Bernie is out making a stink about the debt ceiling being a matter of our "priorities" as a society -- once again.
He continues to persist in the claim that we can just tax rich people more and solve it.
He's lying.
Look folks, this really is quite simple: The problem is that the price of these services has exorbitantly ramped driven by multiple factors.
CMS is responsible for all of it.
One trillion dollars, approximately, of the total 3.6 trillion spent since October 1st has been in that department and only about $400 billion has been received in taxes to offset it.
That's the problem, in short, and may I remind you that last year this department spent two trillion of the roughly six in total -- and not very long ago, in fact just a few short years ago, CMS spent $500 billion a year -- one quarter of what is spent now.
Just ten years ago CMS spent half what it spends today.
I recognized this problem -- and what it would do to the Federal Budget -- when I was running MCSNet in the 1990s. It featured prominently in Leverage and on a continuing basis, which forms the basis for this article -- a proposal to permanently resolve the problem.
There has been zero political debate over an actual resolution. Not one. Bernie's railing about prescription drugs sounds like part of it, but its not. Why not? Because there's no need for laws to be passed; it has been illegal for more than 100 years to collude in restraint of trade or price fixing.
How does passing something else address willful refusal to enforce the law by both political parties?
We either address this or the rest does not matter. Bernie's screed is nothing new and parts of it were put in place by Obamacare, which contrary to the claims Obama and others made it didn't resolve it -- it in fact made it worse.
Why?
All these "programs" abstract out the consequences of personal decisions away and, much worse, enable organized grift that drives deliberate inefficiency, price-rigging and worse.
These are difficult discussions -- but we have to have them and resolve this or we will descend into an Argentina-style Hell and, as has been seen in other places where this has occurred a nation does not recover from it once it occurs.
We're out of time folks.
And one of the primary changes that has to happen now is the outright fraud by both sides of the aisle on so-called "budget impact" that they all claim over 10 years time, yet exactly zero changes are binding over more than one year.
Thus the first change is that all claims must be made in the context of the current single year impact, and only that year. Forward, unenforceable claims must be barred.
Can we get even that small change?
I doubt it.