House of Eratosthenes

Like Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss once said, “When we saw you would willingly spend your entire days in cubicles smaller than a prison cell, we realized anything was possible.”

I’m going to peg this at sixth grade. Would there be some problem with sixth-graders reading a column like this, perhaps doing a report on it? It would have helped me figure out what was going on, quite a bit; when I was in sixth grade, Jimmy Carter was our President. A lot of grown-ups on both sides were insisting government was lying to us in obvious ways, but nobody ever filled in details. Back then, things were different. If one adult was in favor of Carter’s policies and another adult was opposed, the adults would likely have known each other and wanted to stay friends. They’d only give us the details up to the point that objective was about to be placed in jeopardy and then they’d stop. We didn’t learn much from talking to the grown-ups, and we learned even less from the public school curriculum. President is Commander-in-Chief blah blah blah Senate six years blah blah House two years blah blah blah. That about covers it.

Kids should learn a whole lot more, especially when our elected representatives are lying to us about such elementary contortions of fact & logic…of math.

Of all the claims deployed in favor of ObamaCare, and there are many, the most preposterous is that a new open-ended entitlement will somehow reduce the budget deficit. Insure 32 million more people, and save money too! The even more remarkable spectacle is that Washington seems to be taking this claim seriously in advance of the House’s repeal vote next week. Some things in politics you just can’t make up.

Terminating trillions of dollars in future spending will “heap mountains of debt onto our children and grandchildren” and “do very serious violence to the national debt and deficit,” Nancy Pelosi said at her farewell press conference as Speaker. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius chimed in that “we can’t afford repeal,” as if ObamaCare’s full 10-year cost of $2.6 trillion once all the spending kicks in is a taxpayer bargain.

The basis for such claims, to the extent a serious one exists, is the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis this week of the repeal bill, which projects it will “cost” the government $230 billion through 2021. Because CBO figures ObamaCare will reduce the deficit by the same amount, repealing it will supposedly do the opposite. The White House promptly released a statement saying repeal would “explode the deficit.”

Meanwhile, other Democrats have taken up arms about House procedure. The GOP adopted a budget rule that says repeal doesn’t have to be “paid for,” and the press corps is treating this exemption as a scandal against Washington decency.

In a memo, the inimitable Pete Stark spied a GOP plot “to shove through a massive bill”—the repeal measure is all of two pages—while Henry Waxman and other outgoing committee chairmen shook with outrage about “an offense to good government.”
:
Amid the repeal debate, Democrats and the media are behaving as if they have no knowledge of Congress’s habits or the history of government health-care programs over the last half-century. Entitlements are always sold as modest and “paid for,” then years later everyone suddenly discovers that they are “unaffordable” without digging deeper into the pockets of the middle class. How do you think Medicare and Medicaid got to their current pass?

The government can’t subsidize coverage for tens of millions of new people and simultaneously reduce the deficit, as most Americans seem to intuitively understand. The real offense Republicans are committing in the eyes of Washington is exposing its illusions.

The point that seems to be lost in this, is that it doesn’t very much matter if the people are able to cast authoritative votes every two years if they’re so dreadfully uninformed. And I don’t know if they are, but certainly somebody is, if so many members of Congress are so confident about telling us we need to spend money on a new program in order to save money, and we can’t afford not to spend it. We need to be asking what it is we have been doing, over the past several years, to allow a perception that they can get away with such a thing whether it be real or imagined.

If We the People had more than a concussed chimpanzee’s grasp of basic logic and even more basic math, the Democratic party would cease to exist.

Sad, but there you go.

Every single liberal idea from the dawn of time can be refuted Samuel Johnson-style. When told of Berkeley’s Idealist philosophy, which posits that the material world is just a mental construction, Johnson kicked a rock and said “I refute it thus!”

Too bad we can’t do to the seat of their pants what Johnson did to the rock. The common sense quotient in this country would double overnight.
- Severian | 01/08/2011 @ 08:15
This is why the hard left, somewhat well-known types are now feeling confident enough to call for their drones to engage in violent revolution in the U.S. There are enough of them who are so stupid and ignorant to believe anything.

I used to simply refer to the liberal drones as merely ignorant, but that’s not sufficient any more. Words mean things. How can you possibly believe the rhetoric of the leftist leadership and have any intellectual skill left. It’s one thing to buy a car without having the mechanical understanding of a master mechanic. It’s another thing entirely to buy a car that you can see doesn’t have an engine and expect it to run.
- Moshe Ben-David | 01/08/2011 @ 16:05
Funny how last year when the Democrats were debating the thing, they admitted it would cost billions and billions (channeling Carl Sagan here) but that it was a crime against humanity that the United States of America would allow anyone in its borders to go uninsured. The criticism that went “If that’s your concern, then insure the uninsured at public expense and leave the rest of us alone” was ignored and to my knowledge, never addressed by the advocates of ObamaCare.

Now, suddenly, not spending all that money is going to do very serious violence to the national debt and deficit.” I always want to ask these Left-wingers: “Since when do you guys care about that?” Usually they only bring up the issue of out-of-control-federal spending when the topic at-hand is tax cuts or national defense. Then suddenly its ‘we can’t afford it!’

Cost savings…by adding millions of uninsured people to the ranks of the federally-insured…and stopping this is going to blow up the deficit. Snort. I honestly am left speechless.
- cylarz | 01/09/2011 @ 00:31
I posted a link to the WSJ on my “Hello Kitty of Bloggin” page. Thanks for the heads-up, Morgan.

The dishonestly of the Left never ceases to amaze. There is difference of opinion on the methodology required to reach a mutually-shared goal.

Then, there is telling bald faced lies to the American people…after they just got done kicking your people out of power, no less. I suspect it will be a long, long time before the Left gets back in, after these shenanigans.
- cylarz | 01/09/2011 @ 00:58

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ObamaCare’s Reality DeficitSaturday, January 8th, 2011

ObamaCare’s Reality Deficit
Saturday, January 8th, 2011