Here is the money quote from the article Medicare Saves Money by Paul Krugman:

Indeed, as the economist (and former Reagan adviser) Bruce Bartlett points out, high U.S. private spending on health care, compared with spending in other advanced countries, just about wipes out any benefit we might receive from our relatively low tax burden. So where’s the gain from pushing seniors out of an admittedly expensive system, Medicare, into even more expensive private health insurance?

I think the same reasoning in our country is applying here as the reasoning that most people go through to minimize the taxes they pay on investments.  I have heard it said that if you put money away in tax deferred accounts, you will end up paying more in taxes than if you paid the taxes right away.  I did a few hypothetical calculations and found out that this claim is true.  However, the reason you pay more taxes is that you make more money.  If you calculate how much money you have after paying your taxes, you will find you have more by investing in tax deferred accounts like IRAs and 401k’s than if you invested without the benefit of tax deferral.

People get stuck on the idea of minimizing their taxes, when they ought to be concentrating on maximizing the money they get to keep after paying taxes.  Doing one of these things is not the equivalent of doing the other. (For the mathematically inclined who want to know why the difference, the simple answer is that compound interest is not mathematically linear. In fact, it is geometrically nonlinear.)

Now for Krugman’s strong finish:

The point, however, is that privatizing health insurance for seniors, which is what Mr. Lieberman is in effect proposing — and which is the essence of the G.O.P. plan — hurts rather than helps the cause of cost control. If we really want to hold down costs, we should be seeking to offer Medicare-type programs to as many Americans as possible.

JB made a comment on the article Wrestle Mania Over Debt Ceiling.  The comment was:

Republicrats have dropped the ball on both sides.  There really is very little difference between Bush & Obama.  Both have abhorrently squandered money thru expensiver power grabbing programs.  Both have intruded in our personal lives whether thru the Patriot Act, or the bureaucracies such as the FBI given more power to search without cause, or thru Obama’s executive order to assassinate U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism without a trial by jury.  Both are war mongers.  Bush went on his war parade bombing Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama has expanded it by adding Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya to the list.  I don’t care how much they hate us over there, they simply aren’t a major threat until they start making inter-continental ballistic AK-47 bullets that can travel from a cave in Pakistan over the ocean to the U.S.  We need someone that’ll drop these power grabbing executive orders, and IMMEDIATELY begin withdrawing troops down from the mess in the middle east, or the gig is up with a major economic collapse.

My response to the comment was:

I agree with the many similarities you point out.  However stating the similarities does not prove that there is little difference unless you can also prove that there really are no differences.

Would Bush have pushed through health care reform legislation?  Would he have pushed through financial reform legislation?  Would he have pushed through the Lilly Ledbetter fair pay act?  Would he have appointed good Supreme Court Justices? Would he have pushed through an economic stimulus program?

Yes, there are many unfortunate similarities between Bush and Obama.  There are also many important differences.

While it is important to recognize the differences between Bush and Obama, it would be like hiding our heads in the sand to ignore the similarities.  Given both the differences and similarities, it may be hard to figure out exactly what to do in the lead-up to the 2012 Presidential election.