The Obama administration, citing an economic downturn that has been deeper than it had first thought, raised its estimate on Tuesday of the government’s deficit over the next decade to $9 trillion from $7.1 trillion.
The Office of Management and Budget also said that it expected the economy to contract 2.8 percent this year, substantially more than previously estimated, and that employment would peak at around 10 percent.
The Glenn Becks of the word will be braying—I’m sure they already are—that reforming the health care system will be impossible now that the deficit projection jumped by $2 trillion. They won’t talk about the the fact that we already spend about $2 trillion on health care every year and that if we don’t do something that’s just going to increase.
hey I read this on slog already
The current debt is about $9Trillion.
That is the accumulated debt
from George Washington to George W Bush.
230 years worth.
It costs $450Billion each year
just in interest.
Obama will DOUBLE the debt
in 10 (or fewer) years.
it will cost $900Billion
each year
just in interest.
And that is at today’s interest rates-
after the Dollar tanks
and interest rates zoom
(they were 21% under Carter…)
servicing the debt will cost
$2Trillion each and every year
JUST IN INTEREST.
Better get Bill Clinton on that debt problem.
Until Americans are forced to recognize that overutilization of drugs, tests and procedures are not compatible with a first-world health-insurance system in anything but the short run, there will be no cost-reduction coming from health insurance reform. We need to make hard choices we should have been making all along: very expensive care for very premature babies, very expensive care for end-stage cancer patients, very expensive medications that would not be necessary if patients would simply alter their lifestyles, etc. Until we address how medicare and medicaid or any public insurance would manage these decisions in some rational way, we will have a health insurance system that gradually turns this country into a second-tier economy.
Britain did it right after WWII. They were broke and broken with a crumbling empire.
That didn’t take long…
Obama got a hold of Uncle Sam’s credit card and ran up a whopper in just a few months, blowing hundreds of Billions on useless crap and now Jr is grounded-
no HealthCare Reform
no Cap and Trade
Gosh, where did that projected multi-trillion dollar surplus go? Clinton left it right here, on the veranda.
Meh… Beck and others like him don’t really care about cost (e.g., Iraq war) and they’re not worried about socialism (e.g., they’ll collect medicare and social security when they’re able). No, they only want democrats to fail. Hell, the conservatives might even like this administration’s health care ideas, but they will only say so if a conservative gets all the credit.
They aren’t in it to win or even to compromise. The only goal they are working towards is for the democrats to fail. Democrats approval is falling, but republicans are not rising. They aren’t trying to fix things, they are only trying to sabotage.
Oh, I see why it rose– Obama is thinking about keeping the Bush tax cuts. Or, rather, budgeting them in so he can tell folks he isn’t raising taxes on them and they’ll vote for him.
I think they meant “UNemployment will peak at 10%” — at least, I hope that’s what they meant.
i thought the plan was to let the bush tax cuts expire on their own – 10 years on – is that figured into this crap? or the TWO wars we’re in?
BTW, cut the military budget in half, and we’d still be the best funded military on the planet. and we’d have a surplus again. but nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
If we just draft all the old people, ship them to Iraq to hold there while our troops come home, and then suspend air service back to the US, all of this has a very simple solution.
So, Obama has failed to explain how his health care reform will LOWER costs, its principal stated goal. If he had explained that, then this news would have strengthened the case for reform.
Krugman is right: Obama is losing the message war ot Reagan, who taught us government is the problem, and Obanma is losing this message war because he has conceded the point!
Have you seen the big pharm ads? on cable? They take it even further. They say “Patty Murray.” standing tall for bipartisan sensible reform, then it says this ad “paid for by the pharmaceutical counceil blah blah blah.” Same with Cantwell. So our Democratic leaders far from putting out any message of their own now have their very political identities taken over by big pharma and redefined as being in favor of bipartisan reform (message: the GOP, it’s not so bad!) (other message: fuck the public option!) (message: Murray and Cantwell + big pharma = b.f.f.! thus big pharma is okay and respectable and legit!)and they do nothing about it.
Talk coopted tools and fools!
We sit here begging Cantwell for one measly statement about public option, after months she gives it and we fall over ourselves in suppliant gratitude. Then these corporate interests use her name and face on TV to define themselves as joined at the hip with her…on the side of reform no less! They take her and own her now, p.r. wise!
They just got us outfoxed, no doubt about it.
These are the corporate interests Obama told us we have to sit down at the table with and work with.
Can you imagine FDR saying in 1932 “well my enemies, you know we have to work with them!”
No he said “the economic royalists hate me! Well I welcome their enmity!!”
He taught us they were the villian and government is the solution, and explained it all (including complete takeover of entire bank sector) in plain words any person could understand from the dry fields of Kansas to the tenements of Brooklyn.
Now FDR, HE was a real FDR!
it only took seven months to make Obama our bitch.
pretty sweet.
@2 are you absolutely sure Obama is behind all that debt? I guess I must have been living in an alternative universe when some character that was installed by ‘fiscal conservatives’ launched two breathtakingly expensive wars and then a bottomless bank bailout. But then again stealth bombers and Wall Street cretin’s East Hampton villas are much much better things to be spending public dollars on than health care, education and infrastructure.
waaaa
waaaaaaa!
wars!
villas!!
You girls won the election.
Got a President and
a SuperMajority in Congress.
End the wars.
Confiscate the villas.
do anything you want.
but please-
for the love of all that is Holy,
stop the constant bitching and whining about how it isn’t your fault.
Do elections matter?
we are starting to wonder.
I heard that President Bush wasn’t even born in Texas, and was actually raised by wolves in Albania.
Where’s his long form birth certificate?
It does help the health care debate. It makes the lunacy of Obama’s trillion dollar health care spending bill that much more apparent. The monstrosity will be D.O.A. once Congress comes back from recess… I suggest you libs give up on this astronomical spending bill and move on to another item on your far-left agenda.. maybe one that requires bankrupting future generations to the tune of billions instead of trillions?
Just a thought.
Yeah lunacy! Nothing remotely loony about still desperately clinging to the idea that the glorious free market is the solution to everything about a year after deregulation of those wise benevolent capitalists on Wall Street brought the planet to the brink of economic collapse.
That trillion over ten years, I’m wondering how it measures up to the trillions that will be disappearing into the black hole of the health care industry if its lobbyists and media shills succeed in duping the ignorant mob into derailing reform.
Us old people are the ones that made the US a safe place for you whinny draft dodgers to voice your stupid ideas. Serve and then TALK.
I did “flyboy” and one of my benefits was socialized medicine.