It's not a deficit, it's a cry for Obamacare and more taxes!




(Thanks to shaman, http://www.shamans.blogger.com.br/2008_07_01_archive.html)





James Kwak's recent post on Huffington Post takes the position that we need two things to resolve the deficit/debt crisis: (1) more and higher taxes and (2) the Obama health care plan. This is John Maynard Keynes Meets Jack Kevorkian.

I traced the links in Kwak's posts and they took me to an Atlantic article that quotes a Stanford professor's "Four Pillars" of a deficit-reducing health care bill, which he claimed the Baucus bill was. First among those Four Pillars is a tax on Cadillac plans. Given that Obama traded away the tax on Cadillac plans owned by Big Labor in exchange for House lefty support of the Senate bill, by your definition, the House of Card has collapsed.

And this doesn't even get to the substantive flaws of the Senate health care bill, i.e., whether, even assuming the numbers "work," it would produce the kind of health care "reform" this country wants or needs. Simply put, the other pillars involve, essentially, health care rationing, based, not on likelihood of success, but on cost, simple cost.