KeithHennessey.com

While the President is calling for “a final up or down vote,” the House majority is reportedly considering a legislative procedure which avoids just that.

I hope that the pending health legislation is not enacted into law. If it is, fiscally responsible legislators, including those on the new Fiscal Responsibility Commission, should include in their formal recommendations repeal of all the deficit-increasing provisions of these new laws.

No, but not for the reason you might think.

Team Obama says the President’s budget would reduce the deficit. CBO says the President’s budget would increase the deficit. What the heck is going on? Who is right? Let’s use Budget Bubble Graphs to see if we can understand what’s going on.

In each of the following four headline pairs, one is from this morning. The other is from last year. See if you can guess which is which.

Can Speaker Pelosi bring health care reform back from the dead? Did it ever really die?

I respond to a point in Budget Director Orszag and White House Health Policy Advisor DeParle’s Washington Post op-ed. America’s primary fiscal problem is the long-term growth of health entitlement spending. The Senate-passed bill creates a commitment for a new health entitlement program, and takes advantage of a gimmick to claim that this commitment is paid for. Instead, this bill would guarantee a future fiscal crisis.

The fiscal policy debate focuses only on deficits and ignores a major philosophical distinction between the two parties: different beliefs about the appropriate size of government. I am going to do my best to correct this by expanding its scope and introducing a new kind of graph. I call it a Budget Bubble Graph.

Speaker Pelosi, Leader Reid, and their Administration allies face seven challenges in implementing the two bill strategy.

I am going to describe the mechanics of the anticipated “two bill strategy” to enact health care reform using reconciliation. If you don’t care about all this procedural mumbo jumbo you can skip this post and head over to my strategic analysis: Hurdles of the two bill strategy.