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The Congressional Budget Office has released its annual budget outlook for the next decade, showing that the budget deficit will continue to fall in the current fiscal year, as well as next year, before gradually beginning to rise steadily again, thereafter. The media mostly talking about this aspect of the report. The Associated Press, for example, ran with the headline: "CBO: Budget deficit to shrink to lowest level since Obama took office."
One of the ways the Obama administration managed to get ObamaCare through Congress was by keeping the cost of the law under $1 trillion. This was accomplished through various budget gimmicks and backloading costs in years at the end of the original budget estimates. These deceptive tactics are how the administration managed to get a score from the Congressional Budget Office purporting that ObamaCare would reduce the deficit by $124 billion.
The ObamaCare bailout provision is leading some health insurance companies to low-ball premiums to attract consumers during the open enrollment period, but they could be setting up enrollees for sharp cost spikes once the transitional section of the law expires after 2016.
Being tasked with a response to the State of the Union address isn't easy. The message, usually given by a fresh face, is carefully crafted to fluff up a party's priorities for the coming months, as well as offer Americans a distinction between their agenda and what the president offered them earlier in the evening.
President Barack Obama delivered his sixth State of the Union address to Congress last night, laying out a litany of mostly terrible policy proposals, as well as attempting to defend his economic record. There's no denying that he's a strong orator who tells a story very well, but the substance of the speech itself was more of the same stale ideas and poor leadership that Americans have seen throughout the course of his presidency. Though there are plenty of policy items worthy of analysis, here are some lines that stuck out.
As we prepare for yet another State of the Union address filled with promises and pledges to the American people, the folks over a Grabien have pieced together a nearly 13-minute montage of the 112 promises that President Barack Obama made in his previous addresses to joint sessions of Congress but never kept.
In addition to proposing an onslaught of spending increases and tax hikes in his sixth State of the Union address, President Barack Obama will, according to The New York Times, "effectively declare victory over the economic hard times that dominated his first six years in office and advocate using the nation’s healthier finances to tackle long-deferred issues like education and income inequality."
President Barack Obama has tipped his hand on how he plans to pay for his budget-busting spending increases. Media reports indicate that he plans to roll out several tax hikes totalling $320 billion in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, including raising the capital gains rate and imposing a tax on big banks' liabilities.
President Barack Obama faces a Republican-controlled Congress that opposes most, if not all, of his legislative agenda. And with just two years left in his presidency, he staring down irrelevance, without many, if any, real legislative accomplishments embraced by the American people. In some way, these sorts of problems can be liberating, but, as he so frequently tells Republicans, there is still an expectation that he live in some sort of a reality.
In the nearly five years since ObamaCare passed Congress and became law, Republican leaders have yet to rally around a specific set of healthcare alternatives. Railing against the 2010 law has been convenient for campaign trail rhetoric, but stalling, as the Supreme Court prepares to hear oral arguments in King v. Burwell, is no longer acceptable.