Ten Trillion & Counting Project
Three Concepts that are Important!
Starve the Beast, Pay-Go, & Medicare Part D
All these three concepts deal with being a bill or law that is passed by the Government to make our society and community a better way of living.
Starve the Beast
Theory administration relied on to balance the budget, it states that if you keep cutting taxes it puts pressure on Congress to stop spending.
- Starving the Beast is a political strategy employed by American conservatives in order to limit government spending by cutting taxes in order to deprive the government of revenue in deliberate effort to force the federal government to reduce spending.
- The term "the beast" in this context refers to the United States Federal Government & the programs it funds. Examples: education, welfare, social security, medicare & medicaid.
- There are slight indications that some conservatives have awakened to the reality that not only does starve the beast not work, but it also leads to higher spending.
PAY-GO
If you can afford it, you get it, if not, you don't.
- A budget rule requiring that new legislation affecting revenues & spending on entitlement programs, taken as a whole, does not increase budget deficits.
- The original Pay-Go was part of the Budget & Enforcement Act of 1990. In that year, President H.W Bush & Congressional leaders painfully negotiated a large deficit reduction package combining spending cuts & tax increases.
- In 2002, Congress allowed Pay-Go to expire, facilitating the passage of deficit- increasing tax & entitlement legislation over the next several years tax cuts & the Medicare prescription drug bill.
- Partly because of the return of large deficits, Congress reinstated Pay-Go in 2007, though it now uses a different mechanism to enforce the rule.
- Pay-Go increases national saving over the long term (when the government runs a deficit, it pays for the shortfall by borrowing money from the private sector, this lowers the national savings.)
- Increasing National saving, in turn; improves the economy's capacity for long-term growth.
Medicare Part D
Added to Prescriptions to Medicare, majority of the voters are 55+ years old, so people liked it because it benefits the seniors
- On December 8, 2003, President George W. Bush signed the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, & Modernization Act, which authorizes Medicare coverage of outpatient drugs as well as a host of other changes to the program.
- As the end of the year 2008, the average annual per beneficiary cost spending for Part D, reported by the Department of Health & Human services, was $1,517, making the total expenditures of the program for 2008 $49.3 (billions).
- Projected Net expenditures from 2009 through 2018 are estimated to be $727.3 billion.
This is very beneficial for the seniors but it's expensive & some doctors take advantage of prescribing prescriptions to patients who don't even need them just so the doctors can get more money out of it.