Funny What We Can “Afford”
Via Balloon Juice.
Yes, the Congressional Budget Office’s preliminary cost estimates for Senate plans were higher than expected, and caused considerable consternation last week. But the fundamental fact is that we can afford universal health insurance — even those high estimates were less than the $1.8 trillion cost of the Bush tax cuts.
Krugman
And then there’s this: “The CBO numbers ($1.6 trillion) were also about half of the estimated long-range costs of the Iraq war.”
Money for war and tax cuts for the rich = Hell yeah!
Money for health care = Irresponsible spending
I don’t want to hear another word about what we can afford, because when it comes to what Republicans want… money’s no option and “fiscal responsibility” is just a cute little phrase uttered when they’re out of power.
Tags: Health Care
Yep, you nailed it. “Fiscal responsibility” has come to mean, stop Democrats’ plans. Just like pork is money spent in somebody else’s district.
Indeed — if tax cuts on the order of the size of the bill for health care was proposed, every damn repub would step in line and make the case of why we have to have them, budget be damned.
And don’t bring that tax cuts pay for themselves idiocy in here — we’ve lived with the structural deficit caused by those tax cuts (and other things) for about 7 years now.
Didn’t Republicans already vote for a tax cut plan (every single Republican) at least 2x that size? Remember the “alternate” stimulus plan?
It is correct to worry about the money. For what it is worth no government program has ever stayed within the rate of inflation over the long term.
Taxes will have to go up and this spending $7 4 trillion in unfunded liabilities and also medicaid goes up 15% almost every year.
How do you pay for it?
Mike Protack
Mike,
How do you pay for the increasing “health care” costs by business at over 10% inflation per year in the current system? So lets see, we take tax cuts b/c individual people are smarter than the government (WOW, that is just not true. I mean look at Seerah Peelin) it will cost us more and be more inefficient than any government run healthcare. Oh, and we already have Medicare and Medicaid by the government to use as benchmarks for the goverment managing health care for all. So stop spouting your idiocy and belief against something that over 70% of americans firmly believe needs to be changed. Wait, never mind. Don’t stop so that all republicans can be laughed at and pushed out of all offices. That is a much better plan.