Harry Reid ridicules saving $54,000,000,000! Only in America…
Republican Senator Everett Dirksen is widely credited with saying, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” Fifty years ago the people’s representatives used to fret over spending amounts of money with nine zeros. Not any more. President Obama’s first budget calls for nearly $1,000,000,000,000 of spending every three months. An updated version of Dirksen’s apothegm would read something like, “A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there…” Today’s appropriations make Lyndon Johnson look positively frugal.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, referring to a Congressional Budget Office suggestion that tort reform could save “$54 billion” of proposed healthcare spending, disparaged the notion. Yes, admitted Reid, $54 billion is a lot of money, but compared to the overall cost of healthcare in America, not worth the effort to save it. Of course, Reid can make such a statement because it’s not his money being wasted. Grandma could safely bet her pantyhose that Reid would sing a different tune were his money (and a lot less than $54 billion) at stake. But taxpayer money just isn’t worth the effort.
This mindset of improvidence permeates those who control the reigns of power at the federal and state level. California’s Democratic majority has spent the state into a financial hole it might never get out of. Unknown to mostCalifornians is some $200 billion in unfunded liabilities that are ”off the books” according to State Assemblyman Kevin Jeffries. The pension deals of 1999 and 2001 put the Golden State on an unsustainable fiscal path. Without massive borrowing, California faces tough choices. The state can renege on its pension obligations, attempt to dramatically raise taxes, or go into bankruptcy. No wonder the Huffington Post recently mused whether California would fail altogether.
All this financial irresponsibility has been revealed in one of President Obama’s proposals to “pay” for Obamacare. The President has said America could save $300 to $500 billion by cutting waste and fraud in Medicare. Average Americans immediately demanded to know why the misapplications of their money hadn’t been eliminated already. The answer is sadly obvious. As long as it’s taxpayer money at issue, no one in Sacramento or Washington cares about waste or fraud. Rapacious spending is the only order of the day, designed to satisfy the wants of increasingly greedy and shiftless constituents too feckless to provide for themselves.
In his senatorial statement about healthcare, Senator Reid let slip something of a bombshell. Instead of restating the much publicized price tag for Obamacare — $1 trillion or slightly less over the first 10 years — Reid let fly with “$2 trillion.” Conservatives have seized on this possible misstatement as proof that Obama’s cost estimates are wildly low. Would that $2 trillion was the real number. As with virtually all large federal welfare programs, future amendments and cost overruns will relentlessly drive up expenditures. Name a federal welfare program that has not dramatically exceeded projected costs and I’ll eat my computer.
Americans would do well to remember the Medicare debates of the 1960s. Republicans of the day screamed that future costs would doom the program to bankruptcy. Playing defense, Democrats predicted acceptable costs 30 years after Medicare began. The 30-year mark was reached in the mid-1990s. By that time, Medicare expenditures were nearly 10 times the promised levels so confidently put forth in 1965. If Obamacare is signed into law, let’s hope Reid is right. A ten-year cost of $2 trillion, merely double the current estimates, will seem like a good deal. By then we’ll all be saying, “A trillion here, a trillion there…”
Posted by Jerry Pomeroy in Government Waste, Health Insurance Debate, Video