FISCAL IRRESPONSIBILITY
While sitting in the airport on Friday, I clipped this Walter Shapiro column on the fiscal insanity of adding a prescription-drug benefit to Medicare.
At the end of June, the House and the Senate passed separate versions of a $400 billion plan to provide a prescription-drug benefit under Medicare. A committee of 17 congressional negotiators is now struggling to cobble together a compromise on the drug plan that can win the needed support of House conservatives and Senate moderates. And, by the way, virtually no one in Congress believes that this new benefit would actually ended up costing as little as $400 billion over 10 years.
Voters back home might assume that their legislators in Washington would be embarrassed to be creating a far-reaching new entitlement program at just the moment when the deficit is careening out of control. Such is the innocence of those unacquainted with the peculiar folkways of Congress. The $400 billion for the drug benefit has been already approved as part of the congressional budget plan. So in the bizarre way that Congress does arithmetic, the $400 billion is considered to have been already spent, even though the drug benefit would not take effect until 2006.
In Washington, creating this new entitlement is seen as a test of the president's political strength. Defeating it would be a defeat for the president. But the rest of us would be better off.