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Krugman: Death Panels and Middle-Class Tax Hikes Ahead
Posted 02/07/2013 06:27 PM ET
Big Government: We almost never agree with President Obama's favorite economist Paul Krugman, but he recently spoke the truth about where Obama's policies are taking the country. It should scare anyone with a pulse.
Krugman, after speaking at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C., was asked about the debt crisis. After arguing it's no big deal in the near term, Krugman admitted that "Eventually we do have a problem. The population is getting older, health care costs are rising ... . Something is going to have to give."
What's that something? According to Krugman, it's middle-class pocketbooks.
"We won't be able to pay for the kind of society we want without some increases in taxes," he said, "and surely in the end it will require some middle-class taxes as well, maybe a value added tax."
That's not all. We're also "going to have to ... really make decisions about health care, (and) not pay for health care that has no demonstrated medical benefits."
In case anyone failed to get what he was talking about, Krugman made it clear, saying the snarky version is:
"Death panels and sales taxes is how we do this."
This wasn't the first time Krugman has used this line — a couple years ago he said pretty much the same thing on NBC's "This Week." And to his credit, Krugman is at least being honest about the miserable end to which liberalism leads. If the government continues on its current course, the nation's debt will climb inexorably higher.
But Krugman's bleak future is hardly set in stone.
Remember, Krugman says that it's the inevitable future that results from creating "the kind of society we want," meaning the kind of society Krugman and his fellow liberal elitists want.
There is a far better alternative.
We just need to get control of entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, for which Republicans have offered numerous workable cost-saving reforms. We need to kill ObamaCare, which if allowed to take effect will turbocharge federal spending.
And we need to boost economic growth by unleashing the private sector through a sustained campaign of deregulation and tax reform.
Do those things, and we can easily close the budget gap without ever resorting to death panels or a VAT tax.
That might not be the kind of society Krugman or Obama wants, but it certainly leads to a far better place than theirs.
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