Facts always matter, but never more so than when politicians deal with issues of real consequence, like health care and budget deficits.
Data sets and out-year projections may make everybody’s eyes glaze over, but without accurate information, the end result of legislation is disaster. Today, there is no way to avoid fiscal ruin and social erosion unless we can determine whether health care reform will tame or swell deficits.
Yet the Republican leaders in Congress are now insisting on their own “facts” concerning health care and deficits, which directly contradict the careful studies of the Congressional Budget Office. They have gone so far as to denigrate CBO, among the most respected agencies in Washington since its founding in 1974, by accusing its analysts of using “rigged” assumptions to reach its conclusions.
Why? The agency’s conclusions are irritating to the Republicans, especially Speaker John Boehner and Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, because the CBO found that health care reform will reduce the federal deficit by more than $230 billion during the first decade after it goes into effect — and then by trillions of dollars in the decades that follow.
For many Americans worried by the growing deficit, that particular aspect of health care reform was no doubt obscured by all the faked uproar over “death panels.”
Now, however, with the question of deficit reduction hanging over the new Congress, the Republicans feel obliged to address the fiscal impact of their drive to repeal, defund and destroy health care reform. They’ve chosen to do so by issuing their own 19-page rebuttal of the CBO analysis, filled with accusations about budgetary “gimmicks,” “double-counting” of revenue and omission of major costs — and the use of “biased” assumptions imposed on the agency’s analysts by the Democrats who were in control when the bill passed.
But the truth is that Boehner has been around long enough to understand that the CBO’s methods are strictly neutral and indeed bipartisan. As Paul N. Van de Water of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted, in a detailed rebuttal of the attack on CBO, the agency’s reality-based analytical procedures were developed during the past three decades by House and Senate Budget committee members and staff, as well as administration officials of both parties.
For the current crop of politicians to disparage them is an insult to those honest efforts and an assault on the foundations of government.
If all that seems too dry, too wonkish, too earnest, then consider this: The present speaker and his cronies know that their partisan attack on the CBO is patently hypocritical. Unless afflicted with early Alzheimer’s, they can surely remember that two years ago, the Republicans and other opponents of reform were crowing loudly because the CBO had found that the Senate Finance Committee’s health care bill would increase the deficit. Although Democrats grumbled, they accepted the CBO findings and rewrote the bill extensively to ensure that it reduced the deficit, as promised.
Consistency and integrity are important, not only as basic values but because without them, we have no hope of achieving any public objective. Politicians who knowingly seek to promote fraudulent numbers and budgetary smoke cannot be trusted with our medicine or our money.
Joe Conason writes for the New York Observer (www.observer.com). Copyright 2011 Creators.com
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy