Washington spent the week waiting for the Congressional Budget Office to roll in with its new cost estimates of the Senate health-care bill, and what a carnival. Behold: a new $829 billion entitlement that will subsidize insurance for tens of millions of people—and reduce deficits by $81 billion at the same time. In the next tent, see the mermaid and a two-headed cow.
The political and media classes are proving they'll believe anything, as they are now pronouncing that this never-before-seen miracle is a "green light" for ObamaCare. (What isn't these days?) The irony is that the CBO's guesstimate exposes the fraudulence and fiscal sleight-of-hand underlying this whole exercise. Anyone who reads beyond the top-line numbers will find that the bill creates massive new spending commitments that will inevitably explode over time, and that this is "paid for" with huge tax increases plus phantom spending cuts that will never happen in practice.
Fact check? No, it's too good a story:So Congress is going to reduce the deficit by increasing spending $829,000,000,000.00? Doesn't this sound like--well, a joke? Too good a joke to check, evidently.
It all reminds me of the cartoon above by S. Harris.
You can find a collection of S. Harris science cartoons at sciencecatoonsplus..
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