Health Care Thoughts

My quick thought on the pending health care legislation and why it's bad. No, I'm not going to get into all the myriad of arguments that people offer against it nor am I going to spend time refuting every last argument for it.

Instead, I'm going to point out one little thing that makes this the wrong time to do anything about overhauling and putting the government in charge of health care.

The government is running a huge deficit and it is a deficit that we must eventually pay down. Now, like it or not, that means there is probably going to be some kind of tax increase when the economy gets rolling again.

However, if you raise taxes to pay for the health care bill, you then can't tap those people for more money in order to pay down the deficit. Except judging from the Obama Administration's behavior, they think that they can tap those people again and again with no consequences.

In fact, I think we need to look at the Clinton years to see the best case scenario for this. Health care legislation was defeated. By 1994, the Republicans took over the House. During the subsequent years, we had a combination of income taxes increases (but a decrease on capital gains taxes) and spending cuts. In the last two years of the Clinton presidency, we ran a surplus each year and not a deficit. Now, technically, we were still running a deficit because thanks to a change in the budget accounting rules during the LBJ administration, the government counts social security money as revenue and not as expenditures.

But overall, the deficit was reduced.

If health care legislation had passed, there is no way that the tax increases could have paid down the debt as they would have been paying for a new national health care plan.

And if this health care bill passes now, with $1 trillion in new spending, we will get the worst of all worlds: tax increases, increased spending, and higher deficits.

Not really the hope and change I'm looking for.