Friday, March 12, 2010

Quote of the Week

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

Shikha Dalmia, Reason Foundation Senior Analyst and Forbes Magazine Columnist, On the Sheer Lunacy of ObamaCare:

"Even before President Obama rammed through his trillion-dollar-plus stimulus/bailout packages last year, there was a growing sentiment that the country's top priority ought to be tackling the entitlement programs whose liabilities are like a swelling aneurysm in the brain of the body politic waiting to rupture. The combined unfunded liabilities of Medicare and Social Security -- the federal health care and the pension programs for the elderly -- are $107 trillion, seven times the current GDP. Meanwhile, Medicaid, the joint federal-state health insurance program, is consuming on average 21% of state budgets, their single biggest ticket item even before ObamaCare dumps another 16 million people into the program, expanding the Medicaid population by 25%. Beyond that, state and local governments have promised their employees a trillion dollars more in pension and other benefits than they have funds to deliver. "There are not enough taxpayers in the country or creditors in China capable of financing all these promises. Expanding this massive, multifarious entitlement state even more strikes most normal people as sheer lunacy -- especially now that it is visibly coming apart at the seams." 

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