The Democrats say their health care plan will cost $860B between 2010 and 2020. They're going to pay for it by increasing taxes starting immediately. Thing is, however, the benefits those taxes will pay for don't start kicking in until 2014. That means the money that is supposed to pay for health care starts getting collected 4 years before it's needed. That must mean that the money being collected to pay for it will be set aside until it's needed to pay for the new health care program, right? It won't be frittered away on something else in the meantime, right? It won't be used to pay for entirely different new entitlements they dream up, right? We can trust them to sit on such a windfall and not spend it frivolously or recklessly, right? Sure. We can trust them!
Wait a minute! Maybe we should check their record on collecting new tax money for a new entitlement and spending it on only that. Hmmmm. Remind me again why Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are about to bankrupt us? Oh yeah, they spent much (most?) of the taxes collected for them on things OTHER THAN those programs! And now they're acting surprised those programs are running out of money? AND they're reaching into our pockets to save those programs, all of which THEY bankrupted through THEIR mismanagement? Sounds good to me. Where do I sign up?
Let me get this straight. THEY bankrupted Medicare (by spending money collected for Medicare on other things instead, expanding the scope of Medicare to cover things never intended and generally mismanaging the program). And NOW they're coming back to us, hat in hand, asking for more money and approval for a huge new bureaucracy to fix a problem THEY created. And after they start collecting this additional money, they expect us to believe they'll actually save it to spend ONLY on the health care that starts kicking in in 2014 ... in spite of their SPOTLESS record NOT doing that?
Oh, and while we're talking about it, doesn't something bother you about Democrats' claimed net cost of their health care plan? Hmmm. Let's see. They collect new taxes for 10 years but the benefits don't start for 4 years so the costs they quote actually only cover 6 years. If they're going to claim that the plan's 10-year costs are 'only' $860B shouldn't we be weighing the 10-year costs over an actual 10-year period of benefits? Wait a minute! We can't do that because, then, the number will be so big that no sane person would agree to it. It turns out that, in it's first full 10 years between 2014 and 2124, the plan's actual costs will be around $2.5 TRILLION! Wow! No wonder they don't want to talk about that! It works out to about $30,000 PER FAMILY!
When they say the 10-year costs will be $860B but that number only includes 6 years of costs, why doesn't that qualify as blatantly intentionally misleading, if not an outright intentional lie? Where's the integrity and honesty in their claims? What are we to assume except that those qualities in elected representatives don't matter any more, at least to them? What would YOU do if you signed a contract with someone to, for example, buy a house for $300,000 but later when you read the fine print you found out you had to pay almost four times as much as you were told to pay?
Maybe you think these lies are no big deal because they guaranteed you that SOMEONE ELSE (ie, big evil corporations and 'the rich') will have to pay for it. Does that make it fair and honest? Or does fair and honest only matter if it affects you? (By the way, you WILL have to pay for it because corporations and 'the rich' will just pass the costs on to the rest of us in one way or another.)
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