Irish Exit
Verified User
I warned everybody I knew who had a private pay policy not to take that subsidy on their premium payments instead of on their tax returns if they were anywhere close to the cutoffs in income for that reason.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s $21 trillion mistake
- Thread starter anatta
- Start date
I warned everybody I knew who had a private pay policy not to take that subsidy on their premium payments instead of on their tax returns if they were anywhere close to the cutoffs in income for that reason.
Wrong again moron. That tax package resulted in Democrats losing the House and the Senate for the first time in nearly four decades.
We don't have a REVENUE problem ass-hat. We have a SPENDING problem.
The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 was enacted August 5, 1997. Did Revenues go down, or up dumbass?
countryboy
Verified User
What's AOC?
Oh, okay. Cortez. I forgot Liberals are too stupid to use actual names, my bad. Her ignorance is well-documented, just like the Obama clip that I sent you. You fuckers just lie your way through every damn thing, you have absolutely no shame. Fuck you very much
Lightbringer
Loves Me Some Souls
She's not just ignorant. She's a dangerous combination of ignorant and dishonest.
“$21 TRILLION of Pentagon financial transactions ‘could not be traced, documented, or explained.’ $21T in Pentagon accounting errors. Medicare for All costs ~$32T. That means 66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon.”
— Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), in a tweet, Dec. 2, 2018
The Defense Department is awash with money. So much money that neither the staff nor 1,200 auditors could make sense of where it all went. (The Pentagon recently failed its first big audit in history.)
Enter Ocasio-Cortez. She supports expanding Medicare to people under 65, what’s known as single-payer or Medicare-for-all. But the big question is how to pay for all that health care. According to an estimate from the Urban Institute, the price tag on Sen. Bernie Sanders’s Medicare-for-all proposal would be $32 trillion over 10 years.
Maybe the Pentagon has a few trillion dollars lying around somewhere, as Ocasio-Cortez implied? Let’s find out.
Ocasio-Cortez claimed on Twitter that $21 trillion in “Pentagon accounting errors” could have paid for 66 percent of the Medicare-for-all proposal. Her tweet references an article in the Nation, a left-leaning magazine. The specific line about the missing $21 trillion comes from research by Mark Skidmore, an economics professor at Michigan State University.
Skidmore has been tracking opaque federal budget moves for years. He tallied $21 trillion in unsupported accounting adjustments at the Pentagon from 1998 to 2015. The department’s comptroller says these are budgetary moves that “lack supporting documentation ... or are not tied to specific accounting transactions.”
In 2001, for example, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld testified to Congress that “we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.” For 2015, the Pentagon reported $6.5 trillion in “unsupported journal voucher adjustments.”
Skidmore contends that the Pentagon has competent personnel and is no more complex than a large multinational corporation, which makes the trillion-dollar accounting gaps all the more puzzling.
“The ongoing and repeated nature of the unsupported journal voucher adjustments coupled with the seemingly enormous size of the adjustments warrants the attention of both citizens and elected officials,” Skidmore wrote in a 2017 paper, adding later, “It should be feasible to track revenues flowing in and expenditures flowing out, and share this information in a format that can be understood by literate people.”
Regardless, in the situation Skidmore is describing, the $21 trillion is not one big pot of dormant money collecting dust somewhere. It’s the sum of all transactions — both inflows and outflows — for which the Defense Department did not have adequate documentation. “The same dollar could be accounted for many times,” as Philip Klein wrote in the Washington Examiner.
Skidmore’s paper clearly talks about Pentagon “assets” and “liabilities.” This key distinction was duly noted in the Nation article that Ocasio-Cortez referenced on Twitter.
To be clear, Skidmore, in a report coauthored with Catherine Austin Fitts, a former assistant secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development who complained about similar plugs in HUD financial statements, does not contend that all of this $21 trillion was secret or misused funding. And indeed, the plugs are found on both the positive and the negative sides of the ledger, thus potentially netting each other out. But the Pentagon’s bookkeeping is so obtuse, Skidmore and Fitts added, that it is impossible to trace the actual sources and destinations of the $21 trillion.
But it did not appear in her tweet, which clearly implied that the $21 trillion could have been used to pay for 66 percent of the $32 trillion in estimated Medicare-for-All costs.
“To clarify, this is to say that we only demand fiscal details [with health and education], rarely elsewhere,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a follow-up tweet.
“The point, I think, was more about how we care so little about the ‘how do you pay for it’ when we are talking about war and military spending,” her spokesman wrote in an email. “It’s only when we are talking about investing in the physical and economic well-being of our citizenry that we become concerned with the price tags.”
That’s not the argument coming through in her original tweet, which has been retweeted by nearly 25,000 users. Most people reading the tweet are likely to take its flawed comparison at face value.
It’s also worth pointing out that Skidmore’s total covers 17 years (1998 to 2015), whereas the Urban Institute’s $32 trillion estimate for Sanders’s Medicare plan covers 10 years. So the two numbers are not apples-to-apples to begin with.
After this fact check was published, Pentagon spokesman Christopher Sherwood said “DoD hasn’t received $21 trillion in (nominal) appropriated funding across the entirety of American history.”
“Money Congress appropriates for DoD stays at the Department of the Treasury until they make a payment on behalf of DoD,” he said. “Any funds that remain unspent at the end of the period of availability will remain at the Department of the Treasury and are no longer available to DoD at that point.”
The Pentagon is working to fix the accounting gaps, Sherwood added, "by reducing the labor needed to manually enter the Journal Vouchers and reducing the time it takes to perform research” for account reconciliation.
Let’s put $21 trillion in context. The entire national debt is $21.8 trillion. According to the Congressional Budget Office, total defense spending from 1998 to 2015 was nearly $9 trillion. The CBO estimates $7 trillion in defense spending from 2019 to 2028.
In other words, completely defunding the military for the next decade would yield only one-fifth of $32 trillion. That’s a much better way of illustrating the cost of Medicare-for-All.
Swing and a miss!
Ocasio-Cortez is not the first Twitter user to mangle information from a news report. But it’s unconvincing
to try to pass this off as a rhetorical point being misread. She cited the $21 trillion figure and said “66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon.”
That’s a direct comparison. It’s badly flawed. The same article she referenced on Twitter would have set her straight. The tweet is still up, probably causing confusion. So we will award Four Pinocchios to Ocasio-Cortez.
Did you send her the Bill?
There you go lying again. The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 was enacted August 5, 1997. Tax revenues went UP by 142.5 billion. They increased every year after until the Clinton Recession hit in 2000.
After the Bush tax cuts, revenues continue to increase. You keep making the same moronic lie filled statements every time and the data prove that you're a moron and a liar. You're.....
I am amused by this "private option" meme. So in addition to confiscatory tax rates that make EVERYTHING more expensive, they also have to dip into their pockets and buy private insurance if they don't want to die waiting in line.
Moronic; but that defines the lies Liberals engage in to promote their failed ideological belief system.
countryboy
Verified User
In other words, she's a typical liberal Democrat, AKA, "Democratic Socialist". Liberals are forever rebranding everything, in the hopes that we won't notice. I guess they figure everyone is just as stupid as they are.
REALLY? Who pays for the trillions in subsidies? They just PRINT the money out of thin air dumb fuck?
It's more amazing that you can type while your head is up your ass snowflake. Nancy Pelosi admitted she didn't know what was in the bill you dumb fuck. I am amused that you even believe you have the even slightest clue of what you are erupting about.
Yo make up your bullshit as you go and then demand everyone prove your bullshit wrong. Then after we prove you to be wrong with the FACTS, your typical response is "nuh uh." STFU
Fucking brain dead twat thinks Ocasio is smart. 
You really are.....The waiting is with regard to procedures that aren't life and death.
Of course, there are arguments one could make for either approach. As you suggest, you pay less tax towards healthcare in a system where a large portion of people aren't covered, and that's money available to pay your own health costs. But then you're also likely to have a much larger out-of-pocket expense for healthcare.
So, which kind of system is better? If we were forced to approach that question without any evidence, a clever person could make an argument for either. But, fortunately, we aren't force to take an evidence-free approach.
There are about 40 wealthy nations in the world, which have a variety of different healthcare systems. So, we can look at the ACTUAL RESULTS. We can measure each in terms of per capita healthcare spending, and also in terms of various measures of public health (life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality, obesity, HIV prevalence, teen pregnancy rates, age-adjusted disability rates, and so on).
What do you suppose that kind of practical, numbers-based analysis will tell us?
This is a lie and moronic; the wait is with regard to complicated specialized critical surgeries that cannot be performed because under Government managed programs specialization is limited and discouraged. In addition, shortages of specialized surgeons are exacerbated by very strict limits on the level of compensation.
I do wish you had a brain.
Lightbringer
Loves Me Some Souls
True.
countryboy
Verified User
Then why are people dying while waiting for procedures? Why can't liberals ever just be honest? If you favor shitty, government-run health-care, just say so. Do you think making stuff up bolsters your position? Good fucking grief already.
Even if this were true (in reality, those with life-threatening situations go to the front of the line), it would still be a matter of each system having its good and its bad points. Which is better: having an under-supply of general practitioners, such that even routine healthcare is priced too high for a significant portion of the population, or having an under-supply of certain kinds of specialists, such that people end up having to wait a long time for them, or travel somewhere and spend money out of pocket for immediate attention? Again, if there were no real-world examples to learn from, it would come down to who can make a cleverer-sounding argument for why his or her approach is better. But we actually have dozens of real-world examples to choose from, by which to assess which approach is ACTUALLY better, both with regard to controlling costs and with regard to producing good public health outcomes.
Because there's always a background mortality rate.
If the real-world results suggested systems like those of Canada (or Germany, etc.), would be worse overall, I wouldn't favor them. But the real-world results instead show that such systems produce both significantly lower per capita expenditures and significantly better public health outcomes. But, if you prefer an archaic profit-oriented healthcare system that produces demonstrably shittier results, why not just say so?
It is true; you're claim that they are not life threatening is a lie. Prove that it isn't.
Another lie; that would be your false and dishonest claim. In reality, they CANNOT go to the front of any line because they lack the surgeons and specialized technology to get them out of the line. That is why so many come to the US.
I do wish you had a brain and could be honest.