Whoever gets the Democratic nomination, she or he will run in part on proposals to increase government spending.
In particular, Warren's latest proposal on child care - and the instant pushback from the usual suspects - has me thinking that we could use a rough typology of spending proposals, classified by how they might be paid for.
My second category is a bit harder to define, but what I'm thinking of are initiatives that either expand an existing public program or use subsidies to create incentives for expanding some kind of socially desirable private activity - in each case involving sums that are significant but not huge, say a fraction of a percent of GDP.The Affordable Care Act falls into that category.
Warren's childcare proposal, which reportedly will come in at around 1/3 of a percent of GDP, also fits.
So would a "Medicare for All" proposal that involves allowing people to buy in to government insurance, rather than offering that insurance free of charge.
Proposals in this category are literally an order of magnitude more expensive than benefit enhancements: private health insurance currently amounts to 6 percent of GDP. To implement these proposals we'd need a lot more revenue, which would have to come from things like payroll taxes and/or a value-added tax that hit the middle class.
My main point now is that when people ridicule progressive proposals as silly and unaffordable, they're basically revealing their own biases and ignorance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/opinion/on-paying-for-a-progressive-agenda.html
In particular, Warren's latest proposal on child care - and the instant pushback from the usual suspects - has me thinking that we could use a rough typology of spending proposals, classified by how they might be paid for.
My second category is a bit harder to define, but what I'm thinking of are initiatives that either expand an existing public program or use subsidies to create incentives for expanding some kind of socially desirable private activity - in each case involving sums that are significant but not huge, say a fraction of a percent of GDP.The Affordable Care Act falls into that category.
Warren's childcare proposal, which reportedly will come in at around 1/3 of a percent of GDP, also fits.
So would a "Medicare for All" proposal that involves allowing people to buy in to government insurance, rather than offering that insurance free of charge.
Proposals in this category are literally an order of magnitude more expensive than benefit enhancements: private health insurance currently amounts to 6 percent of GDP. To implement these proposals we'd need a lot more revenue, which would have to come from things like payroll taxes and/or a value-added tax that hit the middle class.
My main point now is that when people ridicule progressive proposals as silly and unaffordable, they're basically revealing their own biases and ignorance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/opinion/on-paying-for-a-progressive-agenda.html
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