The mammoth cost of Bernie Sanders' big plans

[question everything]

Since he now seems to be the leading Democratic candidate, it’s time to give Bernie Sanders’ agenda some thorough scrutiny. Brace yourself. Sanders proposes major changes to the U.S. economy that would remake the health care, energy, auto and financial industries. Yahoo Finance calculates the annual cost of new spending under these Sanders plans at $4.9 trillion. Washington spends around $4.5 trillion per year, so Sanders’ plans would more than double total federal spending.

Among all Democrats running for president, Sanders has the costliest agenda by a considerable margin. Yahoo Finance tallied the cost of Elizabeth Warren’s plans last fall, when she briefly looked like a frontrunner. Those plans added up to about $4.2 trillion per year, or about 14% less than Sanders. At the time, Warren backed the same Medicare for all plan Sanders has proposed, which is the biggest item on the agenda, at about $3.1 trillion per year. Warren has since backed away from Medicare for all, while Sander’s hasn’t. None of the other mainstream Democrats proposes nearly much as new spending as these two.

The other giant price tag on the Sanders agenda is the Green New Deal, which would cost around $1 trillion per year. The GND would aggressively force carbon energy out of the economy by requiring a rapid transition to pollution-free automobiles and green buildings, funding research into new technologies and attempting to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Sanders would also use the GND to create 20 million unionized jobs related to the technology and equipment needed to combat global warming.

(snip)

On paper, some of the Sanders plans look like fair tradeoffs. Independent analyses of Medicare for all, for instance, have found that a single-payer health plan run by the government could cover more people, with higher levels of coverage, for roughly the same amount the nation spends on health care today, from all sources. Instead of paying for premiums and out-of-pocket expenses, businesses and consumers would pay taxes covering the cost of the program. Because of the program’s giant scale, those taxes could end up lower than what people pay directly for health care today.

The problem is the massive disruption sure to be caused in switching from private insurers that cover about 180 million Americans to a government plan that would absorb them all. Too much government control can also depress economic growth. The Penn Wharton Budget Model recently found that Medicare for all could cause a sharp recession if implemented the wrong way, a finding the Sanders campaign disagrees with.

(snip)

Sanders has proposed a variety of tax hikes to pay for his various plans, including a wealth tax starting on fortunes of $32 million, a larger payroll tax to expand Social Security benefits, a tax on some financial trades, and a higher corporate tax. Most Americans don’t object to higher taxes on the wealthy, but Sanders’ tax hike proposals are so aggressive they’d likely meet strong resistance in Congress, even from Democrats.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-mammoth-cost-of-bernie-sanders-big-plans-212635740.html

[evertonfc]

1. He's not going to be the nominee

[UniteFightBack]

2. Nominating Sanders is equivalent to a death wish. nt

[still_one]

4. +++

[Gore1FL]

3. For starters let's undo Reaganomics.

It hasn't worked for 40 years. It's time to start taxing billionaires again.

[RockRaven]

5. Comparing Medicare-for-all to current total federal spending is vapid and indicates an agenda by

whomever is using that framing. Which is about one would expect from an article on yahoo finance, or CNBC, or FOXBusiness, or whatever.

Of course Medicare-for-all would envelop an enormous amount of US GDP. *Because the US spends a disproportionally large amount of it's (already world-leading) GDP on healthcare* (maybe because there are so many for-profit actors on the administrative side creating so much fucking overhead).

And one of the reasons our share of GDP on healthcare is so high is that we are the only industrialized country w/o universal health care. How the fuck do all of these other countries do it and survive? It's a fucking mystery!!!!!!!

[David__77]

6. Excellent. Let's double those plans.

...

[Cicada]

7. Unaffordable plans won't pass in Congress

So Sanders will sign bills we can afford