http://www.slate.com/id/2188153/The fiscal damage to the United States over the last seven years is calculable. It is precisely $3,889,136,064,463, according to the Bush administration's Office of Management and Budget, which totaled up the budgetary cost to date of all the tax cuts and spending increases enacted over the past seven years. Of that nearly $4 trillion total, the administration estimates that 46 percent is tax cuts, 31 percent is defense and homeland-security spending, and 23 percent is everything else, including the prescription-drug benefit.
Even if the next president repealed the tax cuts, canceled the prescription-drug benefit, and returned defense spending to prewar levels, the added debt from eight years of these policies would not vanish—and we would be left paying roughly $100 billion annually just in added interest. Fully fixing it could take years or even decades.
One interesting claims made by the author is that health care spending is a big cause of the long-term deficit issues. Obviously that makes sense for Medicare but he's saying even the money spent on private insurance is causing problems. Some have claimed that health care costs reduces the competitiveness of American companies but I don't think I've heard the claim that the health care system as a whole is impacting the federal deficits negatively:
[/b]Health care, health care, health care. The long-run deficit is almost entirely the result of the rapid growth of health spending in both public programs like Medicare and private health insurance. Ultimately, a lasting solution will implement systemwide reforms that change the incentives facing both providers and patients. But there are some simpler steps we could take right now in Medicare. One is to end the practice of paying private managed-care plans more than we pay for people in the government's insurance plan, a step endorsed by Congress' Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. Another is to use a combination of better clinical guidelines, carrots, and sticks to reduce Medicare spending in high-spending areas.
). If that is true, then there's no point in complaining about Nader ruining it for a guy who actually won. But I'll even accept it as probable that without Nader in the campaign, Gore would have won even with the crime in Florida.
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