Friday, May 15, 2009

Apparently irony is not his strong suite

or, what do you do when the pot IS the kettle?

"President Barack Obama, calling current deficit spending “unsustainable,” warned of skyrocketing interest rates for consumers if the U.S. continues to finance government by borrowing from other countries.

“We can’t keep on just borrowing from China,” Obama said at a town-hall meeting in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, outside Albuquerque. “We have to pay interest on that debt, and that means we are mortgaging our children’s future with more and more debt.”

Holders of U.S. debt will eventually “get tired” of buying it, causing interest rates on everything from auto loans to home mortgages to increase, Obama said. “It will have a dampening effect on our economy.”

Earlier this week, the Obama administration revised its own budget estimates and raised the projected deficit for this year to a record $1.84 trillion, up 5 percent from the February estimate. The revision for the 2010 fiscal year estimated the deficit at $1.26 trillion, up 7.4 percent from the February figure. The White House Office of Management and Budget also projected next year’s budget will end up at $3.59 trillion, compared with the $3.55 trillion it estimated previously.

Two weeks ago, the president proposed $17 billion in budget cuts, with plans to eliminate or reduce 121 federal programs. Republicans ridiculed the amount, saying that it represented one-half of 1 percent of the entire budget. They noted that Obama is seeking an $81 billion increase in other spending"

Yikes!!

All this nonsense is part of the bizarre argument that after having run up the deficit by massive spending increases we now see that the deficit is unsustainable and the only way to fix the problem is to have the federal government take over health care:

"the president pledged to work with Congress to shore up entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. He also said he was confident that the House and Senate would pass health-care overhaul bills by August.

“Most of what is driving us into debt is health care, so we have to drive down costs,” he said."

Double Yikes!!

If you want to lower health care costs, why not abolish the AMA? Why not let more foreign doctors into the US? Why not let some types of care be done by people with less than a MD degree?

We allow supply to be artificially restricted and we subsidize demand and then we wonder why prices are high?

Triple Yikes!!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great post.

Tom said...

I don't think anyone in Washington wonders why health care prices are high. Contemplating the question would be good them -- no wait, bad for them; good for the country. Or perhaps they know already and are just so dishonest that they deny their culpability in pursuit of their own short term self interest.