Morning Mix: Gulf Costs Soar, Airline Merger Likely, and Arizona Steps Back

Commentary on the Congressional Budget Office report showing that a given health-care insurance policy will become cheaper under reform has gotten a bit confused. Fox News, for instance, summarized the report as saying, ‘CBO: HC Overhaul Likely Won’t Bring Private Premiums Down.’ Let's assume good faith here, as this stuff is confusing.

Dean Baker submits: At a time when all the tough guys in Washington are making plans to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits for high-living seniors and to cut Head Start for low-income kids, it was generous of Warren Buffett to point out that we taxpayers gave over $1 billion to Goldman Sachs (GS) through TARP.

I've been a bit annoyed by the convention of referring to the health-care bill's 10-year cost rather than its annual cost. We don't talk about very much in terms of 10-year costs, and so people don't have much context for it. So I asked crack intern Dylan Matthews to build a crude comparison of what various government programs are projected to cost in 2015 (chosen because health-care reform doesn't kick off until 2014, and I wanted to give it a year to get up and running). Projections are always iffy, but this is just to get an idea of the relative size of different programs.

"The very fact that we’re all so worried about the CBO highlights the craziness of allowing one office to hold health care reform hostage," write the Wonk Room's Igor Volsky. "Why exactly are [reformers] jumping through hoops to satisfy the CBO?"