George Rebane

Debt or deficit, what’s the difference?  To the overwhelming majority of voters, not much.  Obama’s promise not to “add one dime to the deficit” snugly pulls the wool over the eyes of these people and almost all journalists.  RR readers know that deficits measure the annual increase in national debt in dollars per year, and the economy impacting metric is debt service cost to GDP ratio – try to find that reported anywhere.  National debt, of course, is just the total dollar sum the government pays interest on.  That interest is also the amount of our annual tribute to the feds that serves only to keep blood out of the gutters for a while longer.

According to Obama’s own numbers, his programs of hopeful change will insure that our deficits into the indefinite future will be about $1,000,000,000,000 annually which will double our current debt of almost $12,000,000,000,000 in ten years.  The astute reader will not confuse national debt with the $110,000,000,000,000+ of the nation’s total unfunded liabilities.  (I love writing all these zeros; ‘trillions’ has become just another word.)

So let’s see, Obamacare can hide its unsustainability in the near-term by just shifting the accounting of the deficit.  As we quit spending several hundred billion a year on our mid-east wars, then those ‘saved’ monies can be spent on Obamacare with no increase in the projected deficits as promised.  All while our new nationalized healthcare is taking us down the well-trod European road to lower quality and fewer medical services, longer wait times, and, yes, committees that determine for what kinds of care, especially during anticipated end-of-life, the patient will qualify.

What most people understood Obama promise last Wednesday was that his brand of socialized medicine would not add one penny to our national debt.  However, that it will most certainly do, and in appalling amounts.  But out of the gate, with the wool firmly over our eyes, we will not see deficits increase beyond their already projected astronomical levels, each with an ever-increasing percent made up of Obamacare shortfalls.  And now you know.