On the heels of her Israel stumble,
Ocasio-Cortez sputters when asked about where the money comes from for her grand vision:
In an interview with Trevor Noah on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” Thursday night, candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tried to explain how the United States would pay for all of the entitlements the self-described democratic socialist has campaigned on — including fully taxpayer-sponsored Medicare, college tuition, and housing.
“If people pay their fair share, if corporations and the ultra wealthy, for example, as Warren Buffett likes to say, if he pays as much as his secretary paid, a 15 percent tax rate, if corporations paid, if we reverse the tax bill, raised our corporate tax rate to 28 percent– which is not even as high as it was before — if we do those two things and also close some of those loopholes, that’s $2 trillion right there,” she said. “That’s $2 trillion in ten years.”
CNN estimates that providing Medicare for all would cost $1.4 trillion annually. That means $2 trillion over the course of 10 years would provide a small percentage of the funds she’d need for one plank of her platform alone.
“If we implement a carbon tax on top of that, so that we can transition and incentivize people away from fossil fuels, if we implement a carbon tax, that’s an additional amount of a large amount of revenue that we can have,” she said.
The democratic congressional nominee did not specify how much revenue would be raised through a carbon tax. Economists estimate it may cost as much revenue as it may generate, while increasing unemployment. Ocasio-Cortez also suggested cutting military spending — because the military doesn’t want more fighter jets! Or, presumably, anything else.
“Just last year we gave the military a $700 billion budget increase, which they didn’t even ask for!” she said. “They’re like, ‘We don’t want another fighter jet!’ They’re like, ‘Don’t give us another nuclear bomb!’ you know?”
Probably Russia and China enjoy hearing that sort of thing from a politician whose platform fits their countries’ kleptocratic and communist governments.
Another lefty who's long on feels and short on reals.
I'm skeptical that someone who believes we can all just buy our healthcare off the shelf at Walmart is really credible in criticizing the policy chops of others. Every other first-world nation is able to make this work.
ReplyDeleteIt reminds me of our local fight for curbside recycling pickup. The fight was led by City Council member and mayoral candidate Priscilla Scalf, and the resistance made many predictions that suggested implementation would fail to meet objectives and bust the budget. She did not rely on competing facts or predictions that could be easily shaped to fit the position you prefer. Instead, she kept faith with knowing that over 7,000 communities nationwide were successfully providing this important service, and anything they could do, Columbus certainly should be able to make work. She was not successful, but as her successors and her mayoral opponent have shown, she was correct and her detractors were proven to be wrong.
Ocasio-Cortez may not have a holistic spreadsheet detailing every aspect wrought by such a major change in a significant part of the economy, but she does have the evidence of the global examples which, despite anecdotal complaints about wait periods to get acne scars sanded, is providing high quality healthcare to their populations at a significantly lower cost than the U.S., and with better results.
And I again contend that her so-called Palestine "stumble" is a dishonest characterization. Readily admitting that you do not have a well-developed policy position on every issue IS NO FLAW, and indeed, provides a character-building example for all of us.
DeleteRe: Palestine: well, then, she ought to keep her West-hating trap shut about Israeli "occupation."
ReplyDeleteRe: health care: There are some cases of universal (or nearly so) health care systems that don't run as horribly as the case of the NIH, which I discussed in a post the other day, but any and all of them depend on this: high taxes. And taxes, to review a basic fact, are money taken at gunpoint by the entity in society with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force from sovereign individuals. That is a huge invasion of freedom right there.
No, let everybody keep his or her money and make his or her own choices about caring for his or her health.
If the rejoinder to that goes something like this - "Oh, come on, Washington is crawling with Big Pharma lobbyists and insurance-industry lobbyists" - it proves a basic LITD point - namely, that we haven't seen anything close to a real free market in health care in at least decades.
And as Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute said in the piece about the NIH I discussed in that recent post, the upshot of that is that no one knows the real market value of any given product or service in the broad category we call health care.
So the first step is remove all barriers to finding out the market value of it all. Let things shake out with no government interference and then we'll have a handle on how affordably it is - or is not. And it will quickly get affordable, as real competition starts to work.
But the basic damage to the Madisonian approach to government that is playing itself out in bureaucratic inertia, price and cost confusion, and crummy service, is the idea that infected the West with the rise of progressivism in the last century - namely, that government ought to be enlisted in addressing the two givens of the human condition: sickness and growing old. It should not.
After years of Conservative Party strangling, it's true that the NHS (which is what I assume you really mean) groans when placed under strain, but that is neither unexpected nor dispositive in the matter of single payer. Even with the NHS' shortcomings, as I pointed out in response to the post you are citing, there is absolutely no interest in the UK or any other universal health care country to switch systems with us.
ReplyDeleteRegarding "trap shutting": When I taught at ABC-Stewart, one of the core principals each teacher was charged with teaching in every subject was the idea to "Reserve Judgement", and it's probably a sound notion all around.
Cheers.
*principles
Delete(Crap!)
It's almost as if the ACA was planned to fail from the get-go as it dismayingly did so we could reopen the wound and agonizingly debate single payer or some variation thereof again. This time the plan just simply cannot be rammed up the posteriors of the opposition, but it will likely be. The US has come to be exceptional in that regard.
ReplyDeleteThe first step is to get away from this notion that we need some kind of "plan." The very term has the odor of collectivism wafting off of it.
ReplyDeleteEven some conservatives grant that the Medicaid reforms from the ACA were the best part that should be retained. That coklectivist odor has been sniff tested by the Supreme Coirt and found to be odiferous.
ReplyDelete"Testing" by the Supreme Court doesn't tell us whether something is right, sensible or workable. Sometimes it's not even reliable for telling us about the Constitutionality of something.
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