Dime bag

Shorter David Brooks: Brilliant speech, but if health care "reform" adds "one dime" to the deficit, the Obama presidency will have been a failed, lying one.

First, Obama rested the credibility of his presidency on what you might call the Dime Standard. He was flexible about many things, but not this: “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits — either now or in the future. Period.”

This sound bite kills the House health care bill. That bill would add $220 billion (that’s 2.2 trillion dimes) to the deficit over the first 10 years and another $1 trillion (10 trillion dimes) to the deficit over the next 10 years.

There is no way to get from the House bill to deficit neutrality. The president’s speech guarantees that the more moderate Senate Finance Committee bill will be the basis for the negotiations to come.

The Dime Standard also sets off a political cascade. Since the Congressional Budget Office is the universally accepted arbiter in such matters, the Democrats have to produce a bill that the C.B.O. says is deficit-neutral, now and forever. That means there will be a seller’s market for any member of Congress, Republican or Democrat, who has a credible amendment to cut costs. It also means the Democrats will have to scale back coverage and subsidy levels to reach the fiscal targets.

In a word: No. What the "CBO says" has no bearing whatsover on, ya know, actual spending or savings. In fact, as in baseball where the double play cannot be "assumed" by the official scorer if an error is made on the play, the CBO is not able to measure the real savings of any health care bill if the reforms in it can't be measured historically.

The CBO estimate may certainly complicate the politics of this by, say under-estimating a politically challenging reform, such as effectiveness research (or as the health care experts on the right would put it, "getting between you and your doctor and a full body CAT scan"), but the estimate will not "add one dime to the deficit."

As for the "resting the credibility of his presidency" bit, well, Doghouse Riley doesn't do "shorter." Fortunately.