The Health Bill is now Law. I'm not sure how it will work out. I think it will benefit me personally. The rest of us may have to wait to find out.
One thought that I haven't seen anywhere else. Let's be generous and assume that the deficit reduction mechanisms actually work, and this bill is deficit neutral (or even slightly beneficial as the CBO claims). Now, I don't really believe it will work that way, but let's say they do work.
The mechanisms involve roughly one trillion dollars in higher taxes on the rich, and savings in Medicare. No skin off my back (for now). These are, to some extent, the easy fixes, the most politically palatable, the "low hanging fruit" in the battle to decrease our deficits.
One trillion dollars is a lot of low-hanging fruit. Instead of using them to pay down the deficit, we have eaten them. Eaten them for a reasonable cause, but eaten them. They are gone. When the time comes to really tackle the deficit, we will have to reach higher. One trillion is "easy" deficit reduction is gone. Get ready for higher taxes that impact the middle class, and large cuts in other government programs.
Upon further searching, I noticed that Greg Mankiw makes a similar point here.
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3 comments:
Did you not think that lot of these savings would be actually contingent upon passing this Health Care Reform?
Probably half of the saving is going to come from Medicare. Do you think such Medicare savings would have happened without health care reform, in itself and that money would have been used to simply reduce our deficit? Which politician can ever explain that policy to any American - that I am going to cut your Medicare to reduce deficit?
I wish you were to respond to Ezra's commentary in this regard.
Thanks for the comment.
IMO, if we never cut Medicare/Social Security/pension etc. entitlements to cut the deficit, without offering something of equal value in return, we will go broke.
In this case, we offered back something of double the value.
Who is Ezra and where is his commentary?
Ezra is the guy, well some think he is the one who actually got this Health Care Reform to us in USA, who writes in WaPo....
http://www.21stcenturypolitics.com/2010/03/hcr-comment-ezra-klein.html
Unless he or some one else writes the history book of HCR saga of last two years, we are unlikely to understand what Ezra and few other folks fundamentally contributed to the passing of HCR.
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