Harry Reid and his jolly elves today will deliver unto America a Christ mas gift it can ill-afford — health- care “reform” — and then vote to raise the federal debt ceiling to a staggering $14 trillion to help pay for it all.
The two are not unrelated.
That became clear yesterday, when the Congressional Budget Office blew the whistle on some fiscal deck-shuffling so egregious that it might make even Bernie Madoff blush.
Turns out that Reid & Co. have been double-counting the proposed Medicare savings to satisfy President Obama’s “demand” (wink, wink) that any health-care bill reduce the deficit.
Which means, as Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) notes, that what Obama and the Democrats claim is a $132 billion deficit reduction over 10 years is actually a $300 billion increase.
Sessions calls this “a potential game-changer” — and you’d think it would be.
But “moderate” Democrats like Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana bartered their votes for constituent cash — while New York’s Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand gave up theirs for, well, nothing.
Reid got the 60 votes he needed to avoid a filibuster — and America likely will get ObamaCare.
Make no mistake, though: This is as classic a piece of fiscal flim-flam as has ever come down the pike on Capitol Hill.
As CBO Director Doug Elmendorf writes, “the savings to the [Medicare] trust fund . . . would be received by the government only once — so they cannot be set aside to pay for future Medicare spending and, at the same time, pay for current spending.”
To do so, he said, constitutes double-counting — which “thus overstate[s] the improvement in the government’s fiscal position.”
That is, the Democrats propose to spend the same money twice.
What of Obama’s repeated assertion that his health-care plan “does not add one dime to the deficit”?
That was a lie — though clearly not the only lie told on behalf of Reid’s bill.
Hence the need for bribery to pass it.
Merry Christmas, America.