Total cost: $1.055 trillion

New Taxes: $572 billion

Cuts to Medicare: $426 billion

Not included: $247 billion needed to stop Medicare payments to doctors from decreasing, pledged to be passed in a separate bill to keep this bill “revenue neutral”

Pages: 1,990

The word regulation appears in the bill 181 times.

The word fees appears in the bill 103 times.

The word tax appears in the bill 214 times.

“As we all know, nothing says ‘affordability’ like higher taxes and fees.”

The word “shall” - as in “must” or “required to” - appears over 3,000 times. “The word, alas, is never preceded by the patriotic phrase “mind our own freaking business.” Not once.”

From Dow Jones Newswires:

“The $1.055 trillion estimate also does not include $245 billion needed to stop Medicare payments to doctors from decreasing, which the House plans to address through separate legislation introduced Thursday.

The costs of the bill are fully offset by cuts to existing spending programs– including the Medicare?Advantage and other programs–saving $426 billion through 2019, and by tax increases raising $572 billion over that time, CBO said. In fact, the combined impact of provisions in the bill would be a net deficit reduction of $104 billion in the next decade, according to CBO.”

Rewarding failure is not just for Wall Street anymore.  Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has done such an uninspiring job over the past few weeks that many in Congress have called for his head.  Much like Wall Street where Washington, D.C. is rewarding failure with big bonuses and massive multi-billion dollar bailouts, the Obama Administration is following the “rewarding failure” strategy by putting forth a proposal that would grant the Secretary of the Treasury the unprecedented power to nationalize private enterprise.  And I bet you thought those types of ideas went out the door when the Iron Curtain fell.  If you believed the era of big government was over then you have not been paying attention.

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Adam Theirer, a scholar at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, notes that the Fairness Doctrine was part of a regulatory paradigm being pushed by the left and, in particular, the group Free Press. This fight is not over. Adam’s piece is worth reading:

Of course, the radicals at the (Un)Free Press weren’t about to let one of the Left’s old favorite regulations go so away without asking for something in return.  One of the reasons that Silver and Ammori are suddenly willing to give their blessing to the Doctrine’s burial is because they want to get on with the more far-reaching agenda of micro-managing media markets using a variety of less visible regulations.

Indeed, in their paper, Silver and Ammori go to great pains to try to show that the Fairness Doctrine supposedly has nothing to do with all the other regulations that they want Congress and the FCC to continue to enforce, or even expand.  These goals include media ownership restrictions, diversity mandates, local programming regulation, and so on.  Recognizing that the Fairness Doctrine was not only ineffective but also a useful tool for many on the political Right to whip their base into action, the Free Press moved to preemptively divorce their other pet projects from the Fairness Doctrine.

It’s a brilliant tactical move by Free Press; lull Limbaugh and other conservatives into a deep sleep by throwing them the bone of a Fairness Doctrine win, and then push a far more radical regulatory agenda through the back-door once they’ve stopped paying attention.  Of course, these things cannot be as easily divorced as the Free Press radicals want us to believe.  The Fairness Doctrine was just one part of a much grander regulatory paradigm that so-called progressives have pushed for under the banner of “public interest regulation.”

Cross-posted from The Next Right.