So pathetic is this spin by now that even Saturday Night Live parodied it over the weekend. For starters, Gibbs claims that the Democratic health care overhaul will save $130 billion over ten years. We’re supposed to be excited by those “savings”. That despite the fact that the deficit for the month of October alone was over $170 billion. So we’ll save less over ten years than we’re spending in a single month.

Second, the only reason it saves $130 billion over ten years is because Reid’s proposal doesn’t actually go into effect until 2014. The CBO only scored the cost until 2019, which means we’re only getting figures for five years (2014 to 2019). Were we to score the cost for ten years following its implementation, we’d reach $1.8 trillion.

This would be like me going out a racking up $20,000 a month in credit card debt and then touting the fact that I’ll save $10,000 over the next ten years. Well, not really. I’ll only start saving the $10,000 five years from now and that figure only takes into account a five-year period.

By the way, how large is our national debt getting? As Allahpundit points out, by 2019 we’ll be spending $700 billion a year on interest alone. To put that into perspective, we’ve spent about that on the entire war in Iraq. We’ll be spending an entire war in Iraq each year…on interest alone.

Hope and change, baby!