If the Progressive Agenda Is “Pie in the Sky”, We Can Have Our Pie and Eat It, Too.
This is an op-ed I wrote for a now defunct independent organization website back in Fall of 2018. Some of the dates, etc. might be a little outdated, but I am posting this here for saving.
It is a wonderful time to be an Establishment journalist. Our government is currently in shambles, and the 24/7 news cycle is easily filled on a daily basis with every scandal and twist and turn rocking the Trump Presidency. Effectively, the administration is doing a journalist’s job for them. We must all be thankful to our system of government which has withstood all of these stresses that this unprecedented level of corruption, bigotry, malfeasance, and sheer incompetence currently seen. It is a testament to the intellect of our Founding Fathers that they were able to create a system of government which can weather such a storm and still stand.
However, despite the Trump Administration’s making the job of journalists easy, certain members of the establishment media continue to behave as they have in the past: continuing to attack the ideals of liberalism and the progressive platform while doing nothing to hold to account the neoconservative war machine and other inane excesses that the American taxpayer has been forced to foot the bill for in the postwar era.
One of the starkest and most blatant instances of journalistic malfeasance was an interview that Jake Tapper of CNN did with rising star of the Democratic Party and Progressive icon Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I urge everyone who reads this to watch the full interview and form their own opinions on it because there are certainly intelligent and cogent points discussed in there. However, there is one part of the interview where Tapper attempts to ambush Ocasio-Cortez with a question about paying for her Progressive agenda that absolutely infuriated me. In it he comes up with a random number for $40 trillion over a decade for the entire Progressive plan heralded by Ocasio-Cortez and others of her mindset.
Tapper goes on to say:
Your platform has called for various new programs, including Medicare for all, housing as a federal right, a federal jobs guarantee, tuition-free public college, cancelling all student loan debt. According to nonpartisan and left-leaning studies friendly to your cause including the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities or the Tax Policy Center, the overall price tag is more than $40 trillion in the next decade. You recently said in an interview that increasing taxes on the very wealthy plus an increased corporate tax rate would make $2 trillion over the next ten years. Where is the other $38 trillion going to come from?
The sheer temerity of Tapper of putting forward such an extreme and insane claim that neither the CBPP nor the TPC have come up with as an aggregate expenditure so far as my research has revealed requires one to raise their eyebrows at his claim at an absolute minimum. I have not been able to find a suitable piece by either the CBPP or the TPC that corroborates this aggregate that Tapper claims, but for the sake of argument, let us assume that he is right and analyze this as such.
I will be frank here about Ocasio-Cortez’s response; it was not the most specific nor was it something inspiring. However, considering that Tapper seemingly pulled this number out of nowhere in his rush to ambush and attempt to discredit her and the entire progressive agenda, I do not blame her for not having a fully formed and calculated response. Throw in the fact that she is one of the youngest candidates for the House of Representatives ever, that she does not have nearly as large a staff or office budget to hire economists and analysts to do their research and present the information to her as current politicians do, and that she originally came on the show to talk about Trump’s horrifying response to the death toll due to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, and it is completely understandable that she did not have a response fully formed or ready for such a question.
However, her response was still decent, and again I urge everyone to watch the full interview, but I will just briefly quote from near the end of her first response. Ocasio-Cortez believes that “these investments are better and good for our future.”
Such an exchange between the two goes on about three times in a row where Tapper continues to press Ocasio-Cortez on this so-called “left-leaning analysis” that produced this $40 trillion aggregate as Ocasio-Cortez continues to refuse to give him the satisfaction of successfully ambushing her. She provides very important and extremely valid context for why these investments in the American people are the right thing to do and will help the American people in the long run. Again, considering that Tapper fully intended to ambush her, I would say that she gave a decent answer. I think it would have been more powerful if she had said something to the effect of “I need to research this number further and will get back to you”, but she refused to be kowtowed by the establishment media, and she deserves all of the credit for that. We are so used to seeing Democrats falter and stumble and give in to the establishment media that this is a welcome surprise that Ocasio-Cortez remained with her head on straight and refused to do the same.
In the end, after this back and forth, Tapper ends with this before moving on to talk about the issues related to the sexual assault allegation laid against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh:
I’m assuming I’m not going to get an answer for the other $38 trillion, but we will have you back and maybe we can go over that.
Such ends the discussion about paying for the progressive agenda in this ambush interview. As I mentioned, Ocasio-Cortez was not able to provide a funding mechanism for this price tag, but in this analysis, I intend to do so. Let us start with what is probably the only graphic of substance that CNN provided in this interview:
I do not know if CNN provides to its interviewees who are not in the studio as Ocasio-Cortez was not in this case of what they are showing on the screen, so I cannot say if Ocasio-Cortez had seen this and knew the actual numbers that Tapper was aggregating. Regardless, let us now turn to the issue of funding this agenda that Tapper and the establishment media continue to say is “pie in the sky.”
In this graphic, the numbers do add up to what Tapper had said; the total comes out to be $40.1 trillion. However, for the Medicare for All price tag, I am actually going to use the Koch-funded conservative Mercatus Center’s estimate of $32.6 trillion over the next decade.
This sum total comes $40.7 trillion over the next ten years for the progressive agenda over the next decade. Again, assuming very broadly that this is an accurate statement, this ends up being about $4.07 trillion per year. An obiter dictum note of mention: One of the favorite scare tactics that the right wing and establishment media employ to discredit the progressive agenda is to take price tags over a full decade rather than give an annual cost. This is done in order to massively inflate the price tag and provide no context. That being said, let us look at financing this.
In 2016, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) administered by the Department of Health and Human Services calculated that the total national cost of healthcare was $3.3 trillion. In 2017, CMS calculated that the national aggregate expenditure on healthcare was $3.5 trillion. In the same study, CMS calculated that in 2026, the country will spend a total of $5.7 trillion on healthcare. Now, let’s take a minute to note that this is projecting the current system of an intermingled and very confusing system of public and private healthcare in this country and that this analysis was completed during the Trump administration, not the Obama administration.
The right wing and establishment media continually tells us that if we move towards single payer, we will spend more money, but CMS itself says that this is blatantly false. CMS expects that the national healthcare expenditure will rise 5.5% each year until 2026. I ran the numbers to see what this would cost over the 2017-2026 decade, and the numbers were staggering. This represents a total national healthcare expenditure of $45.2 trillion over the next decade! Let us take a moment to appreciate the sheer magnitude of this number and to compare it with the given numbers for single payer.
Tapper claims that the CBPP and TPC came up with an aggregate of $40.1 trillion over the next decade for the entire progressive agenda with $32 trillion for just healthcare. That means that if we switch from the current system of public and private insurance to a single payer Medicare for All system, as a country, we will save a total of $13.2 trillion over the next decade just on healthcare and a total of $5.1 trillion over the next decade by implementing the entire progressive agenda, including Medicare for All, over the next decade just from going to single payer. Honestly, this should be the end of this discussion, period. Just by switching our healthcare system to that promulgated by Progressives we save over $5 trillion as compared to what Tapper claims will cost us for the entire progressive agenda.
Clearly, we have the money for the entire progressive agenda because we are either spending it right now or we are planning to spend it over the next decade, and in fact, by not implementing the progressive agenda, by Tapper’s estimates, we are wasting $5.1 trillion. Let me reiterate: By not implementing the full progressive agenda, we are wasting $5.1 trillion over the next decade! It is fiscally irresponsible to not implement the full progressive agenda. That is $5.1 trillion over the next decade of American taxpayer money which we are tantamount to setting on fire by not implementing the progressive agenda.
As such, Jake Tapper, when you ask if we can pay for it, yes, we can pay for it. In fact, once we finish paying for the full progressive agenda, we will save $5.1 trillion just from healthcare costs. Let’s see, if Tapper and the Mercatus Center are correct, we need to find $4.07 trillion per year to finance the progressive agenda. I’ve already proved above that we can save way more than spend, but now let’s look at actually financing it.
I’ve already accounted how switching to Medicare for All will save us money, but to reiterate, the country already spent $3.5 trillion last year. By switching to Medicare for All, we will roughly only spend $3.26 trillion a year by the Koch-funded conservative Mercatus Center’s estimate. This means that we need to account for another $8.1 trillion over the next decade to meet a combination of Tapper’s and the Mercatus Center’s estimate.
The number one area of waste in the federal government is the Pentagon. By a Washington Post analysis, over a five year period, the Pentagon lost $125 billion and then buried the evidence so that Congress would not slash their funding. This is horrible misconduct. In addition, the Pentagon is the only area of government that is not audited. We must change this. Also, Congress throws money at the Pentagon and forces them to buy weapons that the Armed Forces themselves do not want or need every year to satisfy the defense contractors who lobby them. Obviously, this is another waste of taxpayer money. As such, to prevent more waste in the Pentagon, I propose that we freeze defense spending for the next decade at 2017 levels: $583 billion per year. The Pentagon has so much money that they are literally wasting it, so they can definitely function on this. The CBO currently estimates that we will spend an additional $883 billion over the next decade on defense if we do not freeze it at 2017 levels. After this we need to find another $7.2 trillion.
If we reverse the 2017 Trump tax cuts that were a giveaway for the wealthiest and the corporations, we will save another $1.9 trillion over the next decade, according to the CBO. That leaves us with finding $5.3 trillion. If we reverse the Bush-era tax cuts that were made permanent by the Obama administration, which were another giveaway to the wealthiest and corporations, we will save another $3.3 trillion over the next decade according to the CBO. We need another $2 trillion to come to a balance on the entire progressive agenda now. If we close just three corporate tax loopholes: exclusion of rental income, capital gains, and deferral of controlled foreign corporations’ income, in ten years, we will receive another $2.72 trillion. And this not only balances the budget on the entire progressive agenda over the next decade even if we ignore all the savings from switching to Medicare for All, it actually brings in an additional $720 billion over the next decade for the federal government to spend.
Don’t tell me we don’t have the money, Jake Tapper, because we do. You know this. I know this. Anyone with access to Google knows this. It is a matter of priorities. Do our lawmakers work for us, the American people, or do they work for their wealthy donors and lobbying groups? Stop being disingenuous, Jake Tapper, and open your eyes. The rest of us have. It’s now your turn. Yes, the progressive agenda can be paid for, and it will actually save money. Hell, if we only switched to Medicare for All and ignored the rest of the progressive agenda, we will save $13.2 trillion over the next decade, and if we implemented the entire progressive agenda, just from switching to Medicare for All, we would save $5.1 trillion over the next decade without any additional sources of revenue. And even if you wanted to keep the current expenditures as they are for whatever dumb reason, there still is enough money that we can actually increase government revenue by $780 billion over the next decade just by freezing defense spending at 2017 levels, reversing the Trump and Bush tax cuts, and closing only three corporate tax loopholes.
Let’s revisit the aggregates. As of right now, we are planning to spend $45.2 trillion over the next decade on healthcare alone. We are planning to spend a total of $6.72 trillion over the next decade on defense. We are planning to actively forego $1.9 trillion over the next decade because of the Trump tax cuts. We are planning to actively forego $3.3 trillion over the next decade because of the Bush tax cuts. Just three of many loopholes in the corporate tax code (exclusion of rental income, capital gains, and deferral of controlled foreign corporations’ income) account to $2.72 trillion in lost income over the next decade. All of these costs tell us that we are currently planning to waste $58.84 trillion over the next decade!
Now, let’s consider what the progressive agenda will cost. Jake Tapper claims that the progressive agenda will cost $40.1 trillion over the decade. Even if we assume that this is correct, we will actually save $18.74 trillion over the next decade! Let me reiterate: By implementing the progressive agenda, freezing defense spending at 2017 levels, reversing the Trump tax cuts, reversing the Bush tax cuts, and closing ONLY three corporate tax loopholes, we will save $18.74 trillion over the next decade!!
And for those so-called “fiscal conservatives” who say that the national debt and deficit matter, this is your chance to show that you actually mean it. If we implement this agenda, we will have $18.74 trillion over the next decade to pay off the majority of our current $21.5 trillion national debt. I dare you to actually stand by your principles and do what is actually fiscally responsible.
Stop playing dumb, Jake Tapper, and stop being a shill for the establishment and right wing machine. You’re better than that.