First Things First

MANDATORY MARCUS

So today it appears that the House health bill now carries with it a one trillion dollar price tag over 10 years.  Surprisingly spending one trillion dollars is also somehow going to reduce the budget deficit.

I've heard of addition by subtraction...but I've never heard of subtraction by addition.
 
If you are like me you probably want some perspective on what exactly one trillion dollars means.  Its an easy number to say, but its so big its practically abstract.  So here's some perspective for you:

• $1,000,000,000,000 - that's a one followed by twelve zero's; a thirteen figure price tag.
  
• One trillion seconds = 31,688 years, 269 days, 1 hour, 46 minutes and 40 seconds.
• One trillion dollars in one dollar bills would weigh 2.2 billion pounds (1.1 million tons).
• It would take a military jet flying at the speed of sound, reeling out a roll of dollar bills behind it, 14 years before it reeled out one trillion dollars.
• One trillion one dollar bills laid end to end would stretch from the earth to the moon 200 times before running out of bills.
• With one trillion dollars you could buy a $3 latte every day for 900 million years.
• One trillion dollars is greater than the entire GDP of Australia.
• One trillion dollars would buy every single stock on the Toronto stock exchange.
• One trillion dollars would fund the military of every NATO country combined.

O.K....so you get the point.  It's a lot of money.  So how exactly does spending it cut the deficit you ask?

"The proposal would recoup these costs, and then some, through revenue from various sources, including $201 billion in taxes on high-premium insurance plans, and $404 billion in spending cuts for Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and other federal programs." - This according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as reported by Medscape (part of WebMD).

After ten years the cost savings and additional revenue will allegedly increase more rapidly since the initial cost of expanding coverage would have already been absorbed.  So what they are saying is that after ten years this plan will reduce the budget deficit even more and at an even faster pace. 

Dare I bother to point out the fact that raising taxes on some insurance plans isn't a cost saving measure...it's an arbitrary government imposed price increase that will likely lower the number of such plans in the future; which will in turn lower the revenue collected and thus not lower the deficit as planned...but why let logic get in the way of such a grand plan?

I like to think I'm a reasonable person.  I like to give people the benefit of the doubt.  But history shows over and over and over that politicians won't reduce spending on anything if it might cost them a vote.  Do you think that maybe when the time comes to cut spending on Medicare, Medicaid etc. that there will be a political element to that decision?  I mean it all looks nice on paper until you realize that every single time in the past that we have considered cutting spending in these areas we end up spending more.

So how about a compromise?  I'm willing to be reasonable. 

First...you (Congress) cut Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP and other federal programs by the $404 billion amount you are alleging you will and then we can talk about taking on the one trillion dollars worth of spending you want.

You know...if you had made those auto companies restructure first...and then decided whether to hand out $81 billion, we might not have just lit that $81 billion on fire the way we did by handing it out first and then hoping for the change that never came.  It wasn't that long ago...so come on Congress...stretch those mental muscles and try to remember what we got for doing things in the wrong order.

Maybe...just maybe...we should do the hard part first and make sure it gets done before we just hand over one trillion dollars to a congressional body that has a clear, indisputable track record of throwing good money after bad.

Alternatively I guess we could just buy Canada and rename it "public option".