As our own Jon Perr recently noted, the Republicans have been doing a lot of lying about the Bush tax cuts and how much they contributed to the deficit while pretending to care about deficit reduction -- Boehner Lies About Bush Tax Cuts and Deficits. Looks like former New York Gov. George Pataki decided to take his turn following in John Boehner's shoes with some revisionist history on MSNBC this morning.
Republicans have been trying very hard to blame President Obama for the nation’s deficit (which he largely inherited from his predecessor), but former Gov. George Pataki (R-NY) today may have gone to the most absurd lengths yet. On MSNBC, Pataki said that the health care reform bill that became law this year is “one of the reasons we have this deficit”:
You just said that Boehner indicated Obamacare as one of the reasons we have this deficit, one of the reasons we have failed to create private sector jobs and he’s absolutely right.
Pataki made no attempt to explain how a law that was passed this year and has yet to be implemented could have possibly caused this year’s deficit. [...]
The Affordable Care Act not only adds nothing to the deficit this year, but is entirely deficit neutral. As Igor Volsky pointed out earlier, the Congressional Budget Office released a letter this week stating that the Affordable Care Act “will produce $143 billion in net budgetary savings over the 2010-2019 period.” Repealing the parts of the law that Republicans love to gripe about would cause an increase in deficits of $455 billion. Let’s repeat: repealing health care reform would increase, not decrease, the deficit.
Of course we got no push back from MSNBC's Chris Jansing. Can we get Cenk hired for her spot please?
