With a number like this, I could run for president and beat Obama in November. And so could you.
I say that because I’m assuming that neither Mitt Romney nor Ron Paul is actually reading this article.
The numbers I’m referring to aren’t poll numbers, or employment numbers, or GDP growth, or gas prices.
Nope.
In a wholly predictable development, it turns out the cost for Obamacare will end up being twice the original price that the Democrats said.
Fancy Nancy was right: They did have to pass Obamacare for liberals to find out what was in it. But hey, this is what happens when you pass a bill you haven’t even read yet.
The Congressional Budget Office now forecasts “a gross cost to the federal government of $1,762 billion,” to implement Obamacare through year 2022 and that “those provisions will increase deficits by $1,083 billion.”
The cost is nearly twice- and counting- the $900 billion that was advertised by Democrats at the time the bill passed, just as Republicans predicted.
Liberal “wonk” Ezra Klein, of the math-impaired Washington Post, still scolded Republican Rep. Eric Cantor last year for pointing out this obvious fact: Democrats cooked the books to make Obamacare appear as a deficit reduction measure.
“But as a matter of arithmetic,” wrote Klein in January of 2011, “using the math that Congress always uses, the bill saves money. It cuts enough spending and raises enough taxes to more than pay for itself, both in the first 10 years and in the second 10 years.”
Turns out the “wonk” was w-w-w-wrong.
Perhaps that’s because Klein has been doing phony Washington math- “math that Congress always uses”- for too long. Only in Washington can you tax something and then say it pays for itself.
Too bad it doesn’t even “pay for itself” under Klein’s phony math.
In the movie The Program head football coach Sam Winters taunts reporters who seem to have problems doing math with “I know you guys can't write, but I thought you could at least count.”