Allegory wrote:
gbaji wrote:
I disagree. You don't have to be an expert in math, or even have access to the exact numbers and facts and do any math at all to figure out that if you expand the benefits provided by the health care system, it will have to cost more. The only math skills you need are "more stuff costs more money", which pretty much everyone can figure out.
Completely wrong. You disagree that the health care plan is deficit neutral, but you do admit that through taxation it covers some portion of its cost correct? You don't believe it's 100% deficit spending with zero tax income supporting it?
Um... Complex question. There is no tax income supporting it. The funding comes primarily via a combination of redirecting some Medicare funds (which will pay for about half the total cost), and increased revenues into the system itself.
That second part can be considered a "new tax" raised to fund the health care. However, it's not actually a legal tax. It's a mandate that everyone must purchase health insurance. Thus, the argument is that if/when this is found to be unconstitutional, a largish chunk of the assumed funding will disappear.
If they are claiming that it's just slightly less costly than the revenue, and I suspect that a good portion of that counted on revenue will not actually appear, I don't need more data than that to conclude that it will result in a deficit. Or actual taxes will have to be raised.
Um. And it *also* assumes that the funds shifted from medicare wont be missed, or that sufficient overlap will allow said funds to do double duty (cases shifted from medicare coverage to the new health care bill, whatever). And that's pretty questionable as well.
And it *also* ignores the whole "we counted 10 years of revenue and 6 years of costs" bit.
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Do you understand now why you can't guess at the effect without having the numbers? You have two opposing vectors, cost and revenue. If a product costs some amount of money and I sell it for some other amount of money have I made a profit, loss, or broken even? If I sale a ship up stream at some velocity against a current moving oppositely at some other velocity, am I moving up stream, downstream, or standing still?
I don't need to know the specifics though. Only the deltas. If I know that it took you 5 hours to sail you your ship upwind last time, and I know that the wind is stronger today than it was then, I don't need to know any details about the nominal speed of the ship, or of the wind in order to conclude that your travel time will be longer. Similarly, I don't need to know anything about the cost per unit of a widget, or the current tax rates, or the costs of delivery, or operation, or salaries, or current profit rates of a widget making company to know that if you increase the taxes on widgets, it'll result in either an increase in the cost of widgets or a decrease in the profits of the company (and probably the former).
I absolutely can guess at the effect. And barring some completely unmentioned additional factor, I'll be right every single time. Because everything else staying the same, the effect of changing one thing can easily be predicted. Even if I don't know the exact amount of effect, I can say whether it's going to be "more" or "less". The total amount of "cost" to provide increased health coverage has increased. It must since we're mandating greater coverage. This cost has to come from somewhere. Since the government didn't actually increase real taxes to pay for it, the difference must come in the form of a deficit. Somewhere. That's pretty much a given.
If you assume (as many people do), that the insurance purchase mandate will be found unconstitutional, then it's not even a question as to whether or not the health care will will result in a deficit.
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You need numbers. Arguing that you can determine the direction of a resultant vector without the magnitudes of the two added opposing vectors is a laughable idea that would fail you high school geometry.
No, you don't. You need numbers to know exactly how much it's going to cost, but not to know that it's going to result in a deficit.
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gbaji wrote:
You're misstating the issue though. It's not about a random bystander being better suited to assessing the cost of the bill, but that a random bystander will be better suited to assessing whether the bill will cost more than the government is claiming.
That isn't what you said.
Huh? What I said means the same thing. If the government tells us that a bill will generate as much revenue as it costs (slightly more in this case), then saying that it'll cost more than they think it will is the same as saying it'll generate a deficit. Any random bystander can look at the BS coming out of the politicians in support of this, recognize it as BS and realize that they are lying to us when they say it wont produce a deficit. The CBO doesn't have that luxury. It has to look at the equally BS numbers and assumptions that those same politicians hand it when doing their scoring.
Which is precisely why a random bystander will consistently be able to determine if/when a bill will cost more than the government claims. We're allowed to make that judgment based on the degree to which we think the assumptions we're given are BS. The CBO is *not* allowed to do that. Garbage in - garbage out, remember? The CBO has to just take those numbers as facts and do the math.
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Even if I allow you to retroactively change your argument, you're still wrong. People still need education and data to figure out if the deficit cost is beyond what is stated by the government. You're not even digging deeper at this point, you've hit rock bottom and started tunneling sideways.
Irrelevant. The government is claiming that it wont create any deficit at all. They are claiming that revenues contained within the bill itself will cover for its cost. Any reasonable thinking person should instantly be able to realize that this may not be on paper false, but that it simply will never in a million years actually work out that way.
In a few years, we'll know for sure, wont we? I have no doubts as to what we'll all know then. Do you? Can you honestly say that you're confident that the health care bill wont cost more than expected and generate less revenue than expected and be badly in the red and in need of new taxes to support it? And guess what? I'll make another prediction. Assuming we don't repeal it by then, the liberals on this board, the same ones who've insisted all along that it'll cost less and that passing it isn't equivalent to raising taxes, will fall over themselves yelling about how we must raise taxes to support the bill. And they'll have forgotten that they so strongly argued that this wouldn't be necessary in the first place. And they'll attack anyone who points this out as some evil protector of the wealthy and hater of the sick.
I'm a veritable Nostradamus!
