By ARTHUR B. LAFFER

Addressing the possibility of the GOP-led Congress not voting to raise the debt ceiling, Austan Goolsbee, President Obama’s top economic adviser, histrionically asserted this month: “This is not a game. The debt ceiling is not something to toy with. If we hit the debt ceiling, that’s . . . essentially defaulting on our obligations, which is totally unprecedented in American history. The impact on the economy would be catastrophic.”

In context, his comments are more than a bit hypocritical.

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At a stroke, Medicare chief Donald Berwick has revived the “death panel” debate from two summers ago. Allow us to referee, because this topic has been badly distorted by the political process—and in a rational world, it wouldn’t be a political question at all.

On Sunday, Robert Pear reported in the New York Times that Medicare will now pay for voluntary end-of-life counseling as part of seniors’ annual physicals. A similar provision was originally included in ObamaCare, but Democrats stripped it out amid the death panel furor. Now Medicare will enact the same policy through regulation.

We hadn’t heard about this development until Mr. Pear’s story, but evidently Medicare tried to prevent the change from becoming public knowledge. The provision is buried in thousands of Federal Register pages setting Medicare’s hospital and physician price controls for 2011 and concludes that such consultations count as a form of preventative care.

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WHEN SEN. Mark Warner took to the floor last week to speak on deficit reduction and tax reform, his language, as the Virginia Democrat acknowledged, was not exactly senatorial. It was, Mr. Warner said, time to “put up or shut up.” The senator said he planned to vote for this year’s tax package – adding $858 billion to the national debt. But, he argued, “We also have to demonstrate that this body can actually walk and chew gum, that we can do short-term stimulus now, but next year engage in meaningful tax reform and deficit reduction.”

Key words: next year. Not 2012, and certainly not 2013.

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