Bernie Sanders's $18 trillion in proposed spending is more affordable than it sounds

[Nice Squirrel]

That'd be great but since the Federal Government doesn't pay teachers (and most public sector employees), I'm not sure this is on his radar.

The dept of education has a $77 billion budget. That money primarily gets distributed to various school districts, who can use it for teacher salaries. I would not be surprised if Bernie wants to double the dept. of education budget.

NM

 

[dismal]

It that all it costs? Surly the Wall Street Journal Wouldn't lie.

Are you suggesting the WSJ is trying to make Bernie sound more awesomely spendy than he really is?

 

[Nice Squirrel]

It that all it costs? Surly the Wall Street Journal Wouldn't lie.

Are you suggesting the WSJ is trying to make Bernie sound more awesomely spendy than he really is?

Not the Wall Street Journal. They never have had an agenda.

 

[ksen]

PS - Also note that Friedman's "analysis" was rather superficial, nearly a back of the envelope calculation to justify single payer.

Well, given that the modern GOP has based it's whole approach to government based on the drunken scribblings of Arthur Laffer on the back of a soggy cocktail napkin then the back of an envelope is a step up.

 

[dismal]

Are you suggesting the WSJ is trying to make Bernie sound more awesomely spendy than he really is?

Not the Wall Street Journal. They never have had an agenda.

So they are accidentally making Bern sound more awesome?

Or just factually reporting his awesomeness?

 

[Nice Squirrel]

Not the Wall Street Journal. They never have had an agenda.

So they are accidentally making Bern sound more awesome?

Or just factually reporting his awesomeness?

I am tired and don't really want to dismal up this thread with stupid derails.

 

[ksen]

What about it?

Tax base shrinks.

You mean medical costs currently outpace inflation and have done so for decades.

Except now all of that cost will need to be taxed, on a smaller workforce (due to more retirees), who work less with paid family and medical leave.

Prove that the workforce will be smaller and don't forget to factor in that the Millenial generation is bigger than the Baby Boomer generation.

Given that Medicare is much more cost efficient and every other UHC/Single-payer system is more cost efficient than our current system then I'd put money on it being much more affordable in 15 or 30 years than continuing on the path we're on now relying on private insurance markets.

Private insurance markets, the way it currently operates, is not the only choice. See Switzerland or Singapore for some UHC options that I would support.

Which would be a fine discussion to have and one that still acknowledges that our current system is much more expensive and leads to poorer outcomes than other systems, many of which are UHC.

Conclusion assumed and not proven.

If people take more time off, you really think we'll get the same level of production?

So prove it. Sounds simple enough.

That sounds scary!

To assume that all of this is affordable in 30 years without showing the math from expected cost inflation, smaller workforce, etc. is what is really scary.

You're already wrong on smaller workforce so why should I assume you got anything else right?

Um no, it's kind of a let's join the rest of the civilized world when it comes to health, education and other social policies.

How long can this graph and this graph keep going up? If you can't demonstrate the situation will be sustainable in 30 years and not have an unacceptably high risk of a global financial catastrophe should credit markets lose confidence in the fiscal situation of developed countries debt, then your proposal is a non-starter. How high of a risk of global financial catastrophe orders of magnitude more severe than the great recession and the EU sovereign debt crisis are you willing to tolerate? 1%? 5%? How much does the risk increase with these proposals?

Those graphs are more of a product of economies still struggling to grow after the Great Financial Crisis. A healthy, growing economy will take care of the majority of government debt to gdp problems.

 

[SimpleDon]

http://www.vox.com/2015/9/15/9330931/bernie-sanders-spending-cost

I'll take it.

I would question the 15 trillion dollars for Medicare for all. I read somewhere that our current private insurance driven health care system will cost us more than 40 trillion dollars over the next ten years, if it isn't changed. 15 trillion dollars for Medicare for all looks like an unrealistic savings of 25 million dollars.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Yeah, about that $15 trillion in medicare spending.

From the article linked in the OP:



$15 trillion over 10 years is actually about $3 trillion less than is currently projected to be spent privately over the next 10 years on healthcare.

I see you are quoting "objective" VOX, and relying on their enthusiasm for impulsively dashing off uncited claims. Notice that the projected Medicare spending of Bernie's proposal is based on a 2013 analysis for a particular House bill, using Gerald Friedman's work.

But the 2015 estimates for future Medicare spending are based on unknown methods, which may or may not use the same criteria and methodology of Friedman.

Shopping for two different numbers is not difficult, especially when the criteria examined, the methods, and the time period covered are different.

PS - Also note that Friedman's "analysis" was rather superficial, nearly a back of the envelope calculation to justify single payer.

Uh huh. And in the end, it isn't much of a tax hike as it is a deflection of where our current health care premiums are going.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

I do like how Bernie says he will raise the money.

 

[braces_for_impact]

For those wondering:

FMLA requires covered employers to provide up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave to eligible employees for the following reasons: for incapacity due to pregnancy, prenatal medical care or child birth; to care for the employee's child after birth, or placement for adoption or foster care;

from HERE. This is why I spent a week at home after my sone was born in May. You can have 12 weeks off yippee! It's unpaid. You just incurred a lot of new expenses. No time for bonding - get your ass to work, that's the choice you made having kids right?

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

For those wondering:

FMLA requires covered employers to provide up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave to eligible employees for the following reasons: for incapacity due to pregnancy, prenatal medical care or child birth; to care for the employee's child after birth, or placement for adoption or foster care;

from HERE. This is why I spent a week at home after my sone was born in May. You can have 12 weeks off yippee! It's unpaid. You just incurred a lot of new expenses. No time for bonding - get your ass to work, that's the choice you made having kids right?

But... it also has to do with how many employees work within a certain radius of your office, I believe. I wasn't qualified despite working for a corporation that has hundreds of employees.

 

[maxparrish]

I see you are quoting "objective" VOX, and relying on their enthusiasm for impulsively dashing off uncited claims. Notice that the projected Medicare spending of Bernie's proposal is based on a 2013 analysis for a particular House bill, using Gerald Friedman's work.

But the 2015 estimates for future Medicare spending are based on unknown methods, which may or may not use the same criteria and methodology of Friedman.

Shopping for two different numbers is not difficult, especially when the criteria examined, the methods, and the time period covered are different.

PS - Also note that Friedman's "analysis" was rather superficial, nearly a back of the envelope calculation to justify single payer.

Uh huh. And in the end, it isn't much of a tax hike as it is a deflection of where our current health care premiums are going.

You mean if Vox makes an unsupported left talking point from the nether region, without a citation or comparative study, it must be so. Uh huh.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Uh huh. And in the end, it isn't much of a tax hike as it is a deflection of where our current health care premiums are going.

You mean if Vox makes an unsupported left talking point from the nether region, without a citation or comparative study, it must be so. Uh huh.

I don't think Vox made that point, I did.

 

[SimpleDon]

What, no huge investment in green energy projects?

Possibly in the infrastructure section?

No huge raises for public sector employees and teacher salaries?

Most public sector employees work for state and local governments. The president, the office that he is running for, is the head of the federal government.

No new huge grant increases for research? No huge increase in NASA budget to go to Mars? Is this really all the spending increases he and his supporters want, or is this just the first course of a multi-course platter?

Large increases in research wouldn't make the round off error in a scale measured in trillions of dollars. If we could redirect only a small part of the corporate welfare portion of the defense budget to it we could go to Mars with no budget increase. It wouldn't float my boat but why not? We talking about pretty much the same corporations profiting.

I don't know if this is all that he and his supporters want. Are you able to read his mind

What about the fact that the labor force participation will continue to decline as time goes on as the population ages?

All the more reason to start increasing wages for the workers now. Otherwise, we will suffer a double hit in the demand in the economy if we continue to reduce relative wages, the labor share of GDP, while the labor force participation drops.

What about the fact that medical costs continue to outpace inflation? How "affordable" will it be in 15 years? 30 years?

We have been through this before. Medical costs have been driven up in the US over the last forty years as the health care industry has been slowly converted into for profit businesses. There is no indication that any of the presidential candidates other than Sanders wants to reverse this. The Republicans have all pledged to repeal the ACA, which surprisingly has achieved some cost containment at the same time that it has subsidized the grossly inefficient private health care insurance companies.

The Wall Street Journal says that Sander's Medicare for all will cost 15 trillion dollars over ten years, and will save 20 trillion dollars in spending by the private sector. I think that this is overly optimistic. But even if Medicare for all just broke even we would be ahead. The study that the Wall Street Journal quoted also said that Sander's Medicare for all plan would insure everyone in the country, and would be able to provide more services and or lower copays than the ACA.

Since there is still no Republican plan that is less expensive than the ACA, the medical costs of repealing the ACA would be higher still.

More paid family and medical leave means less work gets done, shrinking the economy, which means tax revenue shrinks.

No, you don't understand the economics. Raising benefits is just another form of raising wages and lowering profits. Raising wages can help an economy that has too little demand and too much supply. This is the spot on description of our economy right now. Wages are demand, profits are supply. We have too much of our income going to profits and too little going to wages.

Over the last thirty five years the share of the economy that goes to corporate profits has doubled to 11% of GDP. The labor share has dropped by about the same amount as profits have gone up, 5.5% of GDP. You can see the negative impact of the excessive financial capital, in the unending string of asset bubbles in the economy and in the pressure to privatize endeavors that shouldn't be for profit businesses like education, healthcare, prisons, fighting wars, etc.

This excess of supply and lack of demand in the economy is currently limiting our GDP, our growth. Growth under Reaganomics has ranged between ½% to 1% lower per year than under the previous economic regime.

And you seem to be assuming that people currently work when they are sick. That is from your "means less work gets done." Sick people working is something that I would think would be undesirable, to say the least.

What happens when the next recession hits? How much borrowing can be sustained? 10% of GDP borrowing during the last recession will look like a drop in the bucket should another hard recession hit. The more you rely on tax revenue, the greater the percentage of GDP tax revenue will decline during recessions.

The best thing to do is to avoid the recessions, especially the ones caused by financial crises like the deregulation delusion financial crisis of 200. We have repeatedly proved that the financial markets are inherently unstable. If left on their own as they were before 2008 they will always cause a crash. This is because people in the markets can make large profits in instability as long as they can get out before the crash.

You must not have participated in the thread on government debt in Puerto Rico. There is no reason for a sovereign government to have trouble paying their debts as long as the debts are in the currency that the government controls, that is, in dollars for the US.

Unless they do something stupid like shutting down the government by not raising the debt ceiling. No one could be that stupid, could they?

What do you propose we fund the government with, bake sales?

Isn't this the kind of casino mentality, where a low probability severe impact event can create a catastrophic situation, that the left criticizes the banks for? Doesn't this proposal make the government far more vulnerable to that kind of a situation?

See above. The Sanders proposal will save the nation money, about two trillion dollars over ten years. I don't see this as a problem. Especially if we don't further deregulate the financial markets and allow them to cause another financial crisis.

Think about it: if the US were to have the same GDP per capita as France (which this proposal helps push us toward, as many of the policies are similar and responsible for France's 26% smaller GDP per capita), the US would NOT be able to afford this. If credit were to ever dry up for the United States, the global catastrophe that would result would make the great recession look like a trip to Disneyland in comparison.

No, the Sander's proposal world increase, not decrease the GDP.

The question that you should be asking is how can France deliver all of these services with a much smaller GDP per capita?

 

[SimpleDon]

In fact, one might argue that paid family leave may result in more women staying in the work force, growing the economy.

And there's a word for those people.

Communists.

My daughter in law had my new grandson on the fourth of June (I have pictures!). She went back to work week before last and found out that while she was on maternity leave that the bosses had increased the amount of maternity leave to 18 weeks. She turned around, left the office, picked up her baby (my grandson!), and went home.

She is a lawyer. Obviously her firm is doomed. And communist. Doomed, doomed I say comrade!

 

[ksen]

Welcome to the revolution brother!

 

[fromderinside]

Welcome to the revolution brother!

How far up your ass must a response be before you don't say whoopie?

 

[ksen]

If I go by your mom it'd be about 7 inches.

 

[maxparrish]

And there's a word for those people.

Communists.

My daughter in law had my new grandson on the fourth of June (I have pictures!). She went back to work week before last and found out that while she was on maternity leave that the bosses had increased the amount of maternity leave to 18 weeks. She turned around, left the office, picked up her baby (my grandson!), and went home.

She is a lawyer. Obviously her firm is doomed. And communist. Doomed, doomed I say comrade!

A law firm? Takers not makers. It figures.