you get is states that have only ONE insurance carrier. California, with over thirty million people, has only six insurance carriers who can do business in the state. And what you get is huge regulation and huge boondoggles. Just imagine if 200 health insurance companies could compete for your business. Given the above-documented FACT that doctors and hospitals are happily willing to charge far less for cash, how is it not an obvious common-sense FACT that we could radically drive down the costs of health care if we could ONLY have competition that Democrats have prevented???
You’ve got to understand that the free market system is the only thing that can save the American health care system. But Medicare has increasingly taken over that system since 1965 and ObamaCare will complete that takeover until the system collapses. And you’ve got to realize that Democrats viscerally DESPISE that free market competition and want to either dominate health care by nationalizing it or by regulating it to death.
Paul Ryan recognizes that the government has NOT made health care better or cheaper; it’s made it worse and more expensive.
Here is an article that further explains Paul Ryan’s bold plan in answer to Obama’s socialized medicine boondoggle:
Last year, Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.), Chairman of the House Budget Committee, unveiled the Path to Prosperity, an impressive fiscal plan that, for the first time in memory, put one chamber of Congress squarely on the record as favoring significant entitlement reform. Today, Ryan has put forth the sequel. Let’s compare the health-care provisions of Version 2 to those of Version 1.
The headline is that the new plan scraps Ryan’s old Medicare proposal, which involved full privatization of Medicare in the form of “premium support,” for a partial privatization which incorporates the option for seniors to stay on traditional Medicare, using a framework known as competitive bidding. The new Medicare proposal is lifted from Paul Ryan’s collaboration with Democratic senator Ron Wyden (Ore.), which I called a “game changer” when it was released in December.
Other health care-related provisions are basically the same: repeal Obamacare, and block-grant Medicaid. Ryan’s proposal seeks to move toward “patient-centered reform,” which he describes as including malpractice reform, purchasing insurance across state lines, and expanding consumer-driven insurance plans. Notably, he advocates allowing employees to opt out of employer-sponsored care, and giving workers the option to take their employer’s insurance contribution and devote it to buying plans for themselves:
There is a consensus of willing leaders from both parties coalescing around the right way forward in health care. Reform should address government-imposed inequities and barriers to true choice and competition. Common-sense solutions include enacting medical liability reform, ensuring Americans can purchase quality coverage across state lines, and expanding access to consumer-directed health care options. Addressing distortions in the tax code could begin by giving employers the opportunity to offer their employees a free choice option, so that workers could be free to devote their employer’s health coverage contribution to the purchase a health insurance plan that works best for them.
Medicaid: The devil’s in the block-grant details
Ryan’s proposal for Medicaid reform involves “converting the federal share of Medicaid spending into a block grant indexed for inflation and population growth.” This contrasts meaningfully with a plan put forth by four House members on the conservative Republican Study Committee: Reps. Todd Rokita (Ind.), Tim Huelskamp (Kans.), Paul Broun (Ga.), and Jim Jordan (Ohio). The RSC proposal aims to keep Medicaid spending flat, with no inflation adjustment, after block-granting it to the states.
Insofar as block-granting Medicaid has become a consensus idea within the GOP, the devil will devolve into the details: What should be the growth rate for the federal block grants? Should profligate states like New York continue to get big grants at the expense of stingy states like Texas, or should the block grant be administered on a per-beneficiary basis?
Medicare: Adapting Wyden-Ryan for the House budget
In coordination with today’s news, Ryan’s team put together a well-produced video on Medicare’s structural problems, and what premium support and competitive bidding seek to do about it:
The new GOP budget would create a “Medicare Exchange”—much like Obamacare’s insurance exchanges but with a public option—for future retirees who are under the age of 55 today. Critically, the level of premium support would be determined by the second-least expensive plan in a region, or traditional fee-for-service Medicare, whichever was lower. Seniors would keep the savings if they chose a cheaper plan:
The second-least expensive approved plan or fee-for-service Medicare, whichever is least expensive, would establish the benchmark that determines the premium-support amount for the plan chosen by the senior. If a senior chose a costlier plan than the benchmark plan, he or she would be responsible for paying the difference between the premium subsidy and the monthly premium. Conversely, if that senior chose a plan that cost less than the benchmark, he or she would be given a rebate for the difference. Payments to plans would be risk-adjusted and geographically rated. Private health plans would be required to cover at least the actuarial equivalent of the benefit package provided by fee-for-service Medicare.
This is meaningfully different from PTP 1, in which seniors didn’t gain any savings from choosing a plan cheaper than the premium support level, and where traditional Medicare was not an option.
Another key detail: Ryan’s plausible assumption is that competitive bidding could drive Medicare spending down without hard spending caps. However, as a backstop, the proposal caps the growth of Medicare spending at GDP plus 0.5 percent, which—not coincidentally—matches the targeted Medicare growth rate in President Obama’s budget.
The PTP 2 growth rate cap of GDP + 0.5% is meaningfully higher than that of PTP 1, which grew Medicare at the rate of inflation, something that was a principal source of criticism from the left (Alice Rivlin called it “much, much too low” ).
A key question is: what will the CBO do? Will the CBO score this new plan with the GDP plus 0.5 percent Medicare growth cap? Or will CBO give Ryan any credit for the benefits of competitive bidding?
Robert Coulam, Roger Feldman, and Bryan Dowd estimate that competitive bidding could shave 8 percent off of Medicare spending: a modest amount, given the program’s rapid growth rate. In the late 1990s, the City of Denver implemented a Medicare competitive bidding demonstration project, and found that bids came in at 25 to 38 percent below those of traditional Medicare. Unfortunately, that demonstration project, like nearly all others of its type, was shuttered due to fierce opposition from interest groups opposed to competitive pricing: hospitals, doctors, and other providers of medical supplies and services.
Overall health care savings: $2.5 trillion vs. Obama budget
In the 2013-2022 time frame, Ryan claims that this new version of the Path to Prosperity will reduce spending by $2.5 trillion, relative to President Obama’s budget: $205 billion from Medicare, $1.6 trillion from Obamacare, and $770 billion from Medicaid and other health-care programs. (Of course, the proposal would also repeal Obamacare’s tax hikes, making the actual deficit-reducing number smaller.)
One key question will be how PTP 2 interacts with the Budget Control Act, the debt-ceiling agreement from last summer. Democrats, and even some Republicans, are arguing that PTP 2 violates that agreement, and is therefore a non-starter in the Senate. I’ll update this post with further info on that subject as it becomes available.
Congressional Democrats and their allies are already on the attack against the new budget, reiterating the ridiculous claim that Ryan seeks to “end Medicare.” If this assertion was Politifact’s “Lie of the Year” last year, it’s even more dishonest this year, when Ryan’s plan preserves the option to stay in traditional, fee-for-service Medicare. But have a look at this new video from “ Americans United for Change”:
Sounds to me like they’re united against change, but what do I know? It will be up to voters to decide whether or not they want fiscally responsible government.
UPDATE 1: At the AEI press conference, Ryan explained that the tables included in PTP 2 are based on CBO scoring, though he was not asked whether the CBO score includes any credit for competitive bidding. In addition, he explained that the rationale for using GDP plus 0.5 percent for the Medicare premium support growth rate was driven in part by recently slowing growth in Medicare spending.
UPDATE 2: Igor Volsky of ThinkProgress argues, erroneously, that PTP 2 would allow private insurers to “cherry-pick the healthiest beneficiaries from traditional Medicare and leave sicker applicants to the government.” Indeed, the plan risk-adjusts the premium support levels so as to prevent that practice: a well-established methodology. Igor also worries that the plan wouldn’t reduce costs, but rather increase them, because he ignores the cost-reducing effects of competitive bidding. Gene Sperling, President Obama’s National Economic Director, repeats the adverse selection critique in Politico. This is clearly going to be the go-to line of attack for progressive wonks.
UPDATE 3: The CBO has released its evaluation of PTP 2. It turns out that the CBO merely projected future spending using Ryan’s specifications (in the case of Medicare, GDP + 0.5%). Here is a chart that describes how the Ryan plan would reduce Medicare spending relative to current law (the middle bar is the more realistic “alternative fiscal scenario”).
For example, in 2023, spending for a 65-year-old, in 2011 dollars, would be $6,300 under the baseline scenario (no doc fixes), $6,600 under the alternative scenario (includes doc fixes), and $5,900 under the Ryan plan.
In the report, CBO expresses its traditional view that reduced spending on Medicare could have mostly negative consequences, including:
Reduced access to health care; diminished quality of care; increased efficiency of health care delivery; less investment in new, high-cost technologies; or some combination of those outcomes. In addition, beneficiaries might face higher costs, which could in turn reinforce some of the other effects.
Note how “increased efficiency” is sandwiched in there between multiple dire alternatives. Democrats will be sure to seize on this.
UPDATE 4: Paul Ryan’s office confirmed to me that the CBO did not score the competitive bidding provision, and offered these comments:
On competitive bidding and premium support, it is critical to note CBO’s self-admitted “gap in the toolkit” when it comes to analyzing these reforms:
Here’s a video of Foster’s testimony that Ryan is referring to:
UPDATE 5: The conservative Club for Growth has come out against the Ryan plan, because it doesn’t balance the budget quickly enough, and (incorrectly) because it turns off the automatic spending cuts in the Budget Control Act, says President Chris Chocola. The Hill reports that Rep. Tim Huelskamp (co-sponsor of the block-granting initiative I mention above) will vote against the Ryan plan. This shows atrociously bad judgment on their part. The debt-ceiling agreement is a triviality relative to the critical importance of reforming entitlements.
UPDATE 6: The House Budget Committee passed the Ryan plan by one vote—19 to 18—due to two Republican defections: Huelskamp, as mentioned above, and Justin Amash (R., Mich.)
Twelve US cities have already filed for bankruptcy in Obamanation; another 27 are considering it.
The Democrat Party unions that own Barack Obama have bankrupted America. We are like the headless chicken that doesn’t know that it’s already dead.
Our real debt is NOT the $16 trillion Obama has officially given us (it was $10 trillion when Bush left office); it is now well over $211 TRILLION.
Democrats rammed through a Social Security boondoggle seventy years ago that has exploded. It didn’t matter that there was a far better private plan that a Democrat actually proposed; FDR wanted the Democrat to control America until it went bankrupt and he got his way. The same was true of Medicare and Medicaid; there were FAR better options, but Democrats wanted to socialize America and they got their way. Now people will die if these programs collapse, and mark my words they WILL collapse because of Democrats who demonize the issue while refusing to fix the problems or allow them to be fixed while the coming bankruptcy looms closer and closer.
Democrats are demon-possessed liars who try to make their fellow fools believe that George Bush bankrupted America. Bush’s spending isn’t a tenth of one percent of the debt bomb that Democrats have planted in the bowels of America. And those bombs that the Democrats so expertly planted are now beginning to explode and rip this country apart.
Some time back I started citing this little factoid published in the reliably liberal Los Angeles Times:
The staggering amount of unfunded debt stands to crowd out funding for many popular programs. Reform will take something sadly lacking in the Legislature: political courage.
The state of California’s real unfunded pension debt clocks in at more than $500 billion, nearly eight times greater than officially reported.
That’s the finding from a study released Monday by Stanford University’s public policy program, confirming a recent report with similar, stunning findings from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.
The California State Legislature Senate consists of 25 Democrats and 15 Republicans and the Assembly consisting of 52 Democrats and 28 Republicans to go with a liberal governor nicknamed “Moonbeam.” Former RINO Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger tried and was broken by the Democrat majority and the unions and never dared to raise his hands against Democrats or their union masters again.
California will burn in hell because it is Democrat, which is another way of saying that it is half completely insane and half genuinely evil.
That pension bomb was planted by DEMOCRATS. These cockroaches have KILLEDCalifornia. Three big California cities have now declared bankruptcy because there is simply no way to pay Democrat Party-controlled unions their incredibly huge pensions. And Los Angeles is right behind them. Something between 1 in 5 and 1 in 4 California cities are now facing bankruptcy. City after city are now rolling over onto their bellies because the Democrat Party is the most corrupt entity in human history. And I say that because nothing short of the most evil and most dishonest and most corrupt party on earth could have succeeded in murdering the golden goose that was America. When you consider California, with all of its major global ports and all of its inherent economic advantages, only the most stupid people in history could possibly bankrupt it. But Democrats have succeeded wildly.
Unions are giving 92% of their contributions to Democrats. Democrats, in exchange and in quid pro quo, have given benefits and pensions to the unions that support them. And it is a vicious cycle that has continued and will continue until the American people hunt down every single Democrat and burn them alive for what they did to their country.
We’re most of the way through four years of God damn America. And liberals want more God damn America until there isn’t any America left for God to damn.
The Bible describes this mindset of being utterly determined to pursue wickedness and failure no matter what, just as it describes perfectly the coming hell that big government will produce in the coming Antichrist:
“A third of mankind was killed by these three plagues, by the fire and the smoke and the brimstone which proceeded out of their mouths. For the power of the horses is in their mouths and in their tails; for their tails are like serpents and have heads, and with them they do harm. The rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent of the works of their hands, so as not to worship demons, and the idols of gold and of silver and of brass and of stone and of wood, which can neither see nor hear nor walk; and they did not repent of their murders nor of their sorceries nor of their immorality nor of their thefts” — Revelation 9:18-21
“Then the fifth angel poured out his bowl on the throne of the beast, and his kingdom became darkened; and they gnawed their tongues because of pain, and they blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores; and they did not repent of their deeds.” — Revelation 16:10-11
You’d think that the instinct of self-preservation alone would make these people turn from their ideas, but no. Evil is a disease that consumes to the bone.
We’re seeing the same kind of demonic deception going on now in North Korea. This is a nation that is completely dark at night because socialism has so wildly failed it is beyond unreal, but they worship Dear Leader and when he dies they worship the son of Dear Leader:
And that is exactly the way that Democrats are. The only difference is the name of their ”Dear Leader.” His abject failure is the same.
We’re getting just a little tiny taste of the hell that is coming. As the Antichrist leads the world (America most definitely included as Democrats gleefully worship the beast and take his mark) into hell and the people continue to refuse to repent no matter what happens, so also we now live in an America in which about half of the nation will follow Obama right into abject ruination.
All of the major news outlets are reporting that the stimulus bill voted out of conference committee last night has a meager $789 billion price tag. This number is pure fantasy. No one believes that the increased funding for programs the left loves like Head Start, Medicaid, COBRA, and the Earned Income Tax Credit is in any way temporary. No Congress under control of the left will ever cut funding for these programs. So what is the true cost of the stimulus if these spending increases are made permanent?
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) asked the Congressional Budget Office to estimate the impact of permanently extending the 20 most popular provisions of the stimulus bill. What did the CBO find? As you can see from the table below [visit link], the true 10 year cost of the stimulus bill $2.527 trillion in in spending with another $744 billion cost in debt servicing. Total bill for the Generational Theft Act: $3.27 trillion.
The actual cost of the Obama stimulus was simply completely unreported by the mainstream media which is now merely the propaganda wing of the Democrat Party. The numbers reported were pure lies.
So, as I’ve said over and over and over again, the “real” cost of the Obama stimulus was actually 308.75% higher than it was deceitfully sold to the American people as costing.
And now we see that that was a common theme of the Obama deception: because we find that the real Obama deficit wasn’t $1.3 trillion; no, it was actually $5.6 trillion. Which is, for the record, 330.77% higher than what we were told.
A picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s a picture of the the contrast between Obama’s bullcrap and actual reality:
The typical American household would have paid nearly all of its income in taxes last year to balance the budget if the government used standard accounting rules to compute the deficit, a USA TODAY analysis finds.
Under those accounting practices, the government ran red ink last year equal to $42,054 per household — nearly four times the official number reported under unique rules set by Congress.
A U.S. household’s median income is $49,445, the Census reports.
The big difference between the official deficit and standard accounting: Congress exempts itself from including the cost of promised retirement benefits. Yet companies, states and local governments must include retirement commitments in financial statements, as required by federal law and private boards that set accounting rules.
The deficit was $5 trillion last year under those rules. The official number was $1.3 trillion. Liabilities for Social Security, Medicare and other retirement programs rose by $3.7 trillion in 2011, according to government actuaries, but the amount was not registered on the government’s books.
Deficits are a major issue in this year’s presidential campaign, but USA TODAY has calculated federal finances under accounting rules since 2004 and found no correlation between fluctuations in the deficit and which party ran Congress or the White House.
Key findings:
•Social Security had the biggest financial slide. The government would need $22.2 trillion today, set aside and earning interest, to cover benefits promised to current workers and retirees beyond what taxes will cover. That’s $9.5 trillion more than was needed in 2004.
•Deficits from 2004 to 2011 would be six times the official total of $5.6 trillion reported.
•Federal debt and retiree commitments equal $561,254 per household. By contrast, an average household owes a combined $116,057 for mortgages, car loans and other debts.
“By law, the federal government can’t tell the truth,” says accountant Sheila Weinberg of the Chicago-based Institute for Truth in Accounting.
Jim Horney, a former Senate budget staff expert now at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, says retirement programs should not count as part of the deficit because, unlike a business, Congress can change what it owes by cutting benefits or lifting taxes.
“It’s not easy, but it can be done. Retirement programs are not legal obligations,” he says.
In California, Democrat Governor Jerry Brown is talking about the “crisis” of the official state deficit of billion. That’s not even CLOSE to the truth; the actual deficit of just the Democrat-passed unfunded pension liabilities for their union allies is $500 billion ALL BY ITSELF.
The state of California’s real unfunded pension debt clocks in at more than $500 billion, nearly eight times greater than officially reported.
That’s the finding from a study released Monday by Stanford University’s public policy program, confirming a recent report with similar, stunning findings from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.
It’s great if you’re in a government employee union and give all your campaign contributions to Democrats to keep the pork coming. It sucks if you’re the vast majority of Californians. Meanwhile, these same California voters keep falling for the same trick, namely, Democrats keep promising that they’ll redistribute the wealth of others and give it to people who vote Democrat.
Until California collapses under the weight of Democrat lies and burns in hell.
There’s only one term to describe this sheer lunatic deception: demon possessed. The Democrat Party today is the party of hell. One day soon Democrats will worship the Antichrist who will promise the big government Utopia of their dreams and take his mark and ultimately end up in the eternal fire that they truly deserve.
As bad as California looks, the actual debt picture of the United States as a country makes that $500 billion in uncounted unfunded liabilities to pro-Democrat labor unions look like nothin’.
Understand, this article was written in August 2011 when the national debt was “only” $14 trillion. It’s going to be $16 trillion by the end of the year.
Look at the actual debt faced by the United States. You’re on the hook for this:
When Standard & Poor’s reduced the nation’s credit rating from AAA to AA-plus, the United States suffered the first downgrade to its credit rating ever. S&P took this action despite the plan Congress passed this past week to raise the debt limit.
The downgrade, S&P said, “reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics.”
It’s those medium- and long-term debt problems that also worry economics professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff, who served as a senior economist on President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. He says the national debt, which the U.S. Treasury has accounted at about $14 trillion, is just the tip of the iceberg.
“We have all these unofficial debts that are massive compared to the official debt,” Kotlikoff tells David Greene, guest host of weekends on All Things Considered. “We’re focused just on the official debt, so we’re trying to balance the wrong books.”
Kotlikoff explains that America’s “unofficial” payment obligations — like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits — jack up the debt figure substantially.
“If you add up all the promises that have been made for spending obligations, including defense expenditures, and you subtract all the taxes that we expect to collect, the difference is $211 trillion. That’s the fiscal gap,” he says. “That’s our true indebtedness.” [...]
Quantitative easing is a hidden tax; the government inflates the currency which deflates the value of the existing dollars. The dollars systematically become worth less and we get inflation – which is actually running out of control (see here, here, here, here and – for the antidote – here).
Democrats love to blame Republicans for our debt. They are, as I have said before, demon-possessed liars. The programs that the Democrat Party rammed down our forcibly collectivist throats such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are responsible for 99-plus percent of our massive unsustainable unpayable debt that will necessarily implode America.
If you want to put it in honest terms, the agreement the Democrats – the party of baby genocide – was this: “You vote for us, and we’ll give you benefits that we’ll sell the next generation into slavery to pay for.” And Democrats said, “Good! That’s what we want!”
Republicans can’t end Social Security or Medicare now; millions of Americans (including my own parents) count on these programs - even as bad as they are – for survival. Democrats made sure that there were no rivals and no possible alternatives. But we were right all along that it was a terrible program for America and we were right all along pointing out that there were FAR better alternatives.
If that isn’t bad enough, Democrats as we speak are trying to ensure that these programs – beginning with Medicare – go bankrupt. Because the Republicans who said these programs were a mistake to begin with are doing their best to try to sustain them, while Democrats are refusing to allow ANY of the fixes that will prevent them from GOING BANKRUPT NO LATER THAN 2017. Democrats are demanding that we keep these programs exactly as they are: and “exactly as they are” equals CATASTROPHIC BANKRUPTCY and collapse.
And fot further go on with the sheer deceit of the Democrat Party, we now know that ObamaCare was sold on such a whopping load of lies it is beyond unreal – such as a SEVENTEEN TRILLION DOLLAR FUNDING GAP between the ocean of lies and the actual reality.
As sick and as frankly terrifying the implications of all the above are, can I end on a hilarious note?
“And by the way, we’re going to pay down our debt in a way that is balanced and responsible. I inherited a trillion dollar deficit; I signed $2 trillion in spending cuts. My opponents won’t admit it because it runs contrary to, I guess, the only argument they have — but since I’ve been President, federal spending has actually risen at the lowest pace in nearly 60 years. (Applause.) It usually takes a Democrat to fix these problems after they have run up the tab.” (Applause.) — Barack Obama, May 24, 2012
In order to justify this demonic lie, Obama assumes a baseline that simply blames George Bush for all 2009 debt – INCLUDING OBAMA’S MASSIVE $3.27 TRILLION STIMULUSTHAT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH GEORGE BUSH AND WHICH NOT ONE SINGLE REPUBLICAN VOTED FOR. Obama’s “baseline” further assumed that emergency programs such as the TARP – which Obama himself approved of and voted for – was now something that America had to repeat every single year in perpetuity as opposed to being what it was (a one-time emergency event). And so the following year when Obama didn’t spend another $700 billion in TARP, he was actually SAVING money. Oh, and to complete the point about how ridiculous this is, OBAMA ASKED FOR AND RECEIVED HALF THE $700 billion TARP funds. So Obama voted for it, Obama asked for it, and Obama spent it. But it’s Bush’s fault and so blame Bush.
Obama is artificially and demonically jacking up the “baseline” and then pointing to a lie to say “I’m only increasing spending by a little tiny bit.” He uses a bogus contrived statistic to claim he’s the lowest-spending president in sixty years when the actual reality is that he’s the highest-spending president in the history of the entire human race.
One of my favorite programs is the Wall Street Journal’s “Journal Editorial Report” which appears on Fox News. This segment helps you understand why:
When we come back, Paul Ryan takes on the religious left after 90 Georgetown professors attack his budget proposal as going against Catholic social teaching. Would Jesus Christ really have favored big government?
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. PAUL RYAN, R-WISC., CHAIRMAN, HOUSE BUDGET COMMITTEE: Since we meet here today at America’s first Catholic university, I feel it is important to discuss how, as a Catholic in public life, my own personal thinking on these issues has been guided by my understanding of the church’s social teaching. Simply put, I don’t believe the preferential option for the poor means a preferential option for big government.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GIGOT: That was the House budget committee chairman, Paul Ryan, last week delivering an address at Georgetown University. The Wisconsin Republican has come under fire from some Catholics on the left who claimed the blue print goes against the church’s social teaching. Ninety Georgetown faculty and administrators sent a letter to Ryan in advance of the appearance that read, in part, “We would be remiss in our duty to you and our students if we did not challenge your continuing misuse of Catholic teaching to defend a budget that decimates food programs for struggling families, radically weakens protections for the elderly and sick, and gives more tax breaks to the wealthiest few.”
Joining the panel this week, Wall Street Journal columnist and deputy editor, Dan Henninger, and columnist, Mary Anastasia O’Grady.
Dan, we’ll put it on the table, we are all Catholics here, grew up with Catholic social teaching.
DAN HENNINGER, COLUMNIST & DEPUTY EDITOR: Right.
GIGOT: To my mind, the news is not so much Jesuits or Georgetown faculty by conservatives. That is an old story. The news is that Ryan is willing to mix it up in return. Why is the debate important?
HENNINGER: The debate is important for — I tell you, Paul, it is important for reasons that both Ryan’s critics and Paul Ryan cite, both that letter and his talk said the same thing. One in six Americans are in poverty. Now, the Great Society started in 1965, creating programs to address poverty.
GIGOT: Lyndon Johnson.
HENNINGER: Lyndon Johnson.
GIGOT: Expansion of government.
HENNINGER: 50 years later, one in six Americans are in poverty? After spending trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars. Now Ryan is saying, first, we need accountability over why that has happened. Second, the three main programs — two main programs were created then, Medicare and Medicaid, adding in Social Security, the three major entitlements, the costs are so large that they drain money away from other programs for the poor.
GIGOT: Right.
HENNINGER: And Paul Ryan is saying we have to look at this and start making some decisions about where that is going. And that’s what he’s asking his critics to come and talk to him about.
GIGOT: This is what the late Senator, a Democrat, and a Catholic, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, used to make the case to me that — he said, Democrats should reform entitlements for seniors and Medicare and Social Security because, as Dan said, they are growing a huge wedge in the federal government. They will soak up, if trends continue, almost all the spending there is, the money there is, and there would be no money left for child care, for example, or education, or transportation, much less defense — good liberal purposes.
MARY ANASTASIA O’GRADY: But, Paul, why are you talking about facts?
(LAUGHTER)
Facts are not what the left has used to grow the government to what it is right now.
GIGOT: That’s one my big flaws.
(LAUGHTER)
O’GRADY: Really, you have to stop that.
Paul Ryan is freaking these guys out because he is taking their language and using it against them. He talks about how government dissolves the common good of society, how it dishonors the dignity of the human person. They think they own that language. And they think that language justifies big government. And he is saying, no, what you have done with this big government has actually undermined the things that Catholic teaching is supposed to be about. And that is why they are upset about it. If Paul Ryan, God forbid, gets the morale high ground, which they think they own, they will have to go back to the facts. And the facts will not support their position.
GIGOT: Important point, a lot of Republicans and conservatives tend to shrink, at least in my experience, from moral arguments. Look at my failing here, brining — talking practical points in fact.
(LAUGHTER)
But if — so you leave them a monopoly on the moral rhetoric, which is very power of in politics, on the left. Ryan is saying, I will meet you on that same battlefield.
HENNINGER: Well, he has created a phrase, which is the immorality of debt. And, in fact, Pope Benedict himself apparently said that if you live with debt that begins do impede the government’s ability to provide basic services, then you are living in untrue — Benedict is obviously talking about Europe.
GIGOT: Right.
HENNINGER: And Europe has had a tremendous commitment to social justice and social programs, and now we see Europe as a case study in struggling with trying to pay for commitments that simply they can no longer afford. And that is the issue that Paul Ryan is trying to raise. And he now is putting it in moral terms. And there is a moral issue there. And I think he deserve a good-faith answer.
GIGOT: If you look at Europe, one thing that we can see is when you have a debt crisis, and you finally have to do something about it, who suffers the most and first? It isn’t the Georgetown faculty.
(LAUGHTER)
It is the poor, who have their budgets and spending cut?
This is precisely the kind of moral argument that I have been advocating for on this blog. Here’s an example:
So let’s read the Bible and see what it says.
First there’s that little passage in 1 Samuel that warns about the danger of a socialist king who would seize what rightly belonged to the people if they wickedly chose big government instead of trusting in God (as I previously have pointed out):
The story of abusive big government is not a recent one. The prophet Samuel describes it in the Old Testament:
But the people refused to listen to Samuel. “No!” they said. “We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles. — 1 Samuel 8:19-20
Who are we really rejecting? God said to Samuel:
“…it is not you they have rejected, Samuel, but they have rejected me as their king.” — 1 Samuel 8:7
Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking him for a king. He said, “This is what the king who will reign over you will do: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the LORD will not answer you in that day.” — 1 Samuel 8:10-18
The tenth of everything that God warned the people the king would take was on top of the tenth that belonged to God. Which is to say that the king would double their taxes in addition to treating the people like they belonged to him. Of course, that tyrant king was only seizing an additional tenth of his people’s wealth; imagine today, where in the highest-taxed states (which are all Democrat states, fwiw), some Americans are forced to pay more than half of their income in taxes. A mere extra tenth would be like a blessing to them.
It doesn’t sound as if the king whom we are told again and again – ”he will take” – is a good thing. Except on Al Sharpton’s and demonic Democrats warped and evil account of the passage.
Then there’s Jesus, who contrasted what the government confiscated with what belonged to God:
“Show me a denarius. Whose portrait and inscription are on it?” Caesar’s,” they replied. He said to them, “Then give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” — Luke 20:24-25
Notice that what belongs to God isn’t also described as belonging to Caesar. What Jesus is MOST DEFINITELY NOT SAYING here is that giving unto Caesar is in any way, shape or form tantamount to giving to God. Unless, that is, you are a Democrat (i.e., a demonic bureaucrat), in which case worshipping the State is identical to worshipping God.
When Democrats want to let Obama take more of what belongs to us, they are giving their god his due, not the God of the Bible.
So when liberals demand the expansion of government they are not being “pro-God”; they are being ANTI-God. And it also turns out to be the case that they are tragically anti-poor, too.
I once quoted Burton Folsom in his great book “New Deal Or Raw Deal?” It’s time to quote that passage again:
Throughout American history, right from the start, charity had been a state and local function. Civic leaders, local clergy, and private citizens, evaluated the legitimacy of people’s need in their communities or counties; churches and other organizations could then provide food, shelter, and clothing to help victims of fires or women abandoned by drunken husbands. Most Americans believed that the face-to-face encounters of givers and receivers of charity benefited both groups. It created just the right amount of uplift and relief, and discouraged laziness and a poor work ethic.
The Founders saw all relief as local and voluntary, and the Constitution gave no federal role for the government in providing charity. James Madison, in defending the Constitution, observed, “No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity.” In other words, if relief, and other areas, were made functions of the federal government, the process would become politicized and politicians and deadbeats could conspire to trade votes for food” (New Deal or Raw Deal, page 76-77).
Prior to FDR, the American people took care of their OWN, family by family, town by town, county by county, state by state. They had NEVER had welfare, and in fact found the very concept of welfare distasteful. And I’m going to tell you right now that they were better, stronger people than we are as a result of that moral superiority and that faith in THE PEOPLE and not the GOVERNMENT.
Barack Obama – who gave virtually NOTHING to charity when giving would have demonstrated the character he proved he DIDN’T have – doesn’t trust the American people, or much care about them, for that matter. He doesn’t want to help people; he wants to grow the size of government. He wants only to make the state bigger and bigger and more and more powerful and controlling. Obama is angry because he doesn’t believe people should have the right to decide for themselves how much of their own money they “need”; HE wants to make that decision for them and then impose it on them so he can seize their money and redistribute it to people who will vote for him and for his party.
Whenever a Democrat calls for more taxes, understand that what they are really saying is that they believe that the government is too small and needs to become larger. And whenever they call for more taxes for the sake of helping people, what they are really saying is that you are a bad and immoral person who can’t and shouldn’t be trusted to help people in need and that it is better to take your money away from you and put it into the coffers of a big government socialist redistributionist agency which will piss it away on boondoggle programs that benefit the politically connected far more than they do the poor. And the fact that even as Barack Obama and the overwhelming Democrat majority that had dictatorial control of both branches of Congress made government bigger than it has ever been and yet blacks are now worse off than they’ve been for generations and women are being set way back is the icing on the cake of the proof of that fact. Liberals hurt the people they cynically and falsely claim to be helping – and then demagogically use the misery that they themselves created to accumulate even more power for themselves and their failed agenda.
The craziest thing of all is that this seventeen trillion-dollar unfunded spending is actually itself just a small fraction of the money that the most irresponsible political party in the history of the entire human race has spent without being able to even begin to pay for it:
Senate Republican staffers continue to look though the 2010 health care reform law to see what’s in it, and their latest discovery is a massive $17 trillion funding gap.
“The more we learn about the bill, the more we learn it is even more unaffordable than was suspected,” said Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Republican’s budget chief in the Senate.
“The bill has to be removed from the books because we don’t have the money,” he said.
The hidden shortfall between new spending and new taxes was revealed just after Supreme Court justices grilled the law’s supporters about its compliance with the Constitution’s limits on government activity. If the court doesn’t strike down the law, it will force taxpayers find another $17 trillion to pay for the increased spending.
The $17 trillion in extra promises was revealed by an analysis of the law’s long-term requirements. The additional obligations, when combined with existing Medicare and Medicaid funding shortfalls, leaves taxpayers on the hook for an extra $82 trillion in health care obligations over the next 75 years.
The federal government has an additional $17 trillion unfunded gap in other obligations, including Social Security, bringing the total shortfall to $99 trillion.
The shortfall is different from existing debt. The federal government already owes $15 trillion in debt, including $5 trillion in funds borrowed during Obama’s term.
That $99 trillion in unfunded future expenses is more than five years of wealth generated by the United States, which now produces just over $15 trillion of value per year.
The $99 trillion funding gap is equal to almost 30 years of the current federal budget, which was $3.36 trillion for 2011.
The new $17 trillion funding gap is five times the current federal budget.
Currently, the Social Security system is $7 trillion in debt over the next 75 years, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Also, Medicare will eat up $38 trillion in future taxes, and Medicaid will consume another $2o trillion of the taxpayer’s wealth, according to estimates prepared by the actuarial office at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The short-term cost of the Obamacare law is $2.6 trillion, almost triple the $900 billion cost promised by Obama and his Democratic allies, said Sessions.
The extra $17 trillion gap was discovered by applying standard federal estimates and models to the law’s spending obligations, Sessions said.
For example, Session’s examination of the health care law’s “premium support” program shows a funding gap $12 billion wider than predicted.
The same review also showed the law added another $5 trillion in unfunded obligations for the Medicaid program.
“President Obama told the American people that his health law would cost $900 billion over ten years and that it would not add ‘one dime’ to the debt… this health law adds an entirely new obligation—one we cannot pay for—and puts the entire financing of the United States government in jeopardy,” Sessions said in a floor speech.
“We don’t have the money… We have to reduce the [obligations] that we have.”
That $2.6 trillion ObamaCare figure – again, making it THREE TIMES what Obama promised the American people it would cost – is not some “right-wing talking point”; it comes right out of the CBO:
A Congressional Budget Office report shows that the cost of implementing President Obama’s health care overhaul will reach $2.6 trillion over a ten-year period, a dramatic increase from the White House’s original estimate.
In 2009, Obama stated that the legislation would cost “around $900 billion over ten years.” The CBO’s original ten-year numbers weren’t that far off, but critics of the health care bill noted then that the cost would be much greater once projections accounted for its full implementation.
Democrats pushed the back-loaded bill into law in 2010, although it isn’t scheduled to be fully implemented until 2014.
“The fact that the outlook for the law continues to worsen so rapidly, even before it is implemented, is ominous,” Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions said in a statement.
“And despite massive tax hikes and new penalties to pay for the bill, which CBO estimates have risen by another $99 billion compared to their estimates last March … the president’s health spending law will add at least $700 billion to the deficit over its first 10 years. Sadly, it may prove much worse than that.”
The CBO arrived at its $2.6 trillion figure after measuring the effects of expanding coverage over its first ten years in effect. At its full scope the health care law will result in “4 million fewer Americans [having] employer-based coverage,” the CBO noted.
As insane as that $99 trillion figure is, it is the lowball estimate of the sheer extent of the fatal debt cycle that the Democrat Party is entirely responsible for. A peer-reviewed IMF publication cited the actual unfunded liabilities of the United States at over $200 trillion:
Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff says U.S. government debt is not $13.5-trillion (U.S.), which is 60 per cent of current gross domestic product, as global investors and American taxpayers think, but rather 14-fold higher: $200-trillion – 840 per cent of current GDP. “Let’s get real,” Prof. Kotlikoff says. “The U.S. is bankrupt.”
Writing in the September issue of Finance and Development, a journal of the International Monetary Fund, Prof. Kotlikoff says the IMF itself has quietly confirmed that the U.S. is in terrible fiscal trouble – far worse than the Washington-based lender of last resort has previously acknowledged. “The U.S. fiscal gap is huge,” the IMF asserted in a June report. “Closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 per cent of U.S. GDP.”
This sum is equal to all current U.S. federal taxes combined. The consequences of the IMF’s fiscal fix, a doubling of federal taxes in perpetuity, would be appalling – and possibly worse than appalling.
Medicare will go bankrupt no later than 2017; and Democrats are demonizing every attempt by Republicans to save this failed system by making modifications that are critically needed to avert complete disaster.
The Democrat Party ought to be called the “Demoncrat Party” – as in “the party of Demonic Bureaucrats.”
The United States of America is guaranteed to die if Democrats – and particuarly if Barack Obama – is allowed to have anything to do with its governance.
