Congressional Democrats seem extremely pleased with themselves over how they fiddled with the design of an excise tax on employer-provided insurance that will not kick in for eight years (and then grow faster after another two years) to make it look like it will bring in a huge amount of money in the years 2020 through 2029. Given the incredibly stupid design of the excise tax to begin with, no one who understands politics should doubt for a second that this tax will ever go into effect as planned, or bring in this huge amount of revenue.

We’re getting to an end game here, and so the counts will come fast and furious at this point. I think that it’s good to look at the count right when the CBO numbers have been released as a good baseline for the future.

“What’s the CBO score?” is one way to judge between competing health reform efforts, but hardly the best way. How about asking the questions raised by Faithful Reform in Health Care: how many lives will be saved, and how many jobs preserved?