We’re familiar, after years and years of it, with the idea of right-wing ideologues coming to Washington and having no idea how to govern. This is what has led to government shutdowns, narrowly-averted defaults on the public debt, and in general, a lack of legislative accomplishments despite Republican control of both houses of Congress. And we (well, I) like to think of the Democratic Party as the basically technocratic, let’s-do-what-works alternative to ineffective governance by the ideologically driven but basically incompetent Republicans.
But there is a wing of the Democratic Party, or rather the left, that would “govern” like the Republicans if given the chance. We saw this part of the Democratic Party or the left at work yesterday, when Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader in the House of Representative, was shouted down by a group of DREAMers critical of Pelosi for negotiating towards passage of the DREAM Act with President Trump.
“Come again?” I hear you say. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would the DREAMers protest against progress towards their goal, which is the DREAM Act?”
I’m not sure I can explain it. From the news report:
The group carried a large banner and chanted: “We undocumented youth demand a clean bill … We undocumented youth demand that you do not sell out our community and our values … We undocumented youth will not be a bargaining chip for Trump,” according to KPIX.
So if I have this right, the DREAMers are insisting that Pelosi not negotiate anything with Trump; that the DREAM Act should be passed without any concessions to the Republicans who oppose it and who control the Congress.
If you’ve been reading Letters Blogatory for a while, you know that I oppose President Trump and believe he is unfit for office, but that I support passage of the DREAM Act. I want the DREAM Act to pass, which is why I was heartened to see the possibility of a bipartisan agreement between Trump and the Democratic leadership in Congress. The emerging contours of the deal included passage of the DREAM Act along with new border security measures, but not Trump’s infamous wall. That’s a win. But it’s possible now that people with what I suppose are extreme views on immigration (the protesters apparently called for an end to all immigration deportations and for DREAM-like protection for everyone in the country illegally, not just the DREAMers who were brought here as children) might scuttle any such deal. Talk about ideologues with no idea how to govern!
The art of governance in America has always (or at least for a very long time) been the art of bipartisan compromise and accommodation. If we can’t do that anymore, even to accomplish very important policy goals, then we are in big trouble. I hope the Democratic Party will stamp out the kind of ideological, triumphalist, irrational politics we saw yesterday. Otherwise the Party runs the risk of being the mirror image of today’s Republican Party rather than a party that can actually plan and execute policy that works for the nation.
Broadly, I don’t disagree with you. But I have some concerns about your argument.
1) Straw men have always been straw men. It’s easy to find examples of people to pick at, and I feel it’s strange to do that to a group of kids.
2) Compromising can be good, usually. But there is a large difference between compromise and things like pork and large giveaways. And sometimes compromise can be bad, even if it’s the difference between a bill passing or dying.
3) Getting in bed with Trump is dangerous — everything he touches has a way of getting poisoned in the process. While I’d take the chance to pass a decent Dream Act if it can be pulled together, we’re on dangerous ground even negotiating with such an unstable, narcassistic person, who’s more likely to be indicted by 2020 for acts tantamount to treason than renominated to head his party.
I think we need to be careful not to paint with broad strokes or advocate blind deference to our own party leaders. We are native born white men and our ability
to stay has never been on the line. It’s impossible to credibly trust anything this President says on anything-especially immigration. He also folds rather easily, which means he’s easy to dupe into moderate agreements like Chuck and Nancy have just done. It also means if and when Bannon or Miller whisper in his ear he’s going in a totally different direction.
Staking the future of a family on this Presidents word is something I would never ask of anyone. I also don’t think that is what Chuck and Nancy are doing. I happen to think Chuck and Nancy got a great deal out of this, and it’s worth noting that her critics (including yours truly) are eating a bit of crow right now. It’s unlikely Tim Ryan would’ve had the experience or personal commitment to negotiate something like this.
That said-there is nothing wrong with pressing for a better deal and a better agreement. Nothing wrong with protesting the inherent injustice in the Presidents original reversal as strongly as possible. This says little about the “left” and a lot about the perseverance and tenacity of DREAMers.
@Rye I wouldn’t count on 3).
Holding out on any forward progress until we get a new President is not a great strategy either. I think we are seeing our party leaders deftly play the inside game while these brave activists are deftly playing the outside game and holding all politicians feet to the fire on a basic commitment to fairness.
I think Schumer and Pelosi have been doing a good job, too.
But we could both be wrong.
on #3……hypothetically, how possible would it be for Trump to get in bed with the Democrats assuming they take the house in 2018? If he is still in office and knows that the investigation is getting closer, what’s to stop him from switching parties and going along with any legislation that Democrats can muster? Should that happen, would Democrats still push for impeachment and removal from office knowing that Pence is next in line?
The only thing deader than an indicted Manafort or Flynn would be a Democrat who sided with Trump.
I don’t want to hijack this thread, but my guess is that shit starts to hit the fan in the next 3-6 months. Indictments and fall out. Pence is complicit in the coverup, if not the actual Russia Scandal.
I can only hope you are correct.
Thanks, Ryan. To your points:
1. I would agree if I didn’t think the attitude of these young protesters was an example of something larger.
2. I agree that there can be bad compromises. But both in principle (I don’t share the protesters’ apparent views about the wider issue) and in practice (what they say they want is a political impossibility) I see their approach as an extreme example of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
3. I agree that everything Trump touches is sullied and degraded. But surely we don’t just pack up the government until 2020. We have to do the best we can.
re 1: If it was an example of something larger, why didn’t you bring up other examples? Why pick on the young minorities?
I’m not looking for you to answer that question, but maybe something for you to think about.
re 2: given that you’ve admitted this isn’t a great example to choose from, why are you digging deeper?
re: 3: There’s a huge — h u g e — space between working with Trump and “pack[ing] up the government until 2020.” Examples: obstructing everything we possibly can in Congress, through the courts, and focusing on 2018, and working towards flipping as many state legislatures and gubernatorial offices as possibly between now and 2020.
Notably, the GOP did this for 8 years while Obama was President and were *richly rewarded* for it.
I’m not going to oppose a possible Dream Act deal, but my fears are this will blow up in our faces and may help Trump and the GOP look good even as he delivers nothing and we get nothing.
Re 1. Heh. Since you ask, my other example is the Sanders campaign. You may fire when ready.
Re 3. Isn’t what you suggest just an example of what I fear—that the Democratic Party will be a mirror of today’s GOP.
Regarding your fear that “the Democratic Party will be a mirror of today’s GOP” …
The fundamental attribute of the GOP is, and has been, their utter rejection of:
– Integrity
– Intellectual honesty
– Courtesy
– Rationality
– Objective reason
– Science
– The rule of law
etc., etc, etc.
In my view, the “cooperation” you propose is precisely how we Democrats become indistinguishable from the GOP.
We should not make deals with Mr. Trump. Period. He will betray us just as happily and eagerly as he has betrayed everyone else who has attempted to work with him. He has a lifelong history of betraying his friends, family, investors, employees, partners, and literally EVERYONE who has done business with him.
Nope. No sale. The only sane answer is to put our proposals on the table for Mr. Trump and the GOP to take or leave. No “negotiations”, no deals.
Let me know how the jihad goes!
@ let me know: I appreciate your thoughtful response.
</sarcasm>
If we go the route of your “pragmatism”, I don’t want to hear any whining when Mr. Trump betrays us by, for example, making sure that the “new border security measures” come to pass and that the DREAM act fails, such as by having his new allies split the legislation into two parts, so that he can sign the first and veto the second.
Your commitment to “pragmatism” is touching. It’s unfortunate that you see any of us who disagree with you as either jihadists or hopelessly naive idealists.
I don’t know that there’s a deal to be done on DACA. Time will tell. The President could wake up tomorrow and do an about-face; I wouldn’t be surprised at all. But the one way to be sure there will be no DREAM Act during this Congress, I think, is to do as you suggest.
So tell me, kind sir — now that our pragmatic Democrats made a deal with Mr. Trump regarding the debt ceiling, and now that our hero Mr. Sanders has introduced his medicare-for-all bill, today we are again forced to mobilize because the repeal-the-ACA zombie has again risen from the dead.
How much do we have to lose in these “pragmatic” deals before you join me in saying “enough”? How many more times must these thugs betray us before you join my “jihad”?
Are you saying you think the Democrats should have used the threat of a default on the public debt to force concessions on health care? Isn’t that exactly the kind of irrational, unpatriotic gamesmanship we were all against a couple of years ago? This is a perfect example of my point—some on the left are as irresponsible as the Republicans of 2017. I don’t mean you personally of course—we are just throwing ideas around.
“Are you saying you think the Democrats should have used the threat of a default on the public debt to force concessions on health care?”
I’ll say it. Yes.
As I mentioned earlier, there are alternatives to “packing it in.”
Anything and everything we can do to stop the GOP from ruining America should be done.
No more bringing knives to gun fights. We’ll deliver on our promises when we crush the GOP into submission and send the traitors in their party back to Mordor…. I mean Moscow.
@ “are you saying”:
I am saying that the Democrats didn’t have to do the photo op, didn’t have to do the oh-so-bipartisan charade, didn’t have to play into the the “lets make a deal” game that Mr. Trump played.
There was no need to do the debt ceiling deal. The GOP leadership in the Senate and House were both clear that they wanted to avoid a shutdown. We didn’t need Mr. Trump to avoid a shutdown.
I’m saying that the Democrats should have simply demurred.
Had we done so, we would not today be scrambling to try to save the ACA one more time.
It took Barack Obama most of his administration to figure out that the GOP was NOT going to work with him, no matter how accommodating he was. It took Harry Reid far too long to figure out that Mitch McConnell really wasn’t ever going to work with him.
My perspective is that we Democrats have been getting rolled by these thugs time after time, because we keep wishing and hoping that bipartisanship will finally prevail.
It won’t. Today’s GOP has ZERO interest in cooperating with we Democrats at all. Period. None.
I’m tired of getting rolled in the name of “pragmatism” and “bipartisanship”.
I don’t necessarily disagree with you here, but I am sure not seeing much in the way of causation there. Republicans are attempting to repeal ACA because Dems made a deal with Trump on the debt ceiling?
I don’t see a heck of a lot of downside to this Schumer/Pelosi downside. So what a lot of GOP wanted to see it raised? So do Dems, and everyone who is not a political terrorist. So what was given up, exactly? And they got a chance at securing the position of these DACA folks, which is otherwise in serious doubt. Even if it falls apart, you have to try, rather than tell people “Gee I know that its tough that you’re being deported to a foreign country, but we can’t really try to do anything about it because of principles and stuff.”
They have to be careful with this stuff because of who the President is, but when they can get something like DACA, they have to try. If the position is to be “we will not engage in any legislative activity other than to vote “nay” on whatever is brought to a vote, and will not engage the President because he is a racist braying ass” then they might as well resign and give up the post to someone who wants to try governing, come what may.
I think the causation is in the calendar. Had they not done the deal, the Senate would have spent this month debating the debt ceiling. It still would have happened, default was never on the table. But the Senate would not have had time for what it’s now doing.
I generally hate sports analogies, but this time I think one is necessary. The score is 28-21 going into the final 2-minute warning against a tough team, and we gain possession on our own 40. Both teams have used all their timeouts. Our quarterback is also in the running for MVP or something similarly stupid.
The 1st-and-10 play our team ran was a long pass to the middle, hoping to get another score. The pass was picked off and returned for a touchdown followed by an easy extra point. We fumbled the onside kick.
The other guys now have the ball, 1st and 10 on our 30, with 1:30 left in the game. It’s now a nail-biter.
Our guys should have run out the clock.
I don’t think we gained anything for the DREAMers that we didn’t already have. I think we got snookered, again.
I suppose that is the best argument to be made, but it really strikes me as one of those New Republic think-piece arguments on “Why Everything the Republicans Do is the Democrats’ Fault” or “How Democrats Created Trump” etc.
Republicans campaigned for 9 years on repealing Obamacare, and then won the election, and have been attempting to fulfill their promise for 9 months. But, if they succeed this time, its because Pelosi tried to save 800,000 people from catastrophe when the opportunity presented itself?
I’m not interested in blame.
I’m observing that had Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer run out the clock, none of this would be happening.
Little confused as to how Sanders bill hurts rather than helps the ACA fight. He’s been very careful to frame both as part of the same fight. To keep Republicans from hijacking our health care with tax cuts to the wealthy funded by cuts to our most vulnerable.
There can be no single payer if ACA is repealed, but we should absolutely use this unprecedented grassroots mobilization around health care to finish the job Truman started and Obama did so much to advance. The fact that “pragmatic” progressives like Booker and Harris also signed on should insulate this move from the kind of bromides Sanders skeptics tend to throw around about him being unrealistic and hurtful. The data is indicating a real shift in voter sentiment-even among a majority of Trump voters-in favor of single payer.
In my view, the present “momentum” of Medicare For All– conspicuously and indee and did discouraging as insufficiently enthusiastic for justice any mention of how to pay for it– is almost the exact mirror of the last 8 years of “Repeal Obamacare! and replace it with something superduper!”
Absent a more substantive and difficult discussion now, even if there is a sweeping Democratic victory in 2020 on a ‘Medicare for All” platform, the whole thing screeches to a halt on Day 1– kind of like “Repeal Obamacare!! and just put a superduper thing in there”– when people who must run for election in 2 years realize that they have to vote for a huge tax hike on everyone and everything to actually pay for it.
Tax the rich.
You would make a great Republican: an irresponsible liar and snake oil salesman.
Were they to follow your advice, actually get control, and then have to admit that “taxing the rich” would only work if we define “rich” to mean anyone who pays taxes.
And then make the pitch that you will save $12,000 a year in premiums, but get a $25,000/year tax hike, but will save money in the long run, so long as you live for a two or three more decades, to allow all the great savings from preventive care to happen.
It would take a week for “Medicare for All” to become “Medicare for slightly more than presently covered”
Your advocacy in this area is theological and purely faith based, but, alas, utterly removed from reality. And the intense hostility to basic arithmetic by “Health Care is a right” people is the major reason it just ain’t happening anytime soon.
Show the actual math. Until then, keep your snake oil.
If Canada et alia have figured it out no reason we can’t. My understanding is that payroll taxes will go up, but that increase will be more than compensated by not having to pay premia.
But the savings aren’t immediate, because the savings comes from needing less (expensive) acute care because of better (cheaper) preventive care. Better preventive care doesn’t somehow make the overweight guy with heart disease and diabetes cheaper to treat right away, but maybe prevents that guy’s kids from becoming overweight diabetics suffering from heart disease later on, leading to long-term savings.
In the short term, what better preventive care means is that a lot more people will be utilizing the health-care resources that we have. There really isn’t any way around the problem that this makes those resources a lot more expensive. The way Medicare presently works is that it underpays for services, and providers deal with that by overcharging non-Medicare patients to make it all balance out. If everyone is a Medicare patient, it can’t balance out, and so how is any provider supposed to keep the doors open? I suppose you can insist that providers make less money, but that just means fewer people in the profession (i..e., how to you tell someone that, sure you’ll have $300,000 in student loans when you’re 35, but you sure won’t be making enough to pay it off! Sign up here!)
No matter which way you cut it, there is a pretty significant short-medium term expense bulge to deal with, and “taxing the rich” as presently understood by the electorate simply wouldn’t cover it, Taking, say, $100 each from the “top 1%” of a population of 1,000 yields $1,000, but taking $10 each from the remaining 99% yields $9,900, because the “number of people” part of the equation is the big number.
So, “taxing the rich” is great, but the opinions expressed by jtmay here and others like him strongly suggest that many voters are egregiously misled about (i) just how much can be gained by taxing the shit out of Warren Buffett et al., and (ii) the sheer scale of the cost of something like “Medicare For All.” particularly in the short term.
In the long run, we, as a country, ought to be willing to invest that cost, in the same way that I, as a homeowner, might be willing to invest in solar panels– because the investment will eventually pay for itself. But, unlike my solar panels, this might not pay for itself very quickly— That’s why it should be a function of government in the first place!– but, in order to get that investment made, Democrats are going to have to come up with a plausible way to handle the bulge, which is hard to do.
Failure to do so, though, is simply “Repeal Obamacare and Replace it with Something Better” in reverse, and no more likely to be a worthwhile endeavor, and is evidence of the naivete that was the point of this post.
Put another way, “Tax the Rich” is a great appeal to liberal, class-based populism in the same way that “Repeal Obamacare” has appealed to right-wing, racial populism. But in the end, it is mere populism, which is never pragmatic, never focused on achieving successful policies, and always focused only on sticking it to the enemy, everything else be damned.
Nope, it will not happen overnight. Yup, it will take time.
Tax the rich can work if Democrats “grow a set” and drop the attitude that “the money has to come from somewhere”.
Corporate tax rates are far too low and the corporate share of the tax burden has been steadily lowering each year as more and more of the burden transfers to working class citizens.
This externalization of costs by American capitalist is rarely mentioned by Republicans or neoliberal professional class Democrats.
What you call “populism” I call simply “working class politics”. Trump ran with it and kicked Clinton’s butt. He failed to pull it off, however and THAT is why Democrats need to pick it up, run with it and deliver.
@JTM: Jeesh, you just never give up.
You toss around all these bumper-stickers and slogans, and never bother to just talk about the numbers.
Some of us have been thinking about, learning about, and talking about actual FACTS for a long time (about 30 years, in my case).
The money DOES have to come from somewhere. That somewhere is the top 1% by wealth.
I suggest that if we actually want to GET that money, then it makes far more sense to focus on that somewhere. I’m telling you where the money comes from. You continue to attack me.
The money comes from the top 1% by wealth. That’s the “somewhere”. There are several mechanisms to get it:
– Increased tax rates on long-term capital gains
– End the current exclusion of capital gains taxes at death
– Increase the gift/estate tax.
The place to target, for this recapture, is the “generational transfer” of wealth.
I’ve spelled out the “somewhere”, offered several alternatives for “how”, and estimated “how much”.
If you actually want to solve this problem, I would think you’d want to find a way to hold your nose and agree with me rather than insulting me at every opportunity.
So do Canada and others have doctor shortages? Or maybe they’ve come up with a way to not have medical education cost so much in the first place?
I believe that medical school is pretty heavily subsidized– Harvard Medical School (maybe not the best example) costs almost 10x as much as McGill, and they have some student-loan forgiveness programs, and they pay their doctors a lot less (which is easier to do if you don;t stick them with huge student loans like we do.)
I’m not saying anything is impossible, but I am saying that it will be hard because it will cost massive amounts of money. Maybe I should say it will be impossible, unless the inclination to pretend there is a “BE LIKE CANADA” magic wand stashed in the Library of Congress changes.
It will not “cost massive amounts of money”, it will, however, be a massive transfer of wealth from the 1% to the working class, and THAT is the political problem we have.
Please don’t let JTM stand in as s convenient punching bag for the Sanders wing. Argue with those of us who actually have fluency in how the proposed law will actually work. I am happy to have that debate.
@ jconway “don’t let JTM stand in …”:
I hear you. I don’t oppose the “Medicare for all” proposal, I mean only that I see it as directional rather than as a “shovel-ready” plan for a new American health care system.
We need a concrete proposal for a single-payer government-sponsored health care system. Nailing down the specifics requires years of effort, hearings, public discussion, and the distillation of tons of data. We haven’t done any of that yet. The proposal from Mr. Sander’s perhaps motivates us to begin this difficult work, but the work itself remains to be done.
We MUST NOT kill the ACA before a better plan designed from this work is in place. We must do the hard work. We must know the answers to the challenges that are certain to come. Our health insurance industry will not be easily dismantled, and unassailable and concrete evidence is the only way that effort will succeed.
Calling those who object “Wall street sellouts” will not get the job done.
My objection to JTM and to SOME portions of the “Sanders wing” is the argument that the ACA is bad, that killing it is somehow a viable step towards the goal we seek, and similar nihilism.
We here at BMG have heard these comments from JTM quite frequently in the last few weeks. Here is a sample exchange (emphasis mine):
– 2017/09/21:
– 2017/09/22:
We Democrats should NOT tell America that the ACA is failing, because it isn’t. We have seen the GOP in chaos because for eight years they attacked the ACA/Obamacare while having no alternative to offer. They have no alternative because there IS NO alternative short of single-payer government sponsored health care that comes close to working as well as the ACA.
The actual FACT is that the ACA/Obamacare is a masterpiece of well-constructed legislation. It makes enormous progress towards solving the crises that America faced in 2008 — especially working class American families — and does so within the constraints of bitter racist and personal opposition to Barack Obama, deeply entrenched corporate interests, and implacable and utterly corrupt Republican and Republican media opposition.
Barack Obama succeeded with the ACA and Obamacare where Hillary Clinton failed, and where Ted Kennedy failed before that.
Yes, it is still imperfect. Yes, single-payer government sponsored health care is better. Yes, Bernie Sanders supports that. Yes, the current “Medicare for all” proposal should be passed and provides a starting point for what is needed.
No, we Democrats should NOT join the GOP in deriding the ACA/Obamacare. No, the ACA/Obamacare is NOT failing.
No, repeating platitudes like “Medicare for all” is NOT the same as solving the problem.
You need a new hobby.
You both do.
That is absolutely what Sen. Sanders is trying to do. He is also being very explicit that we will not get to MFA without saving and shoring up ACA. Nobody on his team, his 16′ campaign, nor any language in his current proposal suggests repealing and replacing ACA with MFA. I want to be crystal clear that Sanders voted for ACA and the vast majority of his supporters are working their tails off to save it.
Claiming ACA is a Wall Street sellout is a simple tack the Stein/Nader/West wing make that ignores how complex the issue is and how hard it is to make policies into law.
ACA is the foundation upon which any expansion of public health care will take place. Sanders push is a 10-15 year transition largely along the lines I’ve been discussing. Immediately expanding Medicaid to cover folks with PEC and all kids, expanding Medicare to be 50+, and then gradually allowing younger ages to join in as the program expands.
This is not an overnight bill like Graham-Cassidy, and unlocks G-C it will go through the proper process and be CBO scored for which of the four possible funding streams makes sense.
Anyone comparing it to repeal and replace is being intellectually dishonest, whether intentionally or out of ignorance. Ditto anyone comparing this to the 56 or so symbolic votes the GOP took to dismantle ACA. This is a serious and viable public policy proposal, short on some specifics but far more advanced than anything the right has proposed. And it depends on ACA architecture in order to work.
As I’ve written here several times already, I support the “Medicare for All” bill, and appreciate the step that Mr. Sanders has taken in filing it.
I agree with everything you’ve said. Your commentary is very different from what I see from JTM, and I’m attempting to illuminate that difference.
Some say we have a shortage of doctors in the USA. In 2016 The United States had 2.56 doctors per 1,000 people – which is more than Canada at 2.46.
Me? I don’s see a huge difference.
However, in Austria they have 4.99 per 1,000. In Norway it’s 4.31 per 1,000 with Sweden at 4.12 and Germany and Switzerland at 4.04 per 1,000 people.
While there are many, many reasons for the huge costs of medical care in the USA and the less then spectacular outcomes, physician shortages do not rank at the top of that list.
@ CMD and “tax the rich”:
I fear you are mistaken, because you silently assume linearity where there is in fact a HUGE increase.
Wealth and income distribution is “scale free”, meaning that for each $1000 increase at wealthy end of the distribution there are ONE THOUSAND increases of $1 in the tail.
Think about earthquakes, another scale-free distribution. A magnitude 8.0 earthquake is 10 times as strong as magnitude 7.0 earthquake. Because it is scale free, there are therefore 10 magnitude 7 quakes for each magnitude 8. Thus, a region that has 10 magnitude 6 quakes within, say, a 50 year period is likely to have a magnitude 7 quake within 50 years of the most recent magnitude 6 quake.
Coming back to wealth and income distribution, what your intuitively appealing — in statistically incorrect — intuition misses is just how much wealth and income separates the 1% from the rest of us.
You talk about $1,000, but that’s literally unmeasurable in population we’re talking about. Sources like this pegged the 1% threshold, for wealth, at $8.4M net worth in 2012 (five years ago). That was SIXTY NINE times the median household’s net worth of $121,000 that same year.
Let’s stipulate, for discussion, that the threshold today is $10 M (so that the numbers are easier). If the government somehow taxed just ONE percent of that net worth, we’re talking about ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND dollars — $100,000.
A typical family spends about $10,000 per year on health care.
So taxing the wealth of JUST ONE household JUST ONE percent, at the bottom end of the 1% threshold, covered the annual health care costs of the 10 households like the rest of us.
For each 10 1% households earning $10 M, there is likely to be one household earning $100 M. Here is a different source showing that the threshold for the 0.1%, by net worth, was $30.6M in 2013.
If you look at the graph on that page, you see explodes towards the right at the top — that’s why a log axis is needed to even show a meaningful graph.
We DO have billionaires. According to this source, there were 540 BILLIONAIRES in the US on October 4, 2016 (not quite a year ago). That chart shows the richest people in each state for 2017. At number 41 on that list is “Gary Tharaldson”, ND, at $1 B. at number 1 is Bill Gates, WA, at $81.5 B.
I don’t have time to work the numbers for all of these, but it’s easy to put a lower bound on these billionaires. One percent of just the threshold amount is $10 M each. There are 517 billionaires … that’s $5.17 B dollars, and this thumbnail calculation is leaving most of the money from our wealthiest households untouched.
If there are 500 billionaires, there are likely to be about 100 times that many at our $10 M threshold — about 50,000 households with a net worth of $10 M. At our 1% recapture rate, that’s another $5 B.
These are low-ball numbers, because we’re only looking at the thresholds.
Even with those, we’re looking at TEN BILLION DOLLARS by recapturing just 1% of the net worth of our wealthiest 1%.
In short, your guesstimate of $100 from the “top 1%” and $10 from everybody else grossly underestimates what the wealthy have and grossly overstates the burden on the tail.
In fact, there is more than enough money currently captured by our wealthiest 1% to make a huge dent in the expenses of the rest of us, even at very modest wealth taxation rates.
I certainly appreciate the time and effort you put in here, and I rather hope that you are right. It does seem like you are switching back and forth between taxing wealth and taxing income– and I agree with you that wealth should be the thing– but I suppose we shall see if those billions are enough to fund it.
I remain concerned that the cost side of the proposal is going to dwarf those billions, though, unless there are some serious buzzkills in the form of deductibles, co-pays, or, like Canada, very long wait times to actually get health care.
I certainly appreciate and support Sen. Sanders’ efforts here, because he does make an effort to go a little deeper than the bumper sticker. But I’m not sure that his followers are following him, and to the extent that they respond to efforts to come up with a politically viable and fiscally workable proposal as apostasy, I think the issue remains in the realm of naivete that is the subject of this thread.
To a certain extent, a lot of this comes down to finding a way to unify the party divisions left over from last year, which remains a problem with no apparent solution, yet.
We have only limited means for taxing wealth, and so we end taxing income (in one form or another) by necessity. The instruments we have are an imperfect proxy for directly taxing wealth.
The numbers I cited are all from the wealth side (household net worth, etc). The instruments the government has today for taxing wealth are:
1. taxing capital gains (long and short term)
2. estate and gift tax
The preferential tax rate for long-term capital gains is available only to the wealthy, and primarily benefits hedge-fund managers and people like them. The estate tax already applies to only a handful of people, and primarily affects ONLY the very wealthy. This is why the GOP so loudly strives to eliminate it.
One loophole that benefits only the wealthy and is easy to close is that long-term capital gains are excluded at death.
Regarding buzzkill, my take on the numbers is that our health insurance industry has been taking a significant portion of our GDP. This is especially true when indirect costs are included.
By “indirect costs”, I mean:
1. Health care provider staff and equipment doing insurance administration (filing forms, tracking claims, etc)
2. Services rendered primarily because they are profitable and insurers will cover them (the “wallet biopsy”)
3. Consumer and health care provider overhead due to multiple insurance companies (repeating medical histories, claims submitted to multiple insurers or the wrong insurer, etc)
While there is some overlap between my (1) and (3), what I mean for (1) is overhead spent dealing with processing one claim through one insurer, while (3) is overhead spent dealing with multiple insurers for the same claims.
We are the world’s largest economy. We generate an enormous amount of wealth (not income) each year. We also squander a larger portion of that wealth on health care overhead — administration, health insurance industry profits, and so on — than our other first-world peers.
We can and must land on single-payer government-sponsored health care. I am absolutely convinced that it is possible to deliver the same quality health care that we receive today under the ACA/Obamacare, perhaps even better, at no addition net cost to working-class families.
I am absolutely convinced that this is possible only if we force the very wealthy to pay a far greater share of our national health care costs than they do today. A huge piece of that must come from dissolving the health insurance industry as we know it today. We did it to ENRON and Arthur Anderson, we can do it to Anthem et al.
All this is possible. The question remains whether or not we have the political will to do it.
It’s a pragmatic plan CMD. Even Ezra Klein likes it.
It gives four different taxing options to choose from, spells out a 10-15 timetable of gradual expanded enrollment and is going to be CBO scored unlike anything the GOP did. I think this is a really unfair comparison.
Bingo.
Warren Buffet pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.
20% of big companies pay zero corporate taxes.
If your looking for a snake oil salesman, look in the mirror.
Tax the rich.
.
What wonks like us repeatedly fail to recognize is the average voter doesn’t have the time or patience to compare eighteen different white papers on health care and pick the right one. The same voters who got duped into thinking death panels were coming after grandma are now begging their senators to keep their ACA benefits now that the first black Presidents name isn’t on it. And they fuckin love the idea of Medicare for All. Really easy and simple to comprehend.
Take a program that is working to reduce health care costs and cover every American over 65 and gradually expand it to everyone else.
Bernie’s critics, and many of his supporters, haven’t actually read his bill. It doesn’t transition us to Canada overnight asking the underpants gnomes to figure out how to pay for it.
It spells it exactly which taxes will be raised on whom to pay for it. And it includes a payroll tax that for most of us will be equivalent to what we pay for our employer premiums anyway. The costs won’t be cheaper for me. They will be in 10-15 years time once the system starts driving down gouging and standardizing costs for procedures as Medicare already does.
There are four different funding options committees and a Dem President can pick and choose from with voter input. And it’s a gradual timetable that brings in 50+, PEC’s, then kids, then everyone else in a 10-15 year period of gradual enrollment expansion. It’s actually pretty smart and awfully close to what Clinton’s advisors wanted her to do.
Attention working class Americans! There is a “huge” tax increase coming your way. Yup, it’s going to replace the more huge health insurance premiums you’ve been paying to corporations and their wealthy shareholders. In the end, all that means is that your take home pay is going to be more huge!
The major difference is the Sanders proposal actually spells out four different options for how it can be paid, he is open to CBO scoring for each one, and open to using the committee process to actually take the broad roadmap and fill in the gaps with details.
Again, for the life of me I don’t understand why some progressives go to great lengths to draw false equivalency between our side and theirs for the sake of comity and bipartisanship. If the GOP was unwilling to vote for essentially the Nixoncare 2.0, Heritage authored 1993 Dole-Chaffee plan that it’s 2012 nominee signed into law as governor of Massachusetts-it will be unwilling to work with us on fixing ACA or building something better.
Alexander talks a good game with Murray and then ended up voting for this shitburger again. Give McCain credit that he’s in give no fucks mode and is right to point out their process on this is far worse than our process on ACA.
Bernie’s plan spells out how to get from point A to point C, it leaves it up to Congressional committees and a Democratic president to figure out point B and that is far more honest and accurately policymaking than anything the GOP did on Obamacare the last 8 years.
While I very much agree with this sentiment, I’m not sure it answers the diarists point about naivete on the left. In fact, it might be coming at it from both ends: There’s a difference between saying “we want a clean bill’ (which is verbatim) and ‘we don’t want to negotiate with Trump.’ And, yes, it’s more than a little uncomfortable to have to say it to kids. But kids are, by definition, naive. Naive says we can have the perfect bill. Experienced (jaded even) says not to touch Trump. In this instance they both meet at rejecting the efforts at negotiating that are underway.
The Democratic and/or Left hold the position that it is still OK to have respect for the Presidency, if not the actual President and that is a difficult position to be in under such a disaster of a President. The GOP are under no such constraints… they haven’t had respect for either the Presidency or the President since Nixon. They are straight up trying to use the position and the person holding the position for their own ends. They’ve been doing this since Nixon was nearly impeached. As it stands, I think the Democratic position is a noble one, but it remains to be seen if it is a workable one.
Generally speaking, I think the kids are all right.
I don’t agree with using obnoxious tactics, though I thought BLM’s interference with Bernie Sanders’s campaign was particularly effective because Bernie, after some initial confusion, responded with grace and listened to the. Obnoxiousness, however, has limits and may open the political ecosystem to more ugliness than we want to tolerate.
With Bernie’s candidacy, the Left has been more active in Democratic politics. I’m talking about real leftists, not just people left of center. Some leftists have always been involved in party politics, but many haven’t been. A lot of these folks have a different ethos than party stalwarts.
I’m not sure it’s naivete to believe negotiating with Trump will water the bill down; actually I think that’s a pretty rational position.
With the usual disclaimers others have noted (and no violence, of course), I think a louder left can only help.
I don’t know how to answer in the general case, and won’t try.
In this specific example, I want Ms. Pelosi to categorically rule out ANY sort of “new border security measures”. Period.
I think we demand a clean DREAM act. No ties to unspecified “new border security measures”. None. I agree that the demands from protesters for and end to all immigration deportations and for DREAM-like protection for everyone in the country illegally is WAY out of scope for this. I agree that this is naivete that is best gently ignored.
I think Ms. Pelosi should say, flat out, that we Democrats will support a reasonable DREAM act. Period.
No wheeling and dealing with Mr. Trump or his lying and cowardly collaborators, AT ALL.
I enthusiastically agree with ryepower12 that “there is a huge — h u g e — space between space between working with Trump and ‘pack[ing] up the government until 2020’ ”
I think the proper stance towards Mr. Trump is to shun him. I think the proper behavior of every elected official of every affiliation is to have staff return his calls when convenient, be unavailable for photo ops, and not respond to his bizarre behavior. Mr. Trump should have NO role in legislation or government. NONE.
Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer already have a perfectly reasonable DREAM act ready to go, it’s been “negotiated” (whatever it is that one does with incompetent GOP ideologues) for years, long before Mr. Trump took office.
I think Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer should put that bill forward, accepting no ties to any bigoted nonsense about “border security”, and shun Mr. Trump.
The only scenario in which a President can have no role in legislation is if the opposition has veto-proof majorities. Even then it’s still up to him to staff the executive branch with people to apply the laws.
I understand the powers of the Presidency.
My point is to keep the monkey on his back. Congress will either pass or not pass the DREAM act. If it is not passed, the failure will be squarely on the back of the GOP incompetents, bigots, and collaborators.
If the DREAM act is passed and Mr. Trump vetoes it, then we know exactly where he stands. If the GOP incompetents, bigots, and collaborators fail to override that veto, then we know where the GOP and Mr. Trump stand.
If Mr. Trump signs it, then the result will be a clean DREAM act — and no Democrat will have had to make a deal with the devil.
Votes have consequences. American voters put these incompetents and thugs in power. The consequences of cracking the door, even a little bit, to “new border security measures” are JUST as bad as the consequences of not passing the DREAM act.
Mr. Trump is a dangerous, incompetent, probably unbalanced thug. We must NOT make deals with him. The only path forward I see is to work around him. If that isn’t possible, then the consequences are on those who put him in power.
Put another way: “I’d like to see the DREAM Act passed, or not, and have the consequences fall on GOP shoulder, because I judge those consequences to be politically beneficial to Democrats. Sure, that probably means that 800,000 or so American adults in the DACA program will be subject to detention and deportation at any time, and that might be hard for them, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”
They’re people, and if you have a chance to get them off the firing line, you take it, even if it means a photo op with Trump.
So when the kidnappers demand the $50K in ransom or the child dies, your advice is “Pay up”. The point is that the child will almost certainly die anyway, whether or not the ransom is paid.
The long-standing advice of experts is:
1. Don’t negotiate with terrorists
2. Don’t pay ransom demands
I want to solve the problem for people in the DACA program. I see, clearly, who is aiming a gun at their heads.
I see ZERO evidence that anything our leaders did or contemplate doing will do anything to “get them off the firing line”.
Appeasement doesn’t work.
Medicare For All is not the end game; it’s an opening gambit.
It’s typical for many–Bernie Sanders in this case is one–to say we can just do it. In fact, we can’t do it now. And we can’t do it for legitimate reasons. There are far too many people that stand to lose by increasing taxes enough to pay for it. Doctors. Insurance companies. Those of us who have decent insurance. We would all have to give up a lot and then place our trust in a government that could then turn out to be like the one we have now. It’s not going to happen right away.
The other thing is Medicare For All is not the be all and end all. I’m in favor of single payer and affordable insurance for all, but most developed countries also depend on forms of private medical insurance as well.
Medicare For All, which we can’t get to at the moment, is like the car you can’t afford that the salesman shows you before you buy one you can sort of afford. I don’t mean this as cynically as it sounds. Voters need to have an ideal in mind as we move ahead. “Better” is not enough. We may have to work in increments, but it’s important to have an end goal.