Oops. The Treasury had to revise its revenue estimates again earlier this week, as part of the final fiscal year 2010 budget submission for the Obama administration. The president’s initial February proposal for financing just half of his healthcare initiative’s reserve fund of $635 billion over the next decade came up a little short, upon further review by the fiscal referees upstairs in the booth. Obama’s original down payment for sweeping healthcare reform included a projected $317 billion from imposing a 28 percent ceiling on itemized deductions by Americans in the top two income tax brackets (where tax rates are higher than that figure). Treasury now calculates that this proposal would raise only $267 billion, or roughly 84 percent of the original projection. Of course, the Obama proposal to limit deductions for high-income Americans had already been thumbed down by the Democratic heads of the House and Senate tax-writing committees, among a long conga line of other members and outside interests.
The other half of the half was to come from Medicare savings (cutting back reimbursements to private Medicare plans). This just in: Medicare is even more broke than last year, and taxpayers will foot more of the bill through additional general revenue transfers to the program.
Yogi Berra once said, “Baseball is 90 percent mental and the other half is physical.” In the case of the Obama budget for health reform, Yogi might be inspired to say somehing like “58 percent of it is imaginary and the other 75 percent of it is conjectural.”