I&I Editorial
Late-night talk show host Steven Colbert had Sen. Elizabeth Warren on recently and asked her a simple question. “How are you going to pay for it?” Colbert was referring specifically to Warren’s radical Medicare for All plan. “Are you going to raise taxes on the middle class?”
Warren, who’s been rising in the polls, wouldn’t answer. She can’t answer honestly, if she wants to have any hope of being president. Nor can any of the other Democrats running president be honest about their agendas. That’s made clear by a recent Harvard/Harris Poll, the results of which got far too little attention.
Colbert wasn’t the first person to press Warren for an answer about middle-class taxes. She dodged the same question during the Democratic debate last week. All she would say is that “costs are going to go up for wealthier individuals and costs are going to go up for giant corporations. But for hardworking families across this country, costs are going to go down.”
Cost wasn’t the question. A middle-class tax hike was.
There is no question that taxes would go up on the middle class — by a fantastic amount — if Warren were able to get Medicare for All enacted.
At $3.2 trillion a year — which is a completely unrealistic lowball estimate — you could double everyone’s income tax, and double corporate income taxes, and you’d still be a trillion dollars short.
That’s just for Medicare for All. Warren and most of the other candidates have also embraced the even more radical Green New Deal, along with free college, free preschool, free housing, with each pretending that only “millionaires and billionaires” will have to pick up the tab.
As a Heritage Foundation report noted, even if you took every penny earned by every taxpayer who makes more than $200,000, you would cover only half the costs of all this largesse.
Joe Biden, despite his attempts to portray himself as a centrist, is hardly better. On health care, he’s even more dishonest than Warren. Biden claims he just wants to make a little tweak to Obamacare by creating a “public option.” But he knows, as does everyone who’s looked into it, that the public option would very quickly become the only option. That’s why the actual centrist Democrats who were still around in 2010 refused to let Obama include it Obamacare in the first place.
The rest of Biden’s agenda is a slightly watered-down version of those proposed by Warren, Bernie Sanders, and the rest. It will still require enormous tax hikes — a fact he never seems to mention.
Why all the deception? A recent Harvard/Harris Poll of 2,531 registered voters shows why.
Unlike other polls, this one attempted to gauge support for Trump and a Democratic opponent without using any names. The question just described their respective agendas.
Here’s the text:
“Which candidate are you more likely to vote for:
“A presidential candidate who stands for the green new deal on climate change, Medicare for all, free college tuition, opening our borders to many more immigrants and raising taxes to pay for these programs.”
Or …
“A presidential candidate who stands for lower taxes and reduced government regulations, strengthening our military, strengthening our border to reduce illegal immigrants, standing up more to China and Iran and seeking better trade deals for the US.”
You’d be hard-pressed to come up with a more concise description of what President Donald Trump and any of the leading Democratic candidates stand for.
The result: A stunning 61% say they’d vote for Trump’s agenda.
Among independents, 65% chose the Trump agenda, as did every age group except those 18-34, who split 50-50. Even among Democrats, more than a third said they’d vote against the candidate pushing the current Democratic agenda.
The poll went further and broke out specific policy issues. There wasn’t one item on the Democratic agenda that came in the top six. Only 38% say they were likely to vote for a candidate who promised to “raise taxes to pay for these programs.” On the other hand, 83% said they’d likely support a candidate who promised to lower taxes.
How will the eventual Democratic nominee overcome this huge gap in support for the two visions for the country? Lie about Trump’s agenda? Deceive voters about their own? Or some combination of the two?
— Written by John Merline
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I wonder if the writer has considered the savings from the billions upon billions that now flow into the pockets of insurance companies. Surely if that is not changed, the price for Medicare for all is likely too expensive. But I have not seen an analysis of the savings if 98% of the insurance companies were to disappear from the scene. It would be trillions, it seems, over the years.
If I am off base, show me by analysis. What are insurance companies costing the taxpayer today? What if they were to disappear?
Here’s an analysis that looks at precisely the question you are asking: Will savings from eliminating private insurance be enough to offset the cost of giving everyone free health care. The honest answer, according to this analysis, is no. https://fee.org/articles/why-medicare-for-all-is-already-looking-more-expensive/
Strangely, there is never mention of the similarity between bureaucrats in the private health schemes and those of the government. Interveners of all kinds draw off a large proportion of the “cost” of health care. The one, untried, way to run universal health care is to fund it but don’t manage it – social security operates on that principle.
If Medicare is the only thing required, why, under the current system do we need Medicare Advantage plans that are administered by private insurance companies? I think the dream of completely eliminating the private insurance companies is just that, a dream.
Why don’t people pay for their own healthcare? That would be cheapest since you are eliminating the middle man. Unless you are saying you want meto pay for your healthcare, which is probably more correct and the reason for your advocacy.
What do you suppose that the insurance companies are doing with all those billions of dollars? They’re paying for staff to process their claims, buildings to house their staff, office supplies and utilities, the cost of all of the claims that they pay, auditors to keep everything honest, in other words, all of the same costs that the Government will have to pay, but at a much higher efficiency than the Government will ever achieve. If it somehow makes sense to “nationalize” health insurance, it would make sense to nationalize everything. But it doesn’t make sense. As Communist countries have so thoroughly demonstrated.
This is ridiculous nonsense. The entire world hates Trump and what he is doing to them.
It’s impossible for a person to be elected president of the USA if the entire world hates him. Your post is ridiculous nonsense.
Nope. Trump is not my favorite politician – but then neither are any of the Dems. But I am voting precisely for the platform not whether or not I like the person who proposes the platform.
“costs are going to go up for wealthier individuals and costs are going to go up for giant corporations. But for hardworking families across this country, costs are going to go down.” – Ever play ‘crack the whip’ as a kid? The last person in line is the consumer/taxpayer. That’s who ultimately pays the taxes imposed upon the corporations for whom they are part of the cost of doing business. Like taxes on sales: Yes, they are taxes on the seller. Who then passes them on to you, the buyer. Since you, the buyer, has to stay within budget (unlike the government) you buy less or shop more economically – which puts the brake on the booming economy and, since the government derives taxes from money changing hands, also reduces revenue to the Treasury.
They have no popular agenda. The only options they have are: Cheat, tank the economy or start a war. My money is on all three.
These positions all all on record now… What are they gonna do now – try to tell the voter: “We were only funnin’ ya”!”…..? The story of “The Scorpion and the Frog” keeps popping up in my mind over this.
This should not be a problem for the Democrats. We have seen it before.
If you like your Doctor……
Worked.
You mean that the Democratic candidate would have to lie like Trump (and the other Republicans) in 2016? Like Trump promising to pay off the federal debt in 8 or 10 years, then instead adding over $4 trillion to our debt trajectory in 2.5 years?
How will these clowns pay for their spending bender? Simple, really. They’ll just follow Europe: give away tons of “free” crap. The spending will quickly become unsustainable, at which time Democrats will scream in unison that the poor and middle class have become dependent on gvt and it would be immoral to take their goodies away. So the only other choice we have is to slash military budgets. Then our military will become as pathetically underprepared as Germany or Italy, and the liberals will have accomplished yet another longtime dream.
Perhaps the most frightening statement in this article is this: “Even among Democrats, more than a third said they’d vote against the candidate pushing the current Democratic agenda.” This means that slightly less that two thirds of Democrats surveyed support the Democratic agenda. Why? Got to have those “freebies.”
Unfortunately, no one in the media will ask them these questions, let alone force them to answer a tough question,
The fundamental economic reality is that no corporation has ever paid even 1-cent of taxes and no corporation ever will. Just where do liberals think the money to pay the taxes assessed on corporations comes from? I’ll help you out here: It is provided by their customers who have to pay more for the goods and services that they buy from corporations to cover the taxes. Only natural persons, human beings, pay taxes. Every cent in taxes that politicians try to convince you is being collected from those big,bad corporations, is really a tax that you are paying. Unlike the Federal Government, corporations don’t have the power to just print money to pay their bills. They have to charge their costs of doing business to their customers. It is consumers who ultimately pay all taxes. Politicians don’t want us to be aware of how much we’re really being taxed, so they hide a lot of it in the prices of all of the goods and services that we buy. Groceries, clothing, housing, transportation, healthcare, education, Starbucks coffee, MacDonald’s hamburgers – everything includes hidden taxes. Elizabeth Warren says corporations will pay higher taxes to cover the costs of all of the free stuff she’s promising? What will all those corporations have to do to get all the extra money to pay those higher taxes? That’s right. They’ll have to raise prices on everything that you buy from them. In the end, we’ll pay all of the costs for the free stuff, plus a big markup to cover the payrolls for all of the new Government employees hired to administer the new programs. Big markups, because the Government is never efficient. Remember this fundamental law of economics the next time some shady politicians tell you that they’re going to raise taxes on corporations. What they really mean is that they are raising your taxes.
How will the eventual Dem candidate overcome this huge gap?
To a great extent, s/he won’t have to. There are tens of millions of people who vote Dem because they’ve always voted Dem. Their parents voted Dem. Their grandparents voted Dem. Just about everyone they know votes Dem. Add in the millions of Third Worlders who’ve arrived in recent years, and the Dems are almost home before the campaign even starts. Free stuff accounts for a great part of the residuum.