Even With New Pay-Fors, Bernie's Agenda Still Has A $25 Trillion Hole

[Gothmog]

Link to tweet

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has made some extraordinary promises in his campaign for president, including free health care, a federal jobs guarantee, universal forgiveness of all student debt, and radical expansions of nearly every government program from Social Security to housing subsidies. When asked at a CNN town hall last night how he would pay for this gargantuan expansion of government, Sen. Sanders presented moderator Chris Cuomo with a new document that Sanders claimed detailed how he would pay for his proposals. But don’t be fooled: these numbers still don’t add up, and Sanders should be pressed to explain his magic math at tonight’s debate.

The first problem is that the list of Sanders’ proposed spending increases is incomplete. Sanders has proposed costly plans for K-12 education, expanding disability insurance, paid family leave, and more that were not accounted for in the new document. He also grossly understates the cost of his Medicare for All plan by citing a flawed analysis that neglected to incorporate the costs of specific benefits Sanders proposes, such as universal coverage for long-term services and supports, and failed to account for how offering universal health-care benefits more generous than those offered by any other country on earth would increase utilization of health services.

Sanders and his surrogates regularly claim that critics are wrong to focus on how much Medicare for All increases government costs because it would reduce the total cost of health care. But independent analyses from the Urban Institute and Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget have concluded that even with the aggressive price controls he has proposed, Sanders’ Medicare-for-All framework would actually increase national health expenditures by up to $7 trillion. Sanders himself also admitted in a 60 minutes interview this weekend that his Medicare-for-All plan would likely cost around $30 trillion, yet the list of “options” Sanders has offered to pay for them (options which, it should be noted, he has never explicitly endorsed enacting together) would together cover less than 60 percent of that amount by the Sanders campaign’s own accounting.

In January, the Progressive Policy Institute published comprehensive cost estimates of the proposals offered by each of the leading candidates for president before the Iowa Caucus. After incorporating new proposals that Sanders has released since the publication of our analysis and minor methodological updates, PPI concludes that Sanders has now proposed over $53 trillion of new spending over the next 10 years – an amount that would roughly double the size of the federal government. Our estimate is, if anything, overly charitable to Sanders, as it accepts most of the Sanders campaign’s cost estimates outside of Medicare for All and assumes significant overlap in the costs of his proposed federal jobs guarantee and other spending proposals. Other analysts have estimated the total costs of Sanders’ proposals could be anywhere between $60 trillion and $100 trillion over 10 years. ,,,,

Sanders’ proposed pay-fors don’t even come close to covering these costs. The document Sanders published last night, along with others released earlier in his campaign, claim to collectively raise less than $43 trillion in new revenue – meaning that he’s at least $10 trillion short. But the revenue projections Sanders uses for his tax proposals are well outside the mainstream of what independent analysts at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Congressional Budget Office, Tax Policy Center, Penn Wharton Budget Model, and others have estimated. After reconciling Sanders’ latest list of pay-fors with these independent estimates, PPI concludes that even if Congress were to adopt every single revenue option Sanders has offered for consideration, it would fall almost $25 trillion short of his proposed spending increases over the next decade – leaving a gap nearly equal to the total value of all goods and services produced by the U.S. economy in one year.

[squirecam]

1. Math is important

Bernie’s plans still fall short in that department.

[uponit7771]

2. Sanders says he will create 20 million jobs uninformed people believe him. That's what's important

[dalton99a]

3. $25 Trillion is really zero in Revolutionary math

It's all good

[Cha]

5. lol

[Cha]

4. KR

[NCProgressive]

6. And that is after low-balling the expenses

The real deficit is probably around $75 trillion

[Laelth]

9. Welcome to DU.

You make a good point. They never told us that it would cost $13 trillion to kill a bunch of Iraqis, but we paid for it anyway. If we can spend $13 trillion killing Iraqis, we can spend whatever it takes to insure that all Americans have access to health care.



-Laelth

[squirecam]

11. This is not the argument Sanders/Warren has been making.

Nt

[Laelth]

14. Nope. It's not.

I think they should.

Cost be damned. The American people deserve universal, taxpayer-funded health care.

The UK has it. Canada has it. Australia has it. New Zealand has it, and we're richer than all of those countries. Why can't we have it?

Barack Obama didn't win with the slogan, "No, we can't." He won by telling the American people, "Yes. We can," and we had better offer the American people what they want, or our party will suffer the consequences.



-Laelth

[squirecam]

10. Its because Democrats are

The responsible parent. Repubs are the other one.

I like the responsible parent. Sure, both parents could just let you do whatever you wanted. But that doesn’t make for a health child.

[Laelth]

8. And the voters don't seem to care.

Are we going to listen to them?

They're just happy that some politician is willing to fight for what they think they deserve ... cost be damned. At this point, it's looking like Bernie will waltz into the convention with an actual majority of pledged delegates.

What are we going to do then?



-Laelth

[Meowmee]

15. What I read so far of the plan

is pretty crazy and unbelievable

[Moderateguy]

16. This needs to be condensed and converted into an AD by one of the campaigns

The republicans are going to do it in the general anyways