The Obama administration, citing an economic downturn that has been deeper than it had first thought, raised its estimate on Tuesday of the government’s deficit over the next decade to $9 trillion from $7.1 trillion.
The Office of Management and Budget also said that it expected the economy to contract 2.8 percent this year, substantially more than previously estimated, and that employment would peak at around 10 percent.
Despite the budget shortfall, White House officials said they saw no reason to back away from President Obama’s ambitious and costly goal of overhauling the health care system. The new amount includes the cost of the health care overhaul as well as about $600 billion in additional revenue that the administration hopes to raise, two initiatives Congress has yet to approve.
“I know there are going to be some who say that this report proves that we can’t afford health reform,” said Peter R. Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget. But he said the opposite was true: the only way to control spiraling Medicare costs, he said, was to get control of overall health care costs by overhauling the system.
At what point does shame kick in??
Never, Don! The Five Year Plan will proceed as planned!
Shame indeed. They lie that the current debt is 7.1 trillion, when in fact it is 11.7 trillion. The Treasury Dept. lists on its site the debt at the end of each day to the penny. Today it is:
$ 11,719,060,925,865.86
It should easily make $18 trillion this Obama term.
Hey, when does that “net spending cut” take effect?
Wasn’t it Margaret Thatcher who said that the problem with Socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money?
We can’t wait for “someone to do something”. We The People have to look to ourselves to take this country back.
Nice that the Obama Administration came around to agreeing with the Congressional Budget Office, which projected this amount a few months ago, to which Obama replied “It is widely inaccurate”.
Orszag’s statement makes no sense. The proposed “reform” will cost at least $1 trillion in ten years, by the CBO estimate, and that may be low. It’s not going to get control of health costs, it’s going to make it worse. The “waste and fraud” savings they talk about in Medicare are never realized.
Katherine, if they really can save $500 billion in Medicare from waste and fraud, why haven’t they done it? I think we all know the reason – they have no intention of doing it because it is just a number they have pulled out of the air. No doubt there is waste and fraud, but has not every administration claimed it will save us money by doing away with waste and fraud, and then they never do. So it will be with this one.