I posted a link that discussed funding for HR 676 (medicare for all) and what taxes are needed to fund it. You guys are free to read it.
Easy.
Healthcare in this country costs money. It is not as if universal healthcare is in addition to existing healthcare. It replaces existing healthcare which, as I just noted, is already a cost we all bear.
So, will universal healthcare cost more? Well, The Koch Brothers paid for a study on this with a libertarian think tank and the think tank came to the conclusion universal healthcare would save $2 trillion over the cost of the current system over a ten year period.
Take that $2 trillion and rescind the Trump tax cut for another $2.3 trillion. Now we have $4.3 trillion to play with. And all that is just dealing with things as they were when Trump took office. Free tuition seems doable. We have not even begun to talk about closing tax loopholes or taxing the rich more.
A right wing think-tank recently released an economic analysis of the Sanders healthcare program which revealed that it would SAVE over 2 trillion dollars. Whoops. Don’t think that one was supposed to be released.
Didn’t see this post when I made mine :). Yes, amazingly everyone who’s been saying for years that single-payer healthcare would save money was right, and everyone who took money to say that it wouldn’t was wrong. Amazing.
I like how you’re so concerned about paying for programs when your Republican president just passed tax “reform” that’s going to cost more than 2 TRILLION dollars (and is looking to increase the debt by another 100 BILLION dollars). It’s like worrying that the mice will get into your cereal while the rats are eating your face.
If you want to pay for shit, how’s this for a start: REVERSE THE TAX CUTS THAT ARE COSTING US 2 TRILLION DOLLARS!
You can pay for a lot of shit with 2 trillion dollars. Did you know that?
I’d like to know the expense of having an antidemocratic white house for 2 years, 4? What is the expense to society to relitigate the civil war as a psychic diversion instead of look forward? What is the expense of having wealth literally coagulate among fewer and fewer people?
The money is fungible and we can see where it goes (Wilbur Ross?) I don’t see that a big lie changes that. What will not be sustainable is the inequality, not the expense of having a society, which is very reasonable.
Doing some back of the envelope math, I think free tuition (for public school) would run 100 billion a year or so. There are about 15 million students in public college at any given time. Give each one an $6000 a year subsidy (a little less for community college, a little more for in state college) and that comes to $90 billion a year. Private school kids wouldn’t get the subsidy I would assume. But thats about a trillion in a decade.
Hell we can vastly increase investment in renewable energy too. We only spend about $40-50 billion a year on renewables. Use maybe 20-30 billion a year to fund tax cuts and subsidies for private investment, and our total renewable energy investment may triple.
Throw in free daycare for 10 million kids at $1000 a month and that is another $120 billion a year.
You can get all 3 programs (free daycare, free college, vast increases in renewable investment) for about half of the 4.3 trillion in savings you quote.
That’s pretty good for back-of-the envelope math. I saw a paper from a right-wing think tank (so probably an overestimate) that said it would cost $70 billion/year. So basically Trump threw away enough money to pay for a college education for everyone in America.
According to this it may be closer to $40 billion a year for free college (as of 2012).
They argue state colleges collected about 62 billion in tuition fees in 2012, but of that about 22 billion was in the form of grants (I don’t know if those grants were strictly federal pell grants or not) so that money is already being paid by the government.
If OP is listening, we are explaining how to pay for all this stuff.
Basically, you could give everyone in America health care, which puts 2 trillion dollars in your pocket (and because the 2 trillion number comes from a right-wing think tank, you know the real number is higher). With that 2 trillion in savings you can pay for a college education for everyone in America. You still have plenty of money left over, so throw the Republicans a bone by allowing them to declare war on some random country, like Canada. Stupid Canada.
Oh, and since liberals believe in wasteful spending, reverse the Trump tax cuts and use the 2 trillion in savings to literally buy everyone in America a pony.
As I pointed out, we’re talking about 20x more deficit spending here.
No, YOU are explaining how we pay for all this stuff, and I’d note that the sources on cost are not actually the CBO, so assume rosy projections until the CBO gets hold of a real bill.
I thank you for the information, but Warren is apparently ignorant of this and she’s actually in the Senate and supposedly cares about this stuff, and pretty much no Dem candidate can even start to explain this stuff either.
Plus my original point still stands: taxpayers won’t tolerate it, so in the end, progressives are just going to end up doing what mainstream Democrats wanted to do in the first place.
I checked the numbers and there are some pretty optimistic assumptions in there, although kudos for going over all that detail.
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This is not actually a Democrat-endorsed plan for HR676. This is an economists’ ideas on how to fund it. No Democrat is on record supporting a 6% payroll tax or a 6% tax on capital gains of home sales.
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The savings are entirely assumptions, much like Paul Ryan’s cuts to the budget. The overhead savings are real, but assuming you can reduce drug prices by 37% is optimistic. So is the idea of cutting doctor pay, which is politically toxic.
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Tobin Tax revenue is entirely theoretical and very optimistic, plus the Tobin tax is designed to deter high frequency trading, which would reduce revenue substantially. The Tobin Tax is NOT a valid funding source for an entitlement given that problem. Entitlements need stable revenue sources, like payroll taxes. Given that the assumed revenue from the Tobin tax is a whopping $400 billion+, that’s a serious flaw.
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the payroll tax numbers seem to be carefully calibrated to make it appear that the average person will see small savings compared to what they pay now. Which means the assumptions on cost, savings, or revenue, only have to be off by a small amount to put those numbers higher so that the average person pays more. If the average person has to pay more, it won’t be politically possible to pass it. And you’ve already got people making around $80K per year paying more than they do now. Union workers especially will be paying more for less coverage, which will cause them to demand an exemption from the law so they can keep their negotiated plans.
There’s good work in there though, but if even THAT is a bridge too far for candidates to actually endorse or talk about, it shows the impossibility of the task.
Getting back to the point of running as a far left candidate, I don’t think the issue is as much how to pay for the programs, it is a question of how are you going to pass the legislation? Radical change almost never happens in the USA overnight due to our political system. We don’t have a prime minister who gets swept into office and has a party that votes lock step to implement their election manifesto.
Remember how bloody the battles were over the affordable care act and the Bill Clinton health care plan were? There probably weren’t even 50 solid Democratic voters to even ram a public option through using budget reconciliation.
So my question to Sanders, AOC, and their ilk is, how exactly are you going to implement Medicare for all or free college? Also, these types of candidates and their supporters seem to want to make every battle a hill to die on with compromise being an ugly word.
Is free college a solution? Maybe. But not everyone sees the number one problem being white middle class kids with liberal arts degrees from private schools who are struggling with debt.
Due to the nature of the Senate, you can’t pass anything that doesn’t get approval from a red state Senator. That would be true even without a 60 vote threshold. With 30 Trump states, Democrats only have 40 Senators they can absolutely rely on. So even with a 50 vote threshold, they need to talk 10 purple or red state Senators into risking their seats.
So what does Medicare for All look like when the Democratic Senators from Nebraska, Louisiana, and Florida amend it? We’ve been through this before with a much more conservative model. And they made it MORE conservative. I’d expect Senators from those states would reject M4A out of hand in favor of improving ACA.
So the question remains: “What is the most liberal health care plan you can pass that Manchin will vote for?”
A trillion here, a trillion there; soon you’re talking real money.
Actually, you suddenly introduced a figure of $32 trillion without explaining it in any way. Why should we believe that number?
Why won’t they tolerate it?
I showed you a conservative funded report on universal healthcare showed a $2 trillion savings. We have plenty of examples of other countries with universal healthcare (indeed most developed nations have it). In nearly every case those countries have less expensive healthcare and better outcomes in most cases than the US does. So this is not some daring experiment no one can possibly guess the outcome of.
People already pay for healthcare now. The majority of personal bankruptcies in this country are caused by healthcare bills (and by people who have insurance already). We are merely moving the money people already pay around. People positively FREAK that their taxes will go up without considering they are not paying an insurance premium. Certainly some will pay more, a lot will pay less and overall the country will function better which is good for everyone even if not entirely apparent.
The other proposal was repealing the Trump tax cut which is nothing but a massive giveaway to the already very wealthy. This is just going back to the tax situation as it was when Trump took office. A tax situation in which the massively wealthy already benefited hugely (what was Romney’s tax rate with only one year released…how about Trump?). Repealing that tax cut will have no bad effect on the vast majority of the populace and the massively wealthy will still be massively wealthy and enjoying their already overly generous low taxes.
There is $4.3 trillion EXTRA right there and you also get universal healthcare. No raising taxes (keep as they were till a few months ago). No cutting benefits. No military cuts.
So explain to me again why everyone won’t tolerate it?
Far right-wingers get Mexico to pay.
Trump tax cuts are $1.5 trillion, giving you $30.5 trillion to raise over ten years. $10K per person.
Of course other countries have UHC. Citizens tolerate paying half their income in taxes. We don’t. So Democrats don’t run on it. If Democrats had a plan as easy as the one you sorta cite, they’d know about it and run on it. Instead, they have no idea. They’ll just “find a way”. Except like Republican spending cuts, the revenue will never materialize and so they’ll never be able to get red state Dems to vote for it.