And someone in the insurance industry thought releasing this report was a good idea?
Per Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY):
Way to help move things along:
On a conference call a few minutes ago, a finance committee aide said the AHIP report critical of the committee's health care reform bill will actually serve to help the legislation's chances of final passage.
"Instead of creating doubts, the report is actually having the opposite effect and has drawn a lot of ire from those who support reforms," the aide said. "Frankly, it will create a lot of momentum in the Senate to pass reform."
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More on the party of fiscal & personal responsibility from hardcore supply-sider Bruce Bartlett:
During the George W. Bush years [supply side economics] became distorted into something that is, frankly, nuts — the ideas that there is no economic problem that cannot be cured with more and bigger tax cuts, that all tax cuts are equally beneficial, and that all tax cuts raise revenue....As a consequence, we now have a tax code riddled with tax credits and other tax schemes of dubious merit, expiring provisions that never expire, and an income tax that fully exempts almost on half of tax filers from paying even a penny to support the general operations of the federal government.
Indeed, by destroying the balanced budget constraint, starve-the-beast theory actually opened the flood gates of spending. As I explained in a recent column, a key reason why deficits restrained spending in the past is because they led to politically unpopular tax increases. But if, as Republicans now maintain, taxes must never be increased at any time for any reason then there is never any political cost to raising spending and cutting taxes at the same time, as the Bush 43 administration and a Republican Congress did year after year.
The supply-siders are to a large extent responsible for this mess, myself included. We opened Pandora's Box when we got the Republican Party to abandon the balanced budget as its signature economic policy and adopt tax cuts as its raison d'être. In particular, the idea that tax cuts will "starve the beast" and automatically shrink the size of government is extremely pernicious.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2009/10/taxing-and-spending
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