Although the midterms are still in front of us, the leading lights of the Democratic party, and its likely presidential frontrunners, are already preparing for the election to follow, with a series of sweeping domestic policy proposals.
As it turns out, the pitch for nearly all of them is fundamentally the same: The government should be larger and spend more money, with debt and deficits an afterthought at best.
Bernie Sanders would like to spend more money on Medicare for all, Kirsten Gillibrand on a jobs guarantee, Cory Booker on bonds for children, Kamala Harris on a tax credit-essentially a cash subsidy-for the middle class and working poor.
Taken together, these plans highlight the ways in which, under Trump, Democratic policy ambitions have become emboldened by the Republican party's hypocrisy and carelessness when it comes to the deficit-and in particular by last year's tax law, which, along with both military and domestic spending increases, has helped send annual deficits toward the trillion dollar mark.
This represents a transformation from the 1990s, when Democratic centrists were ascendant and President Bill Clinton famously declared that the era of big government was over.
Although the GOP has begun to attempt to counter the Democratic agenda, they have do so by adopting rhetoric that ends up supporting their opponents, offering defenses of Medicare and Obamacare's insurance regulations, signing on to spending bills that accept domestic funding increases in exchange for more money for the military, and promising further waves of tax cuts that would send the deficit spiraling ever higher, and offering additional justification for the Democrats' fiscal expansions in the process.
Under Trump, Democrats have become the party of even bigger government-but Republicans have become the party of the big government we already have.
http://reason.com/blog/2018/10/23/democratic-presidential-hopefuls-have-bi
As it turns out, the pitch for nearly all of them is fundamentally the same: The government should be larger and spend more money, with debt and deficits an afterthought at best.
Bernie Sanders would like to spend more money on Medicare for all, Kirsten Gillibrand on a jobs guarantee, Cory Booker on bonds for children, Kamala Harris on a tax credit-essentially a cash subsidy-for the middle class and working poor.
Taken together, these plans highlight the ways in which, under Trump, Democratic policy ambitions have become emboldened by the Republican party's hypocrisy and carelessness when it comes to the deficit-and in particular by last year's tax law, which, along with both military and domestic spending increases, has helped send annual deficits toward the trillion dollar mark.
This represents a transformation from the 1990s, when Democratic centrists were ascendant and President Bill Clinton famously declared that the era of big government was over.
Although the GOP has begun to attempt to counter the Democratic agenda, they have do so by adopting rhetoric that ends up supporting their opponents, offering defenses of Medicare and Obamacare's insurance regulations, signing on to spending bills that accept domestic funding increases in exchange for more money for the military, and promising further waves of tax cuts that would send the deficit spiraling ever higher, and offering additional justification for the Democrats' fiscal expansions in the process.
Under Trump, Democrats have become the party of even bigger government-but Republicans have become the party of the big government we already have.
http://reason.com/blog/2018/10/23/democratic-presidential-hopefuls-have-bi
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