Bruce Bartlett is on fire. His entire Forbes column is worth reading, but this bit sums it up nicely:
It astonishes me that a party enacting anything like the drug benefit would have the chutzpah to view itself as fiscally responsible in any sense of the term. As far as I am concerned, any Republican who voted for the Medicare drug benefit has no right to criticize anything the Democrats have done in terms of adding to the national debt. Space prohibits listing all their names, but the final Senate vote can be found here and the House vote here.
The Medicare Part D legislation pushed by the Bush administration and voted into law by a Republican Congress will add more to the national debt over the next ten years than the proposed Democratic healthcare reform. By $100 billion dollars.
Yet, we have politicians and pundits on the right pretending to be the party of fiscal responsibility. It’s almost embarrassing to watch.
If Republicans were serious about fixing the terrible fiscal position we’re in they’d do well to bring people like Bartlett back into the fold. Tax cuts and spending cuts sound nice on paper, but in real life it’s a little harder to implement. For one, as soon as Republicans are actually in power they forget all about fiscal discipline. They have their constituencies to pay for, after all. The only president in the past thirty years to actually tackle entitlement spending was Bill Clinton.
Now we have Republicans defending Medicare from potential cuts the Democrats would like to make!
Admittedly, there is no telling if Congress will actually make the cuts they pass into law. But certainly the Republicans could have worked to actually strengthen that likelihood rather than oppose it.
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