Wonder what you would find if you frisked Pelosi/Obama-Care and all the other government service expansions?
Answer: They cost billions more than what they were originally projected to cost.
This is what I would like to call ‘a reality check for those who put their trust in big government’. Are you confident the price tag on Obama-Care will remain within its original cost prediction? If you are one of those liberals who quickly respond with “Yes!” to that question, then here’s your reality slap in the face:
No other Big Government program has ever stayed within an order of magnitude of the promises made when it was signed into law. Medicare originally cost about $3 billion, when it began in 1965, and was projected to cost about $12 billion by 1990, adjusted for inflation. The actual cost in 1990 was nearly ten times that figure, $107 billion. It was up to $440 billion by 2007. The architects of the program would have been run out of town on a rail, if these future costs had been known to the voters of 1965.
The difference between promised benefits and expected revenues for Social Security and Medicare amounts to about $107 trillion dollars, which Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute points out is double the annual Gross Domestic Product of the entire world. The most strident opponent of the New Deal would never have dreamed of predicting this level of cost overrun. Name any government program that has been around for more than five years, and the odds are good it costs at least triple what its opponents originally said it would cost.
Gee, the government has an amazing track record at running things pretty well… Not at all. Need more evidence? Look at the United State Postal Service and Amtrak which are both colossal failures and a drain on our government.
So I ask again, do you like your odds that the price tag on Pelosi/Obama-Care is correct? But than again, the real question should be which price tag is the correct one? After all, Pelosi/Obama-Care has been stuck with more price tags than an opened/returned item placed on the clearance shelf:
- CBO estimate of $3 TRILLION over the next 10 years.
- The Heritage Foundation estimate of $2.6 TRILLION.
- Democrat and CBO estimate of $1.2 TRILLION without the ‘doc fix’ or $1.45 TRILLION with the ‘doc fix’.
And the price tags continue so make sure you pick your poison, because:
Maybe this time, we can roll a titanic new government program across the fruited plains, without squashing the fruit. Among the most dangerous delusions of liberals and moderates is the belief they can unleash a blizzard of taxes and spending without radically altering other aspects of their lives… the belief they can blow the better part of $3 trillion taking over an industry, but everything else will stay exactly the same. They don’t appreciate how quickly the economic depression from huge taxes and industrial takeovers will destroy the income stream fueling the program, requiring increasingly high taxes in a vicious cycle resembling the collapse of a star into a black hole. They underestimate the damage to the national psyche that will result from hooking the middle class into a welfare program it can never escape. They’ve grown to take our fantastically advanced medical science for granted, and don’t realize how much less they’ll be expected to settle for, when doctors and corporations flee from a nationalized health care industry, the way many doctors currently refuse to accept Medicare. I don’t think enough people appreciate how far we have to fall, from the A+ health care we enjoy today, to the C- that will be good enough for government work.
Side-Note: Larger government is never the answer. Democrats and liberals need to wake up to reality and stop passing out entitlements like it’s candy on Halloween. Obama and his loyal Democrats need to get their priorities straight. Unemployment is at 10.2% and they are busy trying to overhaul 1/6 of our U.S. economy… Absolutely irresponsible and absurd.
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