Friday, May 1, 2009

Obama is not the problem... underfunded government and a heath care crisis are...


Conservatives still running the same meme, that Obama is responsible for the massive deficit problems.

They do so for two reasons.  The Bush tax cuts, which created half the deficit reminds us that the government isn't bringing in enough revenue as it stands.  The long term deficit problems require health care reform, because its the cost of helath care that is driving up the deficit.

As i've pointed out in the past, check out the following stuff I pointed to in a recent post:

Regarding the Deficit: Policy Basics: The 2001 and 2003 Tax Cuts which notes:

The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts added about $1.7 trillion to deficits between 2001 and 2008. Because they been financed by borrowing — which increases the national debt — this figure includes the extra interest costs resulting from that additional debt.

This figure also includes the cost of “patching” the Alternative Minimum Tax to keep the tax from hitting millions of upper-middle-class households, a problem the tax cuts helped cause. (See Policy Basics: The Alternative Minimum Tax.)

Over the next decade (2009-2018), making the tax cuts permanent would cost $4.4 trillion, assuming that the tax cuts remain deficit-financed.

And Tax Cuts: Myths and Realities

Congressional Budget Office data show that the tax cuts have been the single largest contributor to the reemergence of substantial budget deficits in recent years.  Legislation enacted since 2001 added about $3.0 trillion to deficits between 2001 and 2007, with nearly half of this deterioration in the budget due to the tax cuts (about a third was due to increases in security spending, and about a sixth to increases in domestic spending).  Yet the President and some Congressional leaders decline to acknowledge the tax cuts’ role in the nation’s budget problems, falling back instead on the discredited nostrum that tax cuts “pay for themselves.”

I mentioned both the health care crisis and the deficit because the two are linked.  If we don't get control of our health care spending we will have major problems over the long term.

For more on this you can read Peter Orszag statement before the Committee on the Budget United States Senate Health Care and the Budget: Issues and Challenges for Reform in June of 2007.  At the time he was Director of the Congressional Budget Office but he is currently the Budget Director for the White House, and keeps a copy of Epictetus on his bed side table.

To see what would happen if we are able to control costs like the rest of the industrialized world, you need to check out the Center for Economic and Policy Research's Health Care Budget Deficit Calculator which, "allows you to see what the projected U.S. budget deficit would be, as a percentage of GDP, if the United States had the same per person health care costs as any of the countries in the list below, all of which enjoy longer life expectancies than the United States."

For more on Obama's plan you can read his Blueprint for Change.

For more on how you can help bring about this change join me in standing with Dr. Dean. So that we can assure that individual Americans can choose either a universally available public healthcare option like Medicare or for-profit private insurance.  A public health care option brings competition into the marketplace without it we will continue to pay 2 to 3 times as much for health care as other industrialized nations (while leaving large chunks of our population without coverage a.k.a "rationing" via income). 

Pragmatic conservatives, who are serious about their philosophy--rather than ivory tower types, who focus on utopia--would point to government spending that should be cut and their scenario of how such cuts would pass the congress.  Just cause they "oppose government spending" as an ideology doesn't mean the rest of us agree with them--or need to.  Government spending, higher taxes--these things don't in of themsevles hurt our quality of life.  Underfunding our government does.

Posted via web from jimnichols's posterous

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