Latest Right Wing Attack on ObamaCare: Math & Economics

Everyone recognizes that the health care bill has met with unfortunate and unnecessarily bitter and divisive protest and everyone knows why:

• It's a one-party bill. A non-partisan bill would not have poisoned the political environment the way this one has and will continue to do.

• Pro-life or pro-choice, just about everyone agrees that the taxpayers shouldn't have to pay for elective abortion, and that forcing them to do so strips millions of Americans of individual rights to deeply personal and moral beliefs. In spite of the presidential order, the door is still open to taxpayer funded elective abortion.

• Even those Democrats, Independents, and Republicans who would have supported reforms to health were turned off by the methods used to pass the bill.

• Mandating individual citizens to buy health insurance establishes an unprecedented and unconstitutional reach of the federal government.

• The health care bill comes at a time of unprecedented deficit spending, bailouts, and in the midst of a near total economic collapse. It was contrived, pushed, and finagled through almost solely for the benefit of President Obama's political career. We've got to give them something!

Unemployment remains close to ten percent, the housing market is still dead, and economists of all persuasions will tell you the malaise will be long-term and abiding and that perhaps America will never return to its traditional economic and political strength. The economic indefensibility of this new debt also endangers national security.

I have always supported REAL health insurance reform but this bill wasn't it. Naturally, any health care bill would have some provisions I wouldn't like but this bill, in its 2700 pages, will hurt the majority of Americans in order to help just a few who may benefit but would have similarly benefited from a bi-partisan bill. This bill is helpful only as a salve to the liberal elite conscience.

Of course, all the opposition to the massive government spending will fall upon deaf ears until another crisis point follows the current one. The thinking of most people in government right now is that we can spend our way out of problems. Wall Street stocks have rebounded largely through massive government infusions of cash. While I am happy for those whose retirement savings have also recovered, the Wall Street recovery hasn't built the kind of confidence needed to create jobs. Demand creates jobs, and there is not a lot of demand out there.

President Obama promised that his stimulus bill would stop unemployment at 8 percent. It's currently at 9.7 percent. The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) for the last quarter (5.6 percent)| is a positive sign, as depleted inventories are rebuilding and corporations get higher productivity out of fewer workers.

You don't have to be Ben Bernanke to understand what ill-timed and unprecedented spending is doing to the economy. The Tea Party phenomenon didn't develop in academia. You only have to understand three economic concepts to "get it" - percentages, debt, and GDP (gross domestic product).

In simple terms, GDP means all that America produces. What seems to be a gigantic debt figure ($500 billion dollars, for example) means little when GDP is also gigantic. However, $500 billion dollars would cause a government to sink if it made up, say, 90 percent of its GDP-which is the case with Greece right now and will be the same in the U.S. in the year 2020, according to CBO figures.

Ben Bernanke told Congress last week that he would be comfortable in the short term if he were able to reduce the debt to GDP ratio from its current 10 percent to 5 percent. By way of comparison, EU rules require that a country reduce its debt to GDP ratio to 3 percent before admission to the European Union. Another comparison, often raised by ObamaCare supporters, is that President Bush increased the deficit by $400 billion. This is true, but a great deal of that expenditure was for defense, and it still pales by comparison with the Obama deficits of two trillion immediately and a possible $10 to $20 trillion by the next decade--if the CBO can be believed.

The only other times in history when American debt ratios rose to astronomical levels was during the four year span of WWII. But since the nanny state did not yet exist, the government was able to reduce the debt and produce a surplus in the immediate years after.

The Obama administration had pushed debt ratios higher than ten percent while telling you the new health care plan will eventually reduce the deficit after the 2012 election. As part of its "deficit reduction plan," ObamaCare strips $500 billion from Medicare at a time when baby boomer retirements will soon hit the rate of 10,000 per month. Tax increases, doctor shortages, fantastical projections of costs, sweetheart deals, outright fraud, duplication of government benefits and services, a new larger health care bureaucracy, failure to address existing major health care problems are on one side of the scale; ObamaCare is on the other.

Sources: The figures come from the U.S. government and can be linked from here:

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/downchart_gs.php?year=1940_2015&view=1&expand=&units=p&fy=fy11&chart=G0-fed&bar=1&stack=1&size=m&title=&state=US&color=c&local=s

You can change the dates as it suits you, but remember that one telling econometric is the percentage of debt to GDP.