In a message dated 7/31/02 4:30:50 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<< I'm not sure this is right. If you look at what the public say they would like in a government health care program it is huge and very expensive (in contrast I suspect if you asked how much they would like to spend on it the amount would be too small to pay for what they would like to see in the package). As I understand it, the cost of the medicare program turned out to be much greater than expected, but not because congress kept changing the legislation to add more goodies. Rather treatment became increasingly more expensive. I suspect that popular opinion would have preferred to see an even bigger medicare program at the start. Of the examples you mention I suspect that only the income tax was sold on the basis of its limited size. - - Bill Dickens >> All my books remain packed in boxes, so I can't look up the figures, but I seem to recall that the Congressional proponents of Medicare projected an ten-year federal outlay of some $8 billion, as opposed to the annual outlay of $110+ billion now. I can't concieve of the vast majority of Americans supporting a program that would have cost two orders of magnitude greater than projected. Typically one of the selling points of federal programs is that "they won't cost too much." Indeed, weren't Public Choice folks here at GMU among the first to explain how groups wanting concentrated benefits can get them by spreading the cost over the larger group of taxpayers, making each taxpayer's share tiny and thus not worth the cost of opposing? Sincerely, David Levenstam
