Obamacare "scored" by the CBO

I know this will come a huge shock to all of you, but it seems Nevada politics is suddently immersed in the controversial passage of Obamacare.  There's only one reason this is true.  Harry Reid (D-NV), Senate majority leader, was the point man for President Obama, and now people are actually looking at the budgetary implications of this massive entitlement program. 

Remember when it passed in the dead of the night and few had actually read the bill before it passed?  Now the pigeons are coming home to roost.  The Congressional Budget Office just issued an updated report -- they have now read it and analyzed its costs using their assumptions.

Sharron Angle, the Republican nominee challenging Reid for his Senate seat, and an arch-conservative who believes the entitlement mentality in Washington MUST be altered drastically, has come under withering fire from Harry Reid's campaign and its operatives.  The reason?  She had the audacity for highlighting the need to move away from the entitlement state in favor of policies which foster personal choices and responsibility.  She sounds like a patriot to me!!

I warned back in December this was the wrong path, and I had lots of support for that assumption.  it was an outrage then, and now it's something worse (language to describe it fails me).  A budget report just released by the Congressional Budget Office proves that the entitlement state is putting us on a path to fiscal ruin, and the government with Harry Reid at the controls in the Senate seems to be out of answers except for, "Trust us, you will like Obamacare when you learn more about it."  Does it come as a surprise that exactly the opposite is happening?

Hold on to your hat, I know you'll be shocked. . . the Readers' Digest version generating many of the headlines, is that Obamacare will do little if anything to reduce deficits and national debt, even using the contrived assumptions Harry Reid required the CBO to use in its "scoring" of Obamacare the first time around in its baseline projections.  Remember President Obama's State of the Union quote?  "I will not allow this bill to add a dime to the deficit."  That one will go down as the whopper of the year in future generations when someone actually gets around to writing an honest history of this administration.

The most significant finding for me is the CBO presents in this report an "alternative" projection, using more realistic assumptions than included in the CBO's health care and budget projections, and it predicts disaster.  Quoting directly from the report:

"The budget outlook is much bleaker under the alternative fiscal scenario, which incorporates several changes to current law that are widely expected to occur or that would modify some provisions of law that might be difficult to sustain for a long period.

"In this scenario, CBO assumed that Medicare’s payment rates for physicians would gradually increase (which would not happen under the current law) and that several policies enacted in the recent health care legislation that would restrain growth in health care spending would not continue in effect after 2020. In addition, under the alternative scenario, spending on activities other than the major mandatory health care programs, Social Security, and interest would fall below the average level of the past 40 years relative to GDP, though not as low as under the extended baseline scenario. More important, CBO assumed for this scenario that most of the provisions of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts would be extended, that the reach of the alternative minimum tax would be kept close to its historical extent, and that over the longer run, tax law would evolve further so that revenues would remain at about 19 percent of GDP, near their historical average.

"Under that combination of policy assumptions, federal debt would grow much more rapidly than under the extended baseline scenario. With significantly lower revenues and higher outlays, debt would reach 87 percent of GDP by 2020, CBO projects.

"After that, the growing imbalance between revenues and noninterest spending, combined with spiraling interest payments, would swiftly push debt to unsustainable levels. Debt as a share of GDP could exceed its historical peak of 109 percent by 2025 and would reach 185 percent in 2035."

Did you get that?  Debt is projected at 87 percent of GDP by 2020!!!!! 

There are lessons here, America.

First, the Democrats built assumptions into Obamacare which were unrealistic, yet the CBO was forced to use those assumptions for its baseline projection. A math "mistake" is one thing, but in my opinion Harry Reid and other Democrats at the controls of this mess need to be tossed for this fraud.

Second, big government never was, never is, never can be the answer. This is terribly subjective depending upon which side of the political divide you pick, but the focus must change from what government can do for people.  We must shift gears to enabling people to do for themselves.  That's a mid-course correction we MUST make in November.  The entitlement mentality, regardless of which party authors it, is a certain road to ruin.  I'm on the side of the CBO, which was intentionally set up as a bipartisan (perhaps the only bastion left in government that truly is bipartisan) arbiter between the warring factions.

Back home in Nevada, the MSM is mocking people like Sharron Angle.  Why?  Because she has seen what everyone else along the parade route with half a brain can see -- THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES!  You cannot spend what you do not have.  Yet anyone like Angle who proposes a non-government solution to retirement savings and healthcare is seen as the idiot. 

Up is down, black is white, smart is dumb, dumb is smart.  Can you read a graph if you're a Democrat?

This CBO report is prima facie evidence that Sharron Angle and her "ilk" have a better handle on the problem than all the smartest people in Washington combined, and she dares to open her mouth in opposition!  How dare she!  Unless Angle wins this election, and we stop this majority rules mentality in its tracks at the November ballot box, Reid and his cronies will continue to drive the bus of fiscal destruction at breakneck speed.

If Nevada sends Harry Reid back to the Senate in November, they will need to apologize to the makers of "Dumb and Dumber" for the dumbest movie ever made.