One thing that really bothers me is the number of people claiming that the Affordable Care Act will bring “universal health care” to the United States. Ryan Lizza’s makes this claim in his defense of President Obama at the end of his long story in the New Yorker, but he simply the most recent example [...]

During the health care debate Democrats worked very hard to promote the myth that reconciliation is an incredibly limited legislative procedure. They did this to create an excuse so they could tell their base the rules “forced” them to go with a corporatist health care reform package. In reality Democrats didn’t pass a more progressive [...]

The latest long term budget projections from the Congressional Budget Office assume that unemployment will be very high for years to come. From the CBO: CBO expects that the recovery will continue but that real (inflation-adjusted) GDP will stay well below the economy’s potential—a level that corresponds to a high rate of use of labor [...]

The Congressional Budget Office is out with a new report about the projected long term solvency of Social Security. The report reaffirms the basic fact that it will be roughly 27 years until the Social Security Trust Fund is exhausted. CBO projects that the trust funds will be exhausted in 2038. In the following year, [...]

The official Congressional Budget Office report on the debt ceiling deal has been release. From the CBO Summary: Establish caps on discretionary spending through 2021; Allow for certain amounts of additional spending for “program integrity” initiatives aimed at reducing the amount of improper benefit payments; Make changes to the Pell Grant and student loan programs; [...]

During the health care reform debate the Democrats put an absurd amount of focus on getting a pretty CBO score for the law. President Obama said the new law must reduce the deficit and have net outlays below an entirely arbitrary $900 billion dollars. To achieve this, the Democrats made some truly bizarre policy decisions, [...]

It is never a good idea to get focused on the politics instead of results of your policy. When you do you wind up making bad policy and still get hammered politically.

When deciding how to move forward with our roughly $100 billion a year war in Afghanistan, President Obama apparently didn’t even take into consideration the issue of cost at least according to White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.
Apparently the position of our government that when it comes to saving the lives of regular Americans it will only be done if it can done on a tight budget but when it comes to killing foreign people cost is no obj

On an international level I would go so far as to say these three liberal health care plans are all significantly to the right of basically even center-right party in the rest of the industrialized world on health care. “Tort reform” gets more play than single payer. If these constitute the “left flank” of the political discussion around the pressing issue of health care costs in America, we as a country are screwed.

Almost any national health care debate in this country is almost entirely disconnected from real-world examples, which is tragic given that facts have a well-known liberal bias. That is why it is incredibly depressing to see a senior fellow from the Center for American Progress is using his platform to spread incoherent ignorance. I don’t [...]