President Obama, impersonating P. T. Barnum, intends to sell his $634 billion increase in healthcare expenditures in his gargantuan $3.6 trillion budget as part of a plan to lower costs sometime in the gauzy future. (He’s been selling snake oil for quite a while now, and it’s getting tiresome.) Drudge:

we are out of money now. We are operating in deep deficits, not caused by any decisions we’ve made on health care so far. This is a consequence of the crisis that we’ve seen and in fact our failure to make some good decisions on health care over the last several decades.

So we’ve got a short-term problem, which is we had to spend a lot of money to salvage our financial system, we had to deal with the auto companies, a huge recession which drains tax revenue at the same time it’s putting more pressure on governments to provide unemployment insurance or make sure that food stamps are available for people who have been laid off.

So we have a short-term problem and we also have a long-term problem. The short-term problem is dwarfed by the long-term problem. And the long-term problem is Medicaid and Medicare. If we don’t reduce long-term health care inflation substantially, we can’t get control of the deficit.

So, one option is just to do nothing. We say, well, it’s too expensive for us to make some short-term investments in health care. We can’t afford it. We’ve got this big deficit. Let’s just keep the health care system that we’ve got now.

Along that trajectory, we will see health care cost as an overall share of our federal spending grow and grow and grow and grow until essentially it consumes everything.

The polls seem to indicate that many Americans are getting wise to the con job being put over on them. Rasmussen: “Seventy-seven percent (77%) of voters say the bigger problem in the United States is the unwillingness of politicians to control government spending. Just 14% say the problem is that voters are unwilling to pay enough in taxes.” However, it’s a little hard to know just what’s going on through the miasma of much of the media’s relentlessly upbeat reporting of everything this fellow says and does.

Final point: when you read Obama’s comments on healthcare and the auto industry, among many other issues, he always seems to blame bad decision-making over a period of decades for today’s problems. What arrogance! Was everyone incompetent until this fellow suddenly came along? It’s really offensive.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 24th, 2009 at 1:55 am and is filed under business, Democrats, General, MSM, Polling, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.