Mike Pence's confused response to the CBO report

"Only in Washington," said Rep. Mike Pence, "can you spend a trillion dollars and say you’re gonna save the taxpayers' money.”

And only in Washington can such willful obtuseness be considered a professional attribute. You can believe that the savings in the Democratic plan will work as CBO thinks they will work, or you can disagree with that. But let's not pretend there's something complicated about the theory of spending money and saving money at the same time.

Let's say I own a graphics design firm. But all our computers are very old. A lot of time is wasted waiting for Adobe Photoshop to load and compute. So I decide to upgrade all of the computers. Costs a lot of money. But since my designers can now do more projects in a day, my firm is actually making more money. So yes, I can spend money and increase my bottom line at the same time. Investing in order to secure efficiencies is not a new concept.

The health-care example is a bit more complicated because the thing we are spending money on (coverage) is not the thing that's saving us money. But it's not that much more complicated. Let's say I want to hire new people at my graphics design firm. But first I need to make room in the budget. So I move our offices to a cheaper area of town, I stop providing free lunch for the staff, I raise prices slightly and I implement a variety of painful managerial changes that substantially streamline our operations. This not only pays for the new hires, but saves money above and beyond that.

No one would argue that these hypotheticals are impossible. Or, if they did, they would be out of touch with basic economic concepts to a truly unseemly degree. But that's what Pence is implying above. Presumably, he's just misleading his audience because it's easier to play to ignorance than to explain his actual critique of the bill. But that's not a good thing either.

Photo credit: Rep. Mike Pence's Flickr page.