Nancy Pelosi has no credibility to lose, so she did no harm to herself. The tactics Democrats have used as to CBO scoring of bills, however, has destroyed the CBO's credibility.
The CBO is supposed to be a neutral calculator of legislation. And it is. I have no doubt that the people at the CBO do their best to calculate the cost of a bill, given the assumptions the CBO is required to follow.
And that is the catch. Whereas on less politicized legislation there may be reasonable assumptions built into a bill and requested by those seeking a cost estimate, as to the health care bills proposed by Democrats it has been all games.
Completely unrealistice assumptions have been foisted upon the CBO, and the CBO has been required to score the bill with phony math.
Jeffrey Anderson at The Weekly Standard has a devastating take-down of the CBO report on the cost of the latest Democratic incarnation of the health care bill, CBO: Obamacare Would Cost Over $2 Trillion:
For a variety of reasons, this tally doesn’t remotely reflect the bill’s real ten-year costs. First, it includes 2010 as the initial year. As most people are well aware, 2010 has now been underway for some time. Therefore, the CBO would normally count 2011 as the first year of its analysis, just as it counted 2010 as the first year when analyzing the initial House health bill in the middle of 2009. But under strict instructions from Democratic leaders, and over strong objections from Republicans, the CBO dutifully scored 2010 as the first year of the latest version of Obamacare. If the clock were started in 2011, the first full year that the bill could possibly be in effect, the CBO says that the bill’s ten-year costs would be $1.2 trillion.There is more, much more. Read the full article.
The CBO report amounts to a fraud perpetrated not by the CBO, but by the Democrats who forced the CBO to play these games.
Update: Michelle Malkin has more, The Deem-o-crats’ towering deception
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Check this out. Now, if you want to send a letter to a newspaper, supporting Obamacare, the lefties have provided a web site that has automated the process. They even provide suggested talking points. Unfriggenbelievable!!! Remember the "Ellis Light" story?
ReplyDeletehttp://bigjournalism.com/richmondsexton/2010/03/18/president-obama-promotes-ofa-astroturf-campaign-with-bonus-plagiarism/
Trackback: http://republicanheretic.wordpress.com/2010/03/19/reconciliation-deem-and-pass-the-cbo-and-obamacare-smackdown/
ReplyDeleteThis is as funny as it can be. Those that have HC... well we know the hypocrisy in that. Attacking the CBO is like attacking those w/o HC. I went to a free health clinic today. Not one single person there care about reconciliation, deem and pass, CBO calculations, things that those with HC have the time and effort to care about. What they cared about was, coverage, access, and cost...hmmm things I have not read one time by this esteemed professor. Again, it is the case of those with HC, making all the noise, while those dying because they do not have HC, too sick or to busy to speak
ReplyDeleteBuckJohnson, why don't we save the trouble of administrating the redistribution of wealth. Just tell me how much of my money you want and I'll mail you a check.
ReplyDeleteEr dude... you support a system which gives 40+ million of your fellow Americans healthcare on par with the developing world, AND you pay through the nose for it.
ReplyDeleteOnce again... you'd think conservatives would have the sense to just shut it after 8 years of demonstrative Bush failures that saw your country attacked, shunned, and nearly bankrupt.