Burnt Orange Report

"Samsonite. I was way off!"

By Nathan Nance

You know when they passed the Medicare Reform Bill, mor ethan half of the Republicans would only vote for it because it came in at under $300 billion. A month and half later, it turned out that the Administration had kept the fact that it would actually cost $540 billion under wraps so it would pass.

But they were off by a few hundred billion dollars more. The Post has a story that the Administration's budet shows the cost of the law will be $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years. That's way off from what was originally estimated.

This is fuzzy math at its worst people. These people can't even estimate how much money they are giving away to pharmaceutical companies, how in the hell can we get them to give us straight numbers on Social Security?

At a House Ways and Means Committee hearing, Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) taunted Treasury Secretary John W. Snow about the rhetorical discrepancies.

"If you're looking for a crisis, I would suggest you look at a crisis that was self-made in just last year, because the crisis exists in what's happened to Medicare by weighing it down," Emanuel said. "Those of us who told you it was going to cost twice as much were right."

Bush, questioned by reporters about the new numbers while meeting at the White House today with the Polish president, said that "there's no question that there is a unfunded liability inherent in Medicare" that the administration and Congress will "have to deal with over time."

I don't think Bush is cognizant of the fact that he created the budget deficit and the "unfunded liability" he's talking about. This is really scary, through-the-looking-glass-type stuff. I may actually have crossed into an alternate dimension where someone thinks that Bush is actually making sense.