Nathan Newman at TPM Cafe has a good post on health care costs. His most topical point is that the Bush health care tax package, which is ostensibly intended to reduce health care costs through financial incentives for health care consumers, is hopelessly misguided and beyond repair. Most health care spending occurs among a small minority of spenders who receive very expensive, intensive care that they likely see as not being optional. Incentives one way or the other probably won't make much of a difference.

Check out Adam and Craig on TomPaine.com today -- "No New Taxes? Don't Read His Lips."

A comment on testimony given to the Senate Budget Committee by Jason Furman, the leader of the center-left Hamilton Project and a scholar at the CBPP. The testimony concerns the "fiscal gap," the hot new phrase for what's typically called the long-term structural imbalance in the federal budget. His testimony is interesting and largely constructive. But it's more notable for its demonstration of budget wonkery's biggest blind spot: health care economics. Furman says rising health care costs are primarily responsible for the "fiscal gap." Yet all he says on the overall issue is this:

The Bush budget proposal assumed the repeal of the estate tax. Sen. Bernie Sanders's office juxtaposed what certain families would get from a repealed estate tax with assorted proposed cuts to social programs. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone summed up the comparisons thusly: Sanders's office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family -- the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune -- would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.