I'll keep pointing this out until the canard dies

Charles Krauthammer

Suppose someone - say, the president of United States - proposed the following: We are drowning in debt. More than $14 trillion right now. I've got a great idea for deficit reduction. It will yield a savings of $230 billion over the next 10 years: We increase spending by $540 billion while we increase taxes by $770 billion.

He'd be laughed out of town. And yet, this is precisely what the Democrats are claiming as a virtue of Obamacare...

Explains CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf in his "preliminary analysis of H.R. 2" (the Republican health-care repeal): "CBO anticipates that enacting H.R. 2 would probably yield, for the 2012-2021 period, a reduction in revenues in the neighborhood of $770 billion and a reduction in outlays in the vicinity of $540 billion."

[LB: Remember that this is only for the 2012-2021 period, which includes ~10 years of revenues and only ~6 years of outlays. After 2021, they can't even pretend that there's deficit reduction.]

As National Affairs editor Yuval Levin pointed out when mining this remarkable nugget, this is a hell of a way to do deficit reduction: a radical increase in spending, topped by an even more radical increase in taxes.

There's been a lot of dishonesty involved with the whole Obamacare process, but this notion that it somehow reduces the deficit is possibly the most pernicious of the lies spread by the left.