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.”
Well, I always knew that The Post couldn’t write- at least not truthfully. But I’ve also known that they couldn’t do math- or global climate modeling, or fact-checking.
Still you have to give the folks from the Obama administration credit for consistency at least. Whether it’s the stimulus, the Chevy Volt, TARP, unemployment, Solyndra, gas prices, the deficit- math just never works out for them.
Let’s face it, if these guys were students, we’d be testing them for some sort of number-related learning disability.
It’s that bad.
As the Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein (no relation) reports: “[B]y 2022, according to the CBO, 3 million fewer people will have health insurance through their employer, while 17 million Americans will be added to Medicaid and 22 million will be getting coverage through government-run exchanges.”
And-they-call-it-reform.
While the CBO predicts that the cost of Obamacare will be $48 billion less than they predicted last year, they get to that math by upping the amount they fine employers and individuals for violating the provisions of Obamacare.
Some government, huh?
This is like fining people for breathing. If they could just stick smart meters on all of us, they could tax us for a bunch of non-approved activities like heterosexual sex, going to church, clinging to guns.
In fact, while some may laugh at those examples as outrageous parody, the contraception-in-the-church flap isn’t parody at all. It’s an attempt by the government to make up for their failed math. The federal government can only be involved in our lives, our health and our religion in a way never dreamed of until recently by getting someone to pay for someone else’s “right” to something the rest of us have to go to work for.
Obamacare- and Bankcare, Real Estatecare, Unioncare, Government Employeecare, Greencare- will only stand if we are all stuffed into the same phony system with the same phony benefits that promise to pay for themselves with the same phony math.
Religion may or may not be the enemy to Obama, but it certainly stands in the way of the Obamacare scheme.
Which bring us back to the number that allows anyone not named Mitt or Paul or Ringo to beat Obama come November.
For the fourth week in a row, churches led us in prayer for the restoration of religious liberty in America.
America. Not Russia, Hilter’s Germany, Iran. America.
“There have been many threats to religious freedom over the decades and years, but these often came from without,” writes Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops regarding the mandate provisions of Obamacare. “This one sadly comes from within.”
And as an increasing number of people are beginning to realize, it’s as easy for the government to trample on one right as it is another.
Any number that comes to more than none is an infamous number and should be defeated by all of us, not just one.
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