How To Avoid Bankruptcy

Here's a one question quiz. In order to avoid going bankrupt, should you:

1. Keep spending money, and more of it.

2. Cut back on spending and pay off bills.

3. Put your head in the sand and ignore it all and maybe it will go away.


Here's something I read aloud to the family this afternoon- it's a little article about some remarks the Vice-President delivered to an AARP meeting this week:

“And folks look, AARP knows and the people with me here today know, the president knows, and I know, that the status quo is simply not acceptable,” Biden said at the event on Thursday in Alexandria, Va. “It’s totally unacceptable. And it’s completely unsustainable. Even if we wanted to keep it the way we have it now. It can’t do it financially.”

I read very slowly and clearly, and yet, everybody in the room said, "HUH?"

But wait! There's more:

“We’re going to go bankrupt as a nation,” Biden said.

“Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’” Biden said. “The answer is yes, that's what I’m telling you.”

The general consensus in the room here is, "In what universe?"

He's talking about health care, and the reason he has to resort to this entirely obnoxious and untenable position that the way to avoid bankruptcy is to spend our brains out is because the nonpartisan CBO just explained that the health care plan is, in fact, spending our brains out and it is not going to save any money at all (the opposite of was once promised):

the creation of a new subsidy for health insurance, which is a critical part of expanding health insurance coverage in our judgement, would by itself increase the federal responsibility for health care that raises federal spending on health care. It raises the amount of activity that is growing at this unsustainable rate and to offset that there has to be very substantial reductions in other parts of the federal commitment to health care, either on the tax revenue side through changes in the tax exclusion or on the spending side through reforms in Medicare and Medicaid. Certainly reforms of that sort are included in some of the packages, and we are still analyzing the reforms in the House package. Legislation was only released as you know two days ago. But changes we have looked at so far do not represent the fundamental change on the order of magnitude that would be necessary to offset the direct increase in federal health costs from the insurance coverage proposals.

Seriously. I understand why politicians say these things. I do not understand why the press isn't jumping all over it in hobnailed boots, nor do I understand why the general public just keeps placidly chewing its cud.