Obamacare and Cost Estimates

I'm going all in this week to defeat Obamacare. As I posted some time ago, this is the one program of this administration that must be defeated, everything else can be undone. Reason number.... well, who's counting, is that these programs ALWAYS COST MORE than advertised, (sorry for the shouting). And the reaction of the politicians is always, "well, it's too important, so cost overruns be damned." Exhibit A is in the YouTube video below. First, a little background from The Heritage Foundation.

Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives Ways and Means Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support held a hearing on the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program and its role in providing assistance to struggling families.

The Obama Administration’s witness, Assistant Secretary for the Administration for Children and Families, Carmen Nazario, included in her testimony a request to extend for a year the TANF Emergency Fund at a cost of $2.5 billion. This would extend a $5 billion program created in the Stimulus package last year that severely undermines the success of welfare reform. It essentially pays states for every new TANF case added to the caseload creating a perverse incentive to grow the size of the welfare state.

Robert Rector, Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, testified at the same hearing that federal and state welfare spending under the Obama Administration is already on a trajectory to spend $953 billion in 2011 on means-tested programs for the poor.

Bureaucratic stupidity follows when Ms. Nazario is queried on these facts: