“The president and his party in Congress are attempting to dig this country so deep into debt that we may not be able to climb out,” writes Mona Charen. Michael Barone reports on the real cost of Obamacare, presenting a chart of the true ten-year costs from Jeffrey Anderson of the Pacific Research Institute, who previously noted:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is touting the Senate’s latest health-care bill as costing $849 billion over 10 years. But this uses the same accounting trick as past versions: 99 percent of the costs don’t kick in until the fifth year of that “10-year” period. The true 10-year costs are well over twice what Reid’s advertising: $1.8 trillion.
These are crippling costs. Who is going to pay them? That’s easy: you and me. Charen:
Just to pay for these programs — excluding everything else the government does — the federal government would have to collect one-third of the earnings of every American by 2054. That, or cut benefits.