Among the many deceptions in the current health care bills, perhaps the most devious is the accounting trick whereby new tax revenues begin immediately, but the new expenses begin a year after Pres. Obama faces reelection. Proper accounting rules require that these two streams of funds be matched to understand the bill’s impact, but for some reason the GAO can’t see through the chicanery and has pronounced the bills to cost around $1.2 trillion instead of well over $2 trillion. Even that figure is understated. If the government were required to use the accounting it enforces on private pension and health care plans, the real cost would be over $10 trillion.

Aside from the hidden crippling costs, this accounting deception is actually an opportunity to stop socialized health care’s worst abuses. Since taxpayers will not face rationing and the outlawing of many of their current plans until 2013, Democrats should impose these restrictions on federal employees immediately.

While many conservatives and libertarians oppose socialized health care because it is unconstitutional and will cripple medical advances that would otherwise save lives, the average voter opposes it because of uncertainty. Middle America fears that the health care they depend on will be degraded, e.g. Medicare cuts, rationing, death panels. Since the bills are about 2,000 pages long, nobody knows their full implications for health care in the US. Will any of the promised savings be realized? Will any of the predicted market disruptions harm the health care system? The Democrats are truly selling a leap of faith.

Rather than making retirees and small businesses the Guinea pigs for a massive government power grab, the Democrats’ accounting tricks allow several years to experiment on their constituents instead. Perhaps the Democrats would be less flippant with their promises of a socialist paradise if government union workers were the target.

Senate Republicans should offer an amendment whereby federal employees are automatically enrolled in the system reserved for everyone else. Perhaps then the Democrats would become far more careful about their glossy assurances. Democrats have proven highly partisan by exempting unions from punishing taxes on their luxurious health care plans. Likewise, the Democrats have protected trial lawyers from any restrictions on their health care racket. A ‘universal punishment’ amendment would inject a badly needed dose of honesty into the debate.

Sen. Coburn has introduced a likeminded amendment that forces Congress to accept the government health care system, but that is a weak tool. Congress knows that, since there are only 535 of them, they can remake their rules at will. Rewriting the rules for millions of federal employees would be much more difficult. If voters want clarity in the health care debate, Coburn should expand his amendment to include all federal employees. With their real constituents’ health on the line, Democrats might finally appreciate the gravity of their plans.

In the face of a stagnant jobs economy, the media-academia complex is ginning up a second stimulus. Saturday’s New York Times reported that the original $800bln stimulus package was both “worthy” but “way too small;” translation: it’s time for more spending. Of course, more wasteful spending designed to entrench budget bloat is very unpopular outside of elite circles. Democrats remarkably see their future in extremely unpopular programs like card check, socialized health care, cap and trade, and now more stimulus. Contrary to their Keynesian religion, no stimulus package has ever worked, and the larger the stimulus, the longer the recession. Stimulus packages actually make recessions worse.

The general justification for the lack of evidence that stimuli help is that, without a stimulus, things would be even worse. The current anemic recovery is one more data point suggesting that this conceit holds no water. Even in the housing sector, the area most propped up by stimulus, new construction starts continue to fall – an indication that the smart money sees no recovery for at least another 12 months. GM, the auto company that received the biggest bailout, is struggling compared to Ford, which received relatively little support. Indeed the GAO predicts that GM will never repay its debt – a de facto second bankruptcy.

While the US recession has ended, unemployment remains far higher than Pres. Obama promised as a part of his $800bln stimulus. The European economy is out of recession without the aid of such a massive stimulus. China is also back on track with only an insignificant $20bln stimulus package. The US stimulus had no positive effect considering the performance of its competitors.

Indeed, stimuli make matters worse. The longest recessions coincide with the biggest stimuli. The Great Depression was a ten year recession from 1929 through 1939, with a double dip in 1938. This, despite the biggest works project in history. Japan lost an entire decade of economic growth in the 1990′s, despite a works program proportionately even larger the Obama’s current boondoggle. If a full decade of failure cannot convince Washington socialists of stimulus’s folly, what hope can there ever be? By contrast, Pres. Reagan stood firm during the 1981-2 recession. Reagan temporarily became one of history’s least popular presidents as he refused to ‘do something’ about the recession. Instead, his broad based tax cuts ushered in the greatest wave of prosperity ever, essentially lasting through 2007.

Why wouldn’t stimulus harm the economy? After all, government spending is essentially the redirection of material and labor from their best uses to ones chosen by politicians. Further, stimulus temporarily props up the prices of material and labor, making them less affordable for private sector uses. Without stimulus, the falling prices of resources would eventually activate projects the country needs. Instead, stimulus redirects resources to pork the common voter reviles. Of course stimulus also redirects money from its best uses in the form of government taxation and borrowing, making business growth even harder.

Not only does the empirical evidence suggest that stimulus slows economic recovery, the simple logic of government manipulation and incompetence is that stimulus is worse than doing nothing. With the Democrats in Washington proposing another multi-billion dollar stimulus jobs package, voters should let them know that giving the free market a try is really the best approach.