The List - TURN IT UP!!!

[Bluesman]

Getcha ya-yas out, and BLAST IT!!!

[Bluesman]

'Nuther'un.



Bush Was RIGHT.

[Ironduke]

Bush was right? We've seen the biggest increase in entitlement spending since Johnson's Great Society.

$1.2 trillion over 10 years, Bush was wrong and McCain was right.

While Bush and MacNamara... I mean Rumsfeld... blundered so badly during the first three years of Iraq that we have an uphill fight to win the election in 2008, McCain was prophetically right from the outset on every issue regarding the war.

[Shek]

Bush was right? We've seen the biggest increase in entitlement spending since Johnson's Great Society.

$1.2 trillion over 10 years, Bush was wrong and McCain was right.

While Bush and MacNamara... I mean Rumsfeld... blundered so badly during the first three years of Iraq that we have an uphill fight to win the election in 2008, McCain was prophetically right from the outset on every issue regarding the war.

Agree on Iraq; Medicare Part D isn't as simple as just looking at the budgetary cost. Emphasis is mine.

Marginal Revolution: Medicare benefits for prescription drugs

Rewarding inventors with inefficient monopoly power has long been regarded as the price of encouraging innovation. Public prescription drug insurance escapes that trade-off and achieves an elusive goal: lowering static deadweight loss, while simultaneously encouraging dynamic investments in innovation. As a result of this feature, the public provision of drug insurance can be welfare-improving, even for risk-neutral and purely self-interested consumers. In spite of its relatively low benefit levels, the Medicare Part D benefit generate $3.5 billion of annual static deadweight loss reduction, and at least $2.8 billion of annual value from extra innovation. These two components alone cover 87% of the social cost of publicly financing the benefit. The analysis of static and dynamic efficiency also has implications for policies complementary to a drug benefit: in the context of public monopsony power, some degree of price-negotiation by the government is always strictly welfare-improving, but this should often be coupled with extensions in patent length.