As the campaign for the presidency heats up, we’re going to hear the words “taxes” and “deficit” and “spending” repeated ad nauseam. And this number: $716,000,000,000.
That’s the amount of future Medicare spending that President Obama and the Democrats in Congress (exclusively, without a single Republican vote) cut, slashed, ripped, hacked out of the hands of elderly Americans over the next ten years.
And I thought Democrats loved Medicare, believed in it, wanted to keep it like it is against the bitter schemes of GOP Scrooges!
Now, as Republicans attack the Democrats’ attack on Medicare, Dems have counter-attacked by charging that in his plan GOP VP nominee Paul Ryan cuts Medicare this exact same $716 billion. Ryan explains that his approach simply took the status quo as the baseline, and, sadly, tragically, that includes Obamacare’s nearly trillion dollar malpractice in gutting Medicare funds.
With older citizens constituting a huge voting block, this fall’s election may hinge on this $716 billion being taken from Medicare. Funny thing is, the number is a mirage. Meaningless. Not real. Medicare will not be cut $716 billion. Not really. Instead, it will grow in leaps and bounds over the next decade.
Nothing in Obamacare stops Congress from spending that $716 billion and more in coming years. In fact, they already plan for Medicare spending to grow by far more.
That’s the problem more broadly with the cuts Democrats offer in exchange for higher taxes. The cuts are illusory because the spending continues to grow. Therefore, any tax increases to plug deficit spending would be pouring water into a bucket full of holes.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
There is a scale in the meaning of the word socialist. In France it means about the same thing as a communist, when one uses plain language. When one uses the language of Monsieur Drumont, it means a Jew. In England a socialist is equal to a French conservative republican. In America it means a thief. In Germany it means an ingenious individual of restricted financial resources, who generally fails to blow up some important personage with wet dynamite. In Italy a socialist is an anarchist pure and simple, who wishes to destroy everything existing for the sake of dividing a wealth which does not exist at all. It also means a young man who orders a glass of water and a toothpick at a cafe, and is able to talk politics for a considerable time on this slender nourishment.
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.