Mark America

Wilson Should Have Said It Again: He Lies!

Remember when Congress was running the numbers through the Congressional Budget Office to get a scoring of the costs of Obama-care? Not surprisingly, these estimates fell well short of the real numbers under the arm-twisting and politicking of the Democrat leadership of Nancy Pelosi(D-CA,) then Speaker of the House. In short, they engineered a lie, and that lie was that over ten years, the costs of Obama-care would be “just” $900 Billion, but now the CBO has revised its estimates, and that number has sky-rocketed to nearly $1.8 Trillion.  You might wonder how badly you’re about to be hammered, but you can expect that by the time Obamacare is fully implemented, most working Americans will see their premiums sky-rocket(and in truth, many already have in just the last two years since the bill’s passage.)  Expect to pay more in taxes, and if you’re an employer, you may want to consider what they intend for you with all the new penalties.

Back in 2009-10, when the bill was being debated, they kept going back to browbeat CBO as repeated modifications of the bill continued to exceed one-trillion dollars.  They finally came out with a cost estimate of $940 billion, and this was sufficient to get the support of some wavering Democrats who didn’t want to be tagged with a $1 Trillion expenditure.  At the time, many Congressional critics said that it would come in far higher since the CBO was using a static scoring that didn’t account for economic conditions at large.  Much of the near doubling of the costs are accounted for by a weaker economy than they had estimated at the time.  This is typical CBO estimating:  Look at the sky today, see it is blue, and estimate the cost for umbrellas over the next ten years will be zero.  As you’re drenched for lack of an umbrella, they will explain that their estimates didn’t account for the dynamics of weather.

The entire Obama-care scam is just now kicking into high gear.  Over the next eighteen months, as new features and taxes kick in, along with the mandates and penalties, I don’t think most small or even medium businesses quite grasp how badly this is going to affect their bottom lines.  This is because much of it  has been hidden, and many large corporations have managed to obtain exemptions from the Obama administration.  It’s not clear that those exemptions are even legal, and it’s fairly certain they will end early in a second Obama term.  Our best hope is that the Supreme Court overturns the whole law, since there is no severability clause in this law, meaning that to throw out one portion, for instance the individual mandate, all portions of the law must go.  If that happens, we’ll be extraordinarily fortunate, but we must plan on the fact that this is going to go forward irrespective of the desires of more than 65% of the American people, who oppose it.

When you see Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, or Barack Obama, or any other Democrat who supported and voted for this law, you can assume they are liars, one and all, and that they knew full well that this program was going to cost significantly more than advertised.  They lied, because it was the only way to get even their own members to vote for it, not because those members believed the lies, but because it gave them plausible political cover.  Know this: If your member of Congress or your Senators voted for this bill, despite what they may say now, they knew it was an underestimate based on willful ignorance.  You should cast your votes accordingly at the next opportunity.