One of the ways to figure out the "price tag" is to project potential costs-versus-savings in to the future. Now, we all know the limited utility of economic projections, especially in light of the current recession and the financial meltdown from last autumn. Not that either was unpredictable or unpredicted (actually, the recession had begun the beginning of last year, but went unremarked until the entire banking system hung on the brink of collapse). Yet, the timing of the event, its severity, and the political response to it were all highly contingent events, played out against an important Presidential election, making the entire situation volatile. Be these things as they may, there is a certain amount of acceptability to projecting costs-versus-savings. Matt Yglesias has done the service of reprinting a chart from a Conor Clarke article in The Atlantic magazine.
The projected difference in GDP over time with and without Waxman-Markey is that almost-invisible orange stripe. In other words, in terms of prospective dollars, the cost is negligible (the figures from which this graph are taken come from the EPA's own estimates drawn up as part of consideration of the bill).
Bob Cesca does a similar service in re the cost of health care reform.
Via Ezra Klein, here's economist Uwe Reinhardt on the cost of healthcare reform:A price tag of $1.6 trillion seems immense if one contemplates the figure in the abstract. It is, however, only about 4 percent of the total cumulative health spending of $40 trillion, the amount government actuaries now project for the decade from 2010 to 2020. That is also less than the 6 to 7 percent that total national health spending has increased each year in the past decade.
It is important to note, in defense of those who start getting twitchy when the talk edges past the $1 trillion mark, such numbers are, for all intents and purposes, unfathomable to us. Yet, for precisely this very reason, putting some kind of perspective and context on the numbers becomes all the more important. In other words, while the price tag sounds HUGE, in light of relevant factors, it's really quite small.
These are important points, although in and of themselves quite small. Politicians use these kinds of figures for their own purposes, but us lay folk, who can pressure politicians one way or another, might keep them in mind as the various debates start flying.
