In the 2002 movie, “Minority Report,” police are empowered to arrest people for crimes they will commit in the future. That was a movie. In real life–or what passes for such in Washington, D.C.–predicting future “crime” has become part of the equation by which the Congressional Budget Office is calculating “savings” in the latest healthcare bill concocted by the House of Representatives.
This bureaucratic behemoth, a 1,990 page insult to fiscally sensitive Americans, has been calculated to cost over $1 trillion dollars of money we don’t have. But there’s “good” news: House Democrats have figured out a way to “save” $161 billion, bringing down the net cost to a mere $894 billion.
How do they do it? They assume that a certain number of individual Americans, and a certain number of employers who do not offer health care coverage to their workers–government mandated coverage–would generate $161 billion in fines and penalties.
In other words, they’re counting on turning a certain percentage of formerly honest Americans into law-breakers because those Americans refuse to be forced to purchase something they don’t want.
Yet even if that figure is right on the money, the estimates are still baloney–and CBO Director Doug Elmendorf knows it. In a letter written Oct. 29th to House Democratic Chairmen, Elmendorf cautioned that his estimates are “subject to substantial uncertainty.” Here’s something that’s not uncertain: not included in the CBO estimate is an additional $245 billion needed to stop Medicare payments to doctors from decreasing. That “offline” cost will be part of “separate legislation.”
No doubt there are substantial numbers of Americans who believe imposing fines on their fellow countrymen for resisting this assault on personal freedom equals “social justice.” No doubt a big portion of them are the free-lunch freeloaders for who believe maintaining America’s fiscal stability is “someone else’s job.” “What’s in it for me” is the beginning and the end of their moral code–and Congress is catering to them.
The national debt? Irrelevant. The assault on personal freedom? Shut up and get with the program. The criminalization of otherwise law-abiding Americans? Ayn Rand: “There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.”
One hundred and sixty one billion dollars worth, courtesy of a fiscally–and morally–bankrupt Congress.
atahlert@comcast.net
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