Here.
As for the political feasibility, only three things need be said. 1) No cadre of far-left politicians has yet been elected, so no talk of feasibility is now meaningful. 2) Lots of far-right politicians have been elected and have put their notions into law and the results have been uniformly disastrous. 3) The point of far-left candidates running is to see a utopian future in which no Republican ever gets elected to any office. That is worth any price, and you should publicly admit that.
I gave cites for my numbers. Where are yours coming from?
Remember, universal healthcare replaces the current system so saying $30.5 trillion is meaningless. It is not like we keep spending what we are spending on healthcare and then ALSO spend an extra $30.5 trillion on universal healthcare.
Put another way (I am making up numbers for illustration here), if the current healthcare system costs us $32.5 trillion over ten years and you put universal healthcare in that costs $30.5 trillion over ten years you do NOT need to come up with $10K per person. You have actually saved money instead.
The fact is that you actually can pay for some of the stuff that Berniecrats are asking for – other countries do it. Yes, they have public deficits and debt, but they pay for their debts. Some of the countries with the most generous social programs (Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Germany, Finland, Denmark) are still quite capitalist and also have much lower debt-GDP ratios than we do. Running as a mainstream democrats means ignoring problems that have caused people to lose confidence in our political and economic system.
Boy, that’s a really big number! Big and scary and worrisome! I wonder if context makes it better?
Oh. Yes, it does!
Even Libertarians Admit Medicare for All Would Save Trillions
The US could insure 30 million more Americans and virtually eliminate out-of-pocket health care expenses while saving $2 trillion in the process, according to a new report about Medicare for All released by the libertarian Mercatus Center.
[…]
The report’s methods are pretty straightforward. Blahous starts with current projections about how much the country will spend on health care between 2022 and 2031. From there, he adds the costs associated with higher utilization of medical services and then subtracts the savings from lower administrative costs, lower reimbursements for medical services, and lower drug prices. After this bit of arithmetic, Blahous finds that health expenditures would be lower for every year during the first decade of implementation. The net change across the whole ten-year period is a savings of $2.054 trillion.
It turns out that in the timeframe that medicare for all would cost us 32 TRILLION DOLLARS… We’d already be spending that and more on health care. And, let’s be clear, the Jacobin article is pretty on-the-nose as to what this study’s goals are:
But the real game here for Mercatus is to bury the money-saving finding in the report’s tables while headlining the incomprehensibly large $32.6 trillion number in order to trick dim reporters into splashing that number everywhere and freaking out. This is a strategy that already appears to be working, as the Associated Press headline reads: “Study: ‘Medicare for all’ projected to cost $32.6 trillion.”
$32 Trillion sounds like a really big number but taken in context we’re looking at a savings of several trillion dollars. It’s kinda like how it’s really expensive to buy a new car, but if you’re gonna spend more than the price of a new car on repairs for your old car this year, that’s an investment well worth making.
We sure don’t guarantee it. Some states have public schools that are only open 4 days a week during the school year because they don’t have the money for 5 days a week. Others have 40 year old textbooks that are both falling apart and teaching about a bygone world. How fucked is that, in this incredibly rich country?
Actually, free health care would be less expensive - it would save $2 TRILLION over a decade. And that’s according to a conservative/libertarian think tank.
Yeah, if you or your kids never get sick.
Yeah, and if people have kids, lose their jobs, and have to settle for a crappy job, their kids should be taken away from them, amirite?
Also, the Federal poverty level is a single number, regardless of where you are in the 48 contiguous states. And you know and I know that some places - particularly the places where most of the jobs are - are more expensive than others.
You can’t base public policy on what people that make bad decisions need to survive their bad decisions. Minimum wage is supposed to be a starting point for single young people. When they “graduate” from minimum wage jobs, they can start planning for a family. If they choose to have a family earlier, that’s their right, but the public does not have to subsidize it.
Of course you can pay for it: Steep middle class tax increases.
But the main point of the thread is how anything you want to do has to get the vote of the median member of the House, who will not be a progressive no matter who controls the House. The other point is that if the far left candidates won’t try to move the Overton Window on funding mechanisms(middle class tax increases), the OVerton Window doesn’t get moved, and so Medicare for All becomes a political impossibility. So just run as mainstream Democrats with unified messaging, since that’s what they are going to be voting for anyway. Is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez going to vote against improvements to ACA? If she does, 80% of the Democratic base will consider her an idiot.
Oooorrrrr…with the trillions of dollars in savings from a more efficient healthcare program, plus the trillions of dollars in savings from reversing the Trump-era tax giveaways. You know, one or the other.
P.s., I love how, in the last dozen posts, you’ve learned that your cost estimates were off by 30 TRILLION DOLLARS, but your conclusion–that the only way to pay for things that Democrats want is through middle-class tax increases–hasn’t changed at all.
Do you ever research any of your claims?
The minimum wage was a long battle by labor and the progressive movement that took place over the first part of the 20th century. Employers took advantage of immigrant and migrant workers by paying them as low wages as possible. Children worked alongside adults in most factories: they merely changed jobs inside the factory as they grew older.
States passed minimum wage laws first, but the conservative Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional on the grounds that they interfered with free contract making. It took until the New Deal to change that.
Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins gave Roosevelt a draft of what became after many battles the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. It not only established a national minimum wage - against the heavy opposition of the conservatives in the South - but also effectively ended child labor.
The minimum wage was created to end exploitation of workers. That still is its main function. The median age of minimum wage workers is 30. The notion that teens working fast food on weekends are the only minimum wage workers is an astounding assertion filtered through eyes blinded by middle class white privilege. A full quarter of minimum age workers are parents. While Hispanics and African-Americans are 27% of the work force they are 39% of minimum wage workers. While no one can argue that all benefits from raising the minimum wage would go exclusively to these adult workers, they would disproportionally benefit from one.
So-called far-left positions are merely those which advocate for real people suffering in the real world from decisions not made by them but institutionally by people who think like you. I assume that’s why conservatives are so threatened by them.
If he did it would undermine the subtle meta-argument he’s making about the likely quality of any government-funded education.
Sure you can! When those bad decisions are consistent, common, and pervasive? We do that basically all the time. Why do you think the FDIC exists? Welfare? Food stamps? Social Security? We noticed that people were quite literally dying as a result of either bad luck or bad decisions, and moved to do something about it! And it kinda worked.
The idea that we protect people from bad decisions is the conclusion you kind of have to reach if you believe, as is implied here, that most people who end up in a bad spot - particularly on minimum wage - are there because they make bad decisions.
I think that’s asinine, personally. Sometimes a condom breaks. Sometimes a relative dies. Sometimes you lose your job. Sometimes you get hit by lightning. Sometimes you just get unlucky. And it doesn’t help that the stress of being poor makes it harder to make good decisions in the first place, which is another factor. (I can’t shake the feeling that so much of conservative thought is based on naive and nonsensical models of how agency and human decision-making works that it’s comparable to Marxism, except Marx had the excuse of living before the advent of modern psychology.)
Not that it matters, though, because…
As Exapno pointed out, literally everything about this is completely wrong from start to finish. I realize it’s popular rhetoric on the right, but given that the right considered Donald Trump an acceptable president, this should be your cue to take literally everything you consider “popular rhetoric on the right” and take a real fuckin’ close look at it. Because most of it is wrong. And Trump was your wakeup call on that.
…How, exactly, do you think “moving the overton window works”? I’m a little confused here. The argument seems to be, “Even if you elect more leftists to congress, the median member of the house still won’t be progressive enough for this, so why bother?” I suppose the correct time to run as a social democrat leftist is… never?
Meanwhile, in reality, Bernie Sanders basically single-handedly dragged the democratic party hard to the left through his presidential bid. He more or less single-handedly changed the conversation to the point where it was even possible for someone like Ocasio-Cortez to run on the platform she ran on. These people are moving the overton window. Maybe we won’t see results immediately, but you know how we’ll never see results? If all we ever run are milquetoast centrist liberals with no interest in rocking the boat.
I’m really not sure how to make sense of your complaints. I think they kinda… don’t.
Please run for national office sometime soon - I will happily donate to your campaign. 
I’m not sure what you’re even talking about here.
Also, just speaking generically, you’re right, you can’t protect every last person against the consequences of their crappy decisions, and it’s unreasonable to expect the government to play a role.
But when many millions of people are making what you regard as ‘bad decisions,’ maybe it’s less a lot of instances of individual folly, but rather a whole lot of symptoms of some larger problem.
And our society really does have a problem of too much money sloshing around at the top, and too little money in the hands of too many people.
What my fellow Marx Brother said. 
Progressively steep tax increases – the middle class is inclusive to a wide range of income levels.
The hard part, the part that takes time, is selling something of value and getting people to understand that paying more taxes collectively can build infrastructure and programs that people can use and benefit from.
I agree that Berniecrats and Ocasio-Cortez should be careful not to alienate moderate democrats, but they absolutely have every reason to pitch their ideas and help people understand how so-called “socialism” can actually support democracy and even support capitalism.
What’s painfully clear is that conservatives have destroyed confidence that people have in capitalism and democracy. If you ask people whether they support capitalism and democracy, they’ll tell you that of course they do. But they don’t vote for populists like Trump if they really, truly believe in those values.
A far left candidate brings new, fresh ideas to the table. These ideas normally wouldn’t get discussed.
Eventually people start to think, “Why not health care for all”.
And lo, and behold, it happens.
All because some far left candidate gave it the spark.
A lot of “left” policies involve spending the same money or less.
Medicare for all? That’s a money saver, period. That’s the point of it, if we get it right. The fact that it will cover more persons is great, but the larger effect will be better insurance for those who already have it.
A new renewable-energy grid? That’s pork barrel, the real secret fuel of the USA economy! But spent on something immediately useful instead of a bunch of bombs that will sit in a warehouse until they rot, or redundant highways parallel to abandoned highways 500 yards away somewhere in Kansas. That means real economic growth, not just a job making something useless.
Now, a basic income guarantee, if we did it off a flat tax, say: That’s a noticeable tax hike on persons making mid-six-figures or higher, and the ensuing inflation will be the larger hit to persons making $80K to $250K. But paying for it isn’t hard to understand.
Let me add: If anyone thinks that maintaining the New York City subway is “far left,” then they need to step back and ask what building the New York City subway was. Good grief!
In what world are fat cats like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi mainstream? The populists and socialists are the future of the party, without whom the Democrats would be a permanent minority and just a token opposition to the right-wing axis.
Exactly.
Who says that they are the mainstream? Who dictates that? They represent the Democratic party at the end of a 70-year post-WWII period in which American went through a lot of change. They presided over a Democratic party that has fought to give, and given, individuals of all stripe representation in politics, which is noble. But they also sucked up to corporate America a little too much, and was terrified of being labeled “socialist”. Rather than thinking of how to counter Newt Gingrich and neoconservatism, they tried to run from the “liberal” moniker.
Bernie Sanders, by contrast, has embraced it. Moreover, he is trying to educate people on the value of liberalism and the very tangible things that voters can take from a liberal agenda. The trick is not letting your detractors define you. People like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi have allowed Republicans to define them as unpatriotic politicians who take the money from hard-working white people and give it to lazy, stupid, undeserving minorities and immigrants. Bernie and AOC ain’t havin’ that. They’re going on the offensive.
It’s funny how conservatives are talking about wage growth now – a very modest wage growth after 9-10 years of stagnation in that department. Along the way, the poor got poorer, the rich got richer. The wealthiest Americans reap most of the benefits of economic growth and the poor bear the brunt of economic contraction. That’s not much of an economy, and this economic growth we have now - thanks to the grossly irresponsible policies of the GOP - is blinding everyone to what is going to be the worst economic crisis in the last 100 years when it finally happens. It might even be worse than the first Great Depression. We’re probably anywhere from 4-8 years from such an event.
When it happens, people will demand economic justice. They will demand social capitalism.