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Originally Posted by Papa_Complex
Two points on that. The first is what EponXero said: How can you know the ultimate real costs or effectiveness of a programme when it hasn't even started?
The second is who will you blame for it not providing the promised services, when it was cut off at the knees by the opposition? A crippled programme will not have a hope in hell of providing anything close to what the original proposals promised.
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The Congressional Budget Office, a somewhat non-partisan agency, has changed their tune on what Obamacare will cost and how many people it will cover over the next 10 years. That's about as good of an estimate as we will see and is also the agency Obama depended on for his estimates when selling it to the American people.
Cut off at the knees? How so? They were working with effectively unlimited resources for the 3 years they had to build out the exchange website and that has been a clusterfuck. That may have been crippled by a lot of things, but none of them appear to be the opposition. I'm not aware of a single provision in Obamacare that hasn't been funded so far due to the opposition.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Papa_Complex
And I recall the first pass of this idiocy, in which the Tea Party adherents were saying 'not a penny more.' It's rather immaterial, though, as you currently have a political hostage crisis.
The spending that increased the debt started under Bush. It was necessitated by a lack of controls on fiscal institutions that started decades back and hasn't been corrected by successive governments; both Republican and Democrat. Take a look at a graph of debt vs. year, corrected for the value of the dollar of any given year, and note when the majority of that debt took a big upswing. Odd how conservatives simply have different ways to waste your money, isn't it?
The Province of Ontario went through a microcosm of what you're experiencing, back in the '90s. The then-Premier started by spending his way out of a recession and then changed horses in mid stream, deciding to go for fiscal restraint and cut-backs. Either strategy has been proven to ultimately work but, unfortunately, only if you stick to your guns. His actions screwed our economy for a decade and it could have been even worse.
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After six years of basically a blank checkbook under both Bush and Obama with mediocre results at best I think it is time to reign it in. The immediate economic danger of Fortune 500 companies failing was dealt with years ago. Agree or disagree with how it was done, it doesn't really matter.
The spending now is different and meant to build growth in the American economy. So far in my view and after years of this going on the results have been shitty. What I mentioned before doesn't help either, the roadshow that happens every time cuts are mentioned. The Democrats and the media went on a jag for months before sequestration about how devastating it would be if sequestration went in to effect. The end result barely moved the needle. I think we can make some cuts and I don't see pushing for them as an unreasonable position.