Just a few inconvenient things that Obama’s big speech failed to address:
9. Can the president make good on his promise not to “add one dime” to the national debt?
The Congressional Budget Office estimates the House health care bill will increase the deficit by $239 billion over the next 10 years, while the Senate bill would add more than $1 trillion to the national debt in the next decade. Democrats discount those figures, saying they do not include the savings they anticipate.
10. The president says that he can save $500 billion in waste and fraud in Medicare. Has the government ever succeeded in such an ambitious cutting effort?
The government has never been able to save money on this scale. Most recently, Obama’s effort to make cuts at the Cabinet level yielded about $267 million in savings. And the government’s biggest effort yet, initiated by then-Vice President Al Gore in 1993, claimed savings of just $12.3 billion after four years.
That’s just two of the things that need answering. There are ten more reasons to go over and read the rest.
Reason number ten, above, should tell you a lot about the airy promises of huge savings. The fact is that the government is incapable of saving money. It is not structured to do so from the ground up.
It is a spending entity. Nothing else. It takes from the productive elements of society and spends that money. Often really badly, always inefficiently. It knows nothing else. In biological terms it is a parasite, a tapeworm within the body politic. Private charity is vastly more efficient in distributing aid than the government is. That should tell you a lot.
Yet we are assured that more government is the answer. I don’t think so.
