I have a new column up on National Review Online today describing Obamacare’s hidden tax hikes and rationing. Here’s how it starts:
President Obama’s 2012 budget has rightly been lambasted as completely detached from fiscal and economic reality. Even under the budget’s own rosy assumptions, the country would accumulate $7.2 trillion in deficits over the coming decade. Under more realistic assumptions, it’s a plan for trillion-dollar deficits every year, with no end in sight. By 2021, government debt would likely approach $21 trillion under this budget, up from $5.8 trillion at the end of 2008.
This might lead one to think there is no Democratic plan for closing the fiscal gap. But actually, the president and his allies do have a plan of sorts. They just don’t want voters to know what it is. Indeed, it is their hope that they can get their plan adopted by stealth — and that voters never fully realize that the government has adopted it.
To Democrats, the solution to our budget problem has two components. First, massive and steady tax hikes, not just over the next few years but every year for the next quarter century to match the explosion in entitlement costs. Second, they want stiff government cost controls on the entire health sector, not just on public insurance programs.
For years, the only thing that stood in the way of Democrats’ securing these changes were unenlightened and intransigent Republicans. But when Democrats secured once-in-a-generation majorities in the 111th Congress, Republicans were no longer in a position to stand in their way. So Democrats took the opportunity not only to pass Obamacare — the largest entitlement expansion in two generations — but also to try to reshape the long-term budget picture according to their big-government vision.
Read the rest here.