Sen Warren's #MedicareForAll Plan

[Michele]

She put this up this morning:

cont.

[Michele]

[Newman]

Thin Lizzies's Wedge

A look at the consequences of her taxation math by Steven Hayward:

I’m starting to wonder whether Elizabeth Warren is another Karl Rove/Steve Bannon dirty trick—a plant inside the Democratic Party with the perfect appeal to make the party sign up for the biggest political suicide note since the Labour Party decided to run on unilateral disarmament against Margaret Thatcher in 1983. (Labour lost in a historic landslide.)

Warren’s Medicare-for-All will depend apparently on a 6 percent wealth tax on the super-rich, up from a previously proposed 3 percent. (Funny how the tax rate is rising already.) Here’s a riddle. Let’s just take Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, each worth something like $100 billion in round numbers. I am continually surprised by the number of people who think that Bezos, Gates, Buffett, etc., all have $100 billion in cash in a bank savings account or something—or even stacks of $100 bills in a vault somewhere. The fact that these wealth figures are the capitalized market value of the immense asset base (tangible and intangible) on paper (and only at the margin) is lost on everyone.

So let’s just take a hypothetical annual 3% wealth tax and run it out. Gates, Bezos, Buffett, et al. will have to sell $3 billion worth of their stock holdings—each year—to send their wealth tax check to the IRS.

Question: Just who is going to buy that much stock every year?

And what would the effect of the many forced liquidations have on stock values, not to mention credit markets if Bezos decided to borrow the money every year (and, incidentally, wipe out any income tax liability for the year—heh)?

. . . The detachment from reality here is breathtaking. But reality may not be the main object of this whole exercise. What we’re really seeing in action is “punitive liberalism.” I refer back to a suite of tweets I shared some months ago:

and so on.

The media has been knocked silly by her $52 trillion dollar estimate, such that they seem to forget this is only a part of her menu of freebies, which includes free universal child care,

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has rolled out a sweeping plan to provide all Americans with affordable child care, paid for with a new tax on multimillionaires.

and free college and student debt forgiveness.

Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has revealed a new higher-education platform that aims to eliminate tuition for two and four-year public colleges and cancel student loan debt for millions of Americans, the senator from Massachusetts announced Monday morning.

The plan is the first from among the top Democratic candidates to propose fully eliminating existing debt for most students. It would create a one-time cost of $640 billion to the federal government and ultimately be paid for by an "Ultra-Millionaire Tax,"  an annual 2% tax on the estimated 75,000 families with $50 million or more in wealth.

Sometimes I think she expects her staff and followers to take an SNL skit literally, and maybe they do. Everybody knows the left has no sense of humor or hyperbole.

And when concerned audience members asked her how she would pay for her plan the character gave more truth than the real Sen. Warren.

“We’re talking trillions. You know when the numbers are this big, they’re just pretend,” the Warren character said.

[Newman]

Adriana Cohen in the Boston Herald:

Stick a fork in Liz Warren, Medicare-for-All has cooked her

Now that she’s finally released details on her Medicare-for-All plan and its eye-wincing $52 trillion projected price tag, there’s no way that 160 million Americans who like their healthcare plans — including labor unions — will want to see them made illegal.

Gaffes notwithstanding, Joe Biden is poised to benefit politically from Warren’s socialized medicine plan. He now appears like the adult in the room by opposing the elimination of private insurance.

In a statement released Friday, Biden’s campaign slammed Warren for promising her plan won’t raise taxes on the middle class.

“For months, Elizabeth Warren has refused to say if her health care plan would raise taxes on the middle class, and now we know why: because it does. Senator Warren would place a new tax of nearly $9 trillion that will fall on American workers.”

I have a nit to pick with Ms Cohen after she scores Canada's system,

Last year the Fraser Institute, an independent Canadian think tank, reported the median wait time to see a general practitioner is 8.7 weeks. To see a specialist is an additional 11 weeks. That’s nearly 20 weeks before a Canadian citizen can get the care they need. Now consider if you or a loved one has a life-threatening illness like cancer where the disease will likely advance while waiting months before the bureaucracy hopefully signs off on treatment.

and later asks, rhetorically,

If anyone thinks allowing power hungry socialists to control the entire health-care industry — 20% of the U.S. economy — is a good idea or will go smoothly, just remember that here in Massachusetts, the government couldn’t even get a website to work during the Obamacare rollout.

And who can forget the 2015 inspector general’s report that found that 307,000 veterans may have died waiting for medical treatment at the VA? Not exactly confidence building.

Well, the answer is, most people can forget anything. Including how much a trillion is.

“We’re talking trillions. You know when the numbers are this big, they’re just pretend,” the Warren character said.

Undaunted, Ms Cohen concludes,

Will we see a future Biden/Buttigieg ticket in the making? Only time will tell.

What we do know right now, is Warren’s days are numbered.

[Newman]

Theodore Dalrymple was quoted in another thread here,

“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is...in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”

I'm wondering if this might not be the case regarding Ms Warren's price tag for healthcare as a human right.

At first blush it's so outrageous even SNL makes fun of it. But novelty wears off quickly.

Soon it becomes a banality, absurd but seldom scrutinized, like other outrageous policies, including open borders. $52 trillion becomes a glossed over footnote in her campaign version of an Eagles song, "Life in the free lane, everything all the time. / Life in the free lane, surely make you lose your mind."

Is that the intent? That progressive Democrats choose their compassionate ideology over arithmetic, and become complicit in the hoax?

Her stem-winder knocks competitors who'd advise us to "dream small," and she wraps up with an exhortation to "dream big, and we. will. win!"

The emphasis should be on "dream." I don't think this plan will work in the primary season, though it looks like she's doing well in Iowa. $52 trillion is a lot. If you collected every single piece of currency that everyone has in the U.S, it would amount to less than $1.7 trillion. We'd have to do it another thirty times to pay for her Big Dream.

[Norm dePlume]

I guess she should have just said Mexico's gonna pay for it. That's proven to get people elected.

[scott]

I guess she should have just said Mexico's gonna pay for it. That's proven to get people elected.

If that's what you think got Trump elected then you actually think the promises of "your doctor" will also work this time. You realize that transferring assets and a large part of the economy to the government is NOT "one of the greatest federal expansions of middle-class wealth in history," correct? The government is not and never has been the middle class and the government is not and never has been a good steward of "middle-class wealth."

And the part about "bring down out-of-control costs?" In Medicare? Yeah. Out of control costs is the problem Medicare created in the first place.

[80zephyr]

If that's what you think got Trump elected then you actually think the promises of "your doctor" will also work this time. You realize that transferring assets and a large part of the economy to the government is NOT "one of the greatest federal expansions of middle-class wealth in history," correct? The government is not and never has been the middle class and the government is not and never has been a good steward of "middle-class wealth."

And the part about "bring down out-of-control costs?" In Medicare? Yeah. Out of control costs is the problem Medicare created in the first place.

And insurance
.

Mark

[Newman]

I guess she should have just said Mexico's gonna pay for it. That's proven to get people elected.

It used to be that "cutting fraud and waste" was the elixir of free spenders.

For health-care-is-a-human-right logicians, "savings" in various incarnations has been the magic ingredient.

But Ms Warren's numbers require something new.

Y'know, Norm, for a number of years I have angrily dismissed support for higher income taxes by the likes of Warren Buffett, and said that if you want to poke the bear, start talking about a wealth tax (and piercing their "foundations" along the way.)

It looks to me like Ms Warren has actually crossed that Rubicon, and the backlash has been quick and prominent. Wasn't that Bill Gates I just saw a clip of, saying in effect, "Now hold on a minute. . . ."?

I think the dominance she and Bernie are showing among the Democratic candidates is the reason the wealthy establishment is panicking and looking for saviors like Michael Bloomberg.

[Billy Jingo]

Boomers not wanting anyone else to have what they've got is on brand.

[Norm dePlume]

If that's what you think got Trump elected then you actually think the promises of "your doctor" will also work this time. You realize that transferring assets and a large part of the economy to the government is NOT "one of the greatest federal expansions of middle-class wealth in history," correct? The government is not and never has been the middle class and the government is not and never has been a good steward of "middle-class wealth."

And the part about "bring down out-of-control costs?" In Medicare? Yeah. Out of control costs is the problem Medicare created in the first place.

Yeah, nobody was paying thousands of dollars for MRI scans in 1964, were they?

[Newman]

When the numbers are this big, they’re just pretend.

This American Thinker piece (Taylor Lewis) poses a question:

Will Democrat primary voters care if Elizabeth Warren's health care plan can't possibly work?

No.

This essay takes apart Adriana Cohen's piece cited here.

Where Cohen errs is in her estimate of the Democratic electorate. The unpleasant consequences of Warren's signature health care policy aren't about to spoil her primary chances. If anything, they'll have the opposite effect, further ingratiating her to the party's perfervid base.

That Warren even put out such a sweeping plan is garnering her plaudits from journalists who've made their admiration of the bookish senator no secret. One MSNBC host described the plan as the "ultimate clapback" to conservative critics, appropriating a slang term that wouldn't go unnoticed had a white conservative employed it, while another correspondent claimed the costly conspectus "allows Warren to come off her heels and start going on offense." Paul Krugman, the cantankerous New York Times columnist, called it a "real plan, not a trickle-down fantasy" that manages to be more about "signaling values and policy seriousness" than sillily providing an actuary-approved budget that pays for everyone's health care, down to removing little Jimmy's tonsils. "Elizabeth Warren's Plan Is a Massive Win for the Medicare for All Movement," wrote activist Ady Barkan. How so? Because ensuring people "get the doctors and caregivers and treatments [they] need...for free" is a "deeply appealing vision."

Notice the language being used in these defenses: "vision," "values," "offense." These terms don't jibe with the Warren campaign's cutesy strapline, "I've got a plan for that." They're abstract, appealing to pathos rather than green-eyeshaded reason. But then, that's always been Warren's — pardon the capitalist term — specialization.

Warren's main appeal is the same as her fellow bolshie Bernie, though it's dressed up in wonky costume jewelry. Their campaigns are fueled by an intoxicating mix of invidiousness and tall poppy syndrome, with a heavy pinch of victimology.

In his underrated political intrigue drama, The Apple Cart, George Bernard Shaw's fictional king Magnus laments, "The people have found out long ago that democracy is humbug, and that instead of establishing responsible government it has abolished it." The responsibility and shrewdness of governing, Magnus continues, no longer belong to kings or statesmen, but "whoever is clever enough to get them."

Pie-in-the-sky promises, vapid soundbites, paeans to collective prosperity, heedless anger — these rhetorical devices, employed in clever language drafted by highly paid consultants, are what attract primary voters and win over cable-TV chatter heads.

Shaw foresaw the emotive popularity contest democracy would soon become in an age of mass media. In a primary field occupied entirely by candidates who wish to overturn the last election through impeachment, voters aren't concerned about a few more zeroes on the National Debt Clock.

Elizabeth Warren's chances in the Democratic primary contest are just fine. For now.

[Billy Jingo]

The impeachment and conviction of Trump will not overturn the last election. Pence will be sworn in, not Clinton. So once again, American Thinker shows itself to be the most ironically name publication in the English language.