Ah, the campaign season is in full absurdity mode. Forget the nuance and the exaggerations. We are now into full-on lies and propaganda. Ever since the Citizens United ruling – you know the one, corporations are individuals and money is speech – so much money has been pouring into campaigns there is no longer a need to filter anything. Just make all the ads and run them. Throw all the crap you can against the wall, see what sticks and then throw more of that. Essentially, political campaigns have become lying contests. He who lies best, wins. You simply say the most ridiculous untrue things over and over until people take them as fact. Cases in point? Obama’s “you didn’t build that.” Anyone with an ounce of sense knows he wasn’t talking about a business. He was talking about a road. Never mind. Makes a great lie to propagate. “Obama said business owners didn’t build their businesses.” “Obama hates business owners.” Or how about Mitt Romney killing Joe Soptic’s wife with cancer? That one sent the prevarication detector off the scale. The saddest part of all this is that I know there are people reading this right now who believe that Obama hates business owners and Romney is responsible for Joe Soptic’s wife’s death. Meanwhile, the things that really matter get glossed over. Voters’ attention spans are short. Nobody wants to be bored with a bunch of facts, right? See, politicians need votes. Simply explaining how they’d deal with an issue and letting voters weigh that against the vision of their opponent is too mundane. That’s no way to get votes. Instead we get, with regard to Medicare, for example, an ad showing a politician shoving an old lady off a cliff in her wheelchair. That’s how you get votes. Not by actually talking about the severe funding problems that Medicare will eventually and inevitably encounter. And even more unsettling is the fact that even if what the candidates were saying about Medicare was true, it’s virtually meaningless from a policy standpoint. James C. Capretta, National Review Online, wrote an interesting piece on the Medicare debate: ... To pass Obamacare, the president cut Medicare by more than $700 billion over the coming decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). ... They (cuts) are arbitrary and across the board. They reduce reimbursement rates for all who provide services to Medicare patients, regardless of how well or badly they treat their patients. Among the cuts is a $156 billion reduction in payments to Medicare Advantage plans over ten years. These cuts will force seniors to pay $3,700 more for their health care by 2017, according to a study I co-authored with Robert Book. The Medicare trustees project that the cuts will drive some 4 million seniors out of Medicare Advantage plans between 2012 and 2018. ... The Ryan budget retained the savings associated with the Obama Medicare cuts largely because they are in the current-law baseline, and the GOP wasn’t able to find enough spending cuts elsewhere to offset them. Capretta goes on to note that Ryan’s budget allows for ways to save money in Medicare without arbitrary cuts. Also, Ryan’s budget doesn ‘t use Medicare cuts to pay for a new entitlement like Obamacare. All the money from the cuts goes to build up the Medicare trust fund. So the unvarnished truth is that both Obamacare and the Ryan budget cut around $700 billion from Medicare – just in different ways. In other words, there apparently are two ways to shove poor granny off that cliff. Now, you don’t have to take my or Capretta’s word for any of this. I have posted the CBO report, the change in Medicare funding by Congressional district, the Medicare trustees’ report and a senior citizen impact study by the Heritage Foundation. Go here: dumbhoosier.com/medicarelinks.html But now, let’s be brutally honest. First of all, these alleged “cuts” are over 10 years. So that amounts to an average of about $70 billion a year. Furthermore, these “cuts” aren’t really “cuts” at all. They are reductions in growth. In other words, if Medicare funding was supposed to increase by, say, 10 percent in a given year, these “cuts” limit the increase in Medicare funding to, say, 8 percent. So Medicare funding increases by 8 percent and we call it a “cut.” Only in Washington. But beyond the obvious frivolity in quibbling over such nonsense, let’s look at the veritable insignificance of the debate from a policy standpoint. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that either Obama/Biden or Romney/Ryan actually can “cut” $700 billion from Medicare over 10 years. The government is spending roughly $3.7 trillion a year and taking in roughly $2.3 trillion. That’s a $1.4 trillion deficit. These Medicare “cuts” are akin to me owing you $1,400 and paying you $70. The same tomfoolery happens when politicians talk about taxes. Obama wants to raise taxes on rich people. Fine. Do it. I don’t care. His plan would raise $95 billion. That’s another $95 against that $1,400 I owe you. We’re up to $165. I only owe you another $1,235. Feeling good about that, are ya? The bottom line in all this? We’re toast There’s no way, in a political climate like this, that any meaningful legislation can ever get passed. Politicians are simply too worried about elections. They’re worried way more about elections than they are about policy. That’s why, even though everybody in Washington knows that Medicare is in deep financial trouble, they demagogue and prattle on about insignificant drivel instead of making the hard choices and wholesale changes that are needed. I hate to sound totally pessimistic here, but I foresee year-over-year trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see. That is, of course, unless the T-bill-propped-up house of cards that is the U.S. economy totally collapses. And frankly, that’s not beyond the realm of probability. But hey, that's all right. Our intrepid leaders have better things to do. They've got some really good lies to tell.
