I attended a Concord Coalition program at UNC last night on the ever-expanding federal debt. All questions I had about why the Concord Coalition hasn’t been more effective in addressing the problem were answered. It took a question from the audience, well me, to get the panelists to acknowledge that the new health care law passed CBO scrutiny only by playing a shell game, but none of them addressed the fact that Medicare is already ignoring the law and acting as if the $59 billion “doc fix” is in force.
Alternate reality is fine up to a point, but one of the speakers was Stefan Kreuger-Byrd, youth outreach coordinator for the Concord Coalition. He used two case studies to show how youth could get involved. One was a Leftish student group that is a division of the Roosevelt Institute dedicated to “carrying forward the legacy and values of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.” The other was Y.I. Want Change, another Leftish group that worked to make 26 the new age of adulthood and whose head was a guest of Nancy Pelosi at the signing of the health care bill.
The Concord Coalition was always more concerned about raising taxes than cutting spending, but the program last night showed that the Coalition cares even less about the growth in the size of government and is perfectly happy for it to grow, as long as tax collections grow faster.
The numbers are bad enough, but seeing a respected bipartisan group actively work against spending restraint is truly dispiriting.
