| jason1637 said:
I have a question about all these proposals from Bernie. I keep hearing Bernie puts forward a something trillion dollar plan every now and then but honestly how do we pay for it? I've read somewhere that in 2016 he proposed that top earners pay a 56% (iirc) tax and that would not be able to pay for these things. I've also read that the 70% for every dollar over 10 million would only bring in 700 billion so that won't be enough. I expect taxes to be raised on corporations and the middle class but you can only go so far when it comes to corporations since we live in a global economy. I've never seen or heard a reasonable fleshed out explanation on we pay for these things being proposed.
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It's a fair question. I saw a break down of it once that actually spelled out all the math, but I'm having trouble tracking it down. From what I remember, the different policies are payed for as follows:
1. Expanding Social Security is done by removing the cap at which we tax for it. Currently, not all income is taxed for Social Security. We don't tax passive income, and we don't tax earned income above...*googles the number* $132,900 as of 2019. So if we remove that cap, and tax passive income, and expand Social Security accordingly, you can actually give the retired population a real living income and instead of needing to raise the retirement age, you can keep it where it is, and still have enough money for social security for another half a century, instead of the decade and a half we have left right now before the surplus runs out.
2. Medicare for all has a variety of factors that pay for it, I don't remember them all, but in general, the easiest way to understand it is that old people, the most expensive population, are already paid for by Medicare, and poor people, who can't pay into the system, are already paid for by Medicaid, the funding of which would get rolled into Medicare For All. Expanding it to include everyone then means that, if you look at your paycheck, and see how much is taken out for Medicaid and Medicare, combine those amounts because they're one program now, and increase that by a few percent of your income, you get what you'd need to pay into Medicare For All. Right now, that rate is, by my googlings, 1.45% for Medicaid and 1.45% for Medicare, so 2.9% total, double if you're self-employed. The quote I saw from the campaign said to raise the rest of the funds would require an additional 4%. Considering we currently spend 18% of GDP on healthcare in this country, having every possible healthcare expense paid for with just 10% seems like a pretty good savings to me. Remember, his M4A plan includes dental, vision, and hearing, and your premiums, deductibles, and co-pays all go to $0, so while you do pay a bit more in taxes, this is far more than offset by those costs going to $0. You actually save money. If you make more than say, $200k a year, you might not save money, because at a certain point that 4% increase, being 4% of a very large income, would be more than the average healthcare expenditures for the average American.
Now if you're wondering why that 8% of GDP spent on healthcare just magically disappears, there are multiple reasons for that. (Yes I know GDP and income aren't comparable % to % like that, but it's close enough and easier to explain this way) First, you know how everyone says that government is wasteful because of the bureaucracy? Well it's true, objectively, but you know what's even more wasteful? More bureaucracy. And more bureaucracy is exactly what you get when every hospital needs to devote whole floors, wings, or even building of their hospital campus to office space to process insurance claims. Not to mention all the bureaucracy of dozens and dozens of insurance companies with tons of offices across the country. That all goes away with Bernie's M4A, because he gets rid of private insurance, and the plan covers EVERYTHING, so all those now obsolete offices close down, all those upkeep costs go to zero, the labor costs go to zero, and the hospitals can convert those floors/wings/buildings from office space to actual medical floors. (It's free real estate).
And they're going to need that free real estate, because the second major way that M4A eliminates costs is with bargaining. Essentially with all the competitor insurance out of the way, M4A becomes like a monopoly, but in reverse. While a monopoly is one seller, many buyers, M4A is a monopsony, the reverse, with one buyer, many sellers. This is where the phrase "single-payer healthcare" comes in. The government isn't making a profit off this, it has no shareholders or CEOs to pay, so it's only motive is to reduce how much it pays for services, to bargain on behalf of the American people for better healthcare prices, like a giant union made of the entire 300 million+ population of the USA. That's a lot of power, and with no one else to go to, the hospitals, the drug companies, etc. have to meet the demands of the M4A program, because that's their only source of income now. The program just needs to not be so demanding as to put companies out of business, which other countries with similar programs have managed fine so I'm not worried about that. And before you say that all those closed offices will mean lost jobs, just remember that it'll also mean more medical wings opening, so therefore more jobs in healthcare, which pays way better and is way more meaningful than some dumb office job as a paper pusher.
3. Okay, that was a doozy, but you did ask for it. Education is simpler though. College is way cheaper than healthcare, as expensive as college is. Tuition is about $70 billion dollars a year right now, chump change compared to Medicare For All. Also, if you're not aware, his plan doesn't have the federal government pay for all of that either. It only covers 67%, with the states taking the rest. To prevent ballooning costs, it requires all states to pay that 33%, so they have incentive to keep it low, and don't just raise tuition to take more from the federal government. Also, none of the 67% is allowed to go to administrator salaries, so you don't just have the president of the college pocketing an increasing amount of the money every time they think they want a raise. How is it paid for? Bernie calls it a Wall Street speculation tax, but it's a tax on stock trades. With just a 0.5% tax on stock trades, just 50 cents tax on every $100 of stock, plus a 0.1% tax on bond trades, and a 0.005% tax on derivative trades, the Sanders campaign claims the government could raise $2.4 trillion dollars over 10 years. Do the math, 67% of 70 is 47, so $47 billion dollars over 10 years is just $470 billion dollars. What's all that extra money for? Cancelling all student debt. There's $1.6 trillion dollars of student debt right now, and $2.4 trillion-$0.5 trillion-$1.6 trillion is...still $300 billion dollars of padding in case stock trades slow even more than anticipated, and if they don't, then that's $300 trillion dollars off the deficit.
That's enough for now, I have to get back to work. Hope that answers some of your question.
