These answers by her actually show me she’s serious about trying to get elected, instead of taking positions that are going to get her literally destroyed on the campaign trail. Abolish ICE is a fine slogan but her point on needing Custom enforcement which is part of ICE regardless of whether it can be split later seems to not be anything crazy. Suspending Deportation as a way to get comprehensive immigration reform is a good move. So honestly I care about results WAYYYY more than I care about saying Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE is something activists should be using to push, The Leaders however should be focused on getting our messed up immigration system fixed and ending needless deportation and detainment especially of families and children…
This again?
She might think saying “we need ICE” is “trying to win” but it’s the belief that is wrong. Saying “we need ICE” makes you lose, not win.
Look we just want humane detention camps capitalism.
Remember when Trump would say/do something his base didn’t like, and they would say he was actually playing 8D chess and everyone would laugh at them?
Interesting Warren/Sanders piece comparing their Wealth Taxes that disregards the rhetoric about whether billionaires should exist or not.
Personally, while I’m in favor of a wealth tax, I don’t think either Warren or Sanders’s plans will be as effective as they claim they will. Real life tends to diminish the effectiveness of plans hatched in theoretical environments.
"Warren’s choice to ease up on the class war rhetoric in this instance is a good example of the stylistic and ideological gap that divides her candidacy from Sanders’. He’s the democratic socialist who wants to lead the United States through a political and economic revolution. She’s the capitalist who wants to make markets and the government work more equitably for the middle class and poor. He would like to #abolishbillionaires. She merely wants to soak them.
But the talk is misleading in this case. If you set aside what Warren said and look carefully at her latest policy plans, hers would do more to cut many billionaire fortunes down to size than Sanders’. Here’s a simple way to break this down: Sanders has proposed one new wealth tax, but Warren has quietly proposed two. And when combined, Warren’s are a bit more aggressive…
It’s worth noting here that, as far as I can tell anyway, neither Warren’s nor Sanders’ plan would abolish many billionaires per se . It’s theoretically possible that some of the ultrarich would see their fortunes taxed until they fell below the all-important 10-figure, but they would need to earn fairly low annual returns for that to happen. What both Warren’s and Sanders’ plans are structured to do is gradually chip away at truly huge fortunes, like Gates’. And under normal circumstances, Warren’s probably chips away faster.
So if your goal is to bring the billionaire class to heel, Warren’s tax plan might be more to your liking. When I brought this up to the Sanders campaign, a slightly unhappy policy aide pointed out that the Vermont senator has proposed a higher estate tax than Warren, which could prevent more rich heirs from inheriting billions. This is an important point, given that, as I’ve written, America’s superrich are starting to get quite old. But that doesn’t change the fact that Warren’s plan would probably claw more back from the Dimon family in the here and now.
A few things to note about Warren’s plan: First, the proposal is kind of messy. Many tax experts think that a mark-to-market system would be a good, practical alternative to a Warren-style net worth tax—since they worry that the latter would be hard to implement and could be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Few whom I am aware of have suggested combining them. Why not? Because these taxes overlap. If you tax someone’s net worth, you are already taxing their unrealized capital gains. So unless you’re worried about John Roberts striking it down, it’s just simpler to increase the size of your net worth tax. There’s no obvious policy reason to use two wealth taxes when one will do.
Second, nobody actually knows how much money these two taxes raise if you mush them together. The Warren campaign tried to ballpark an estimate by taking how much revenue each tax would bring in on its own ($4 trillion for the net worth tax and $2 trillion for mark-to-market) and then adding up the total. But this figure was almost certainly too high, since each tax lowers how much you can raise from the other (if you tax someone’s unrealized capital gains, they’ll have less wealth left over to tax, and vice versa). In the meantime, it doesn’t appear anybody has done a more formal version of the math. “It’s a pretty immense modeling challenge and I don’t think anyone has the capability to produce those numbers at the moment,” Lily Batchelder, an NYU tax law professor who’s written extensively on mark-to-market taxation, told me in an email.
So perhaps it’s best to think of Warren’s recent tax proposals less as a technically precise blueprint and more as a statement of principles. As she put it during the last debate: “Show me your budget, show me your tax plans, and we’ll know what your values are.” In this case, hers are a bit more aggressive against billionaires than her recent rhetoric implies. Some will be relieved to learn that. Others will have more reasons to shed a tear."
What’s the bottom line I’m supposed to take away? Your bolding seems to imply that the Warren plans are better however the actual text of the article shows that the plans are poorly thought out and likely to not actually be effective due to legal issues.
BTW, I’m not sure their analysis is completely correct. At least relative to this source
I think there are two points to the article:
- A candidate’s rhetoric might not match up with their policy proposals. I don’t have the background to say one way or the other whether the author’s conclusion is correct about Warren’s plan versus Sanders’s, but it doesn’t matter. Rhetoric is just words. An actual policy proposal or plan is what people should focus on.
That being said,
- The author seems to imply that pretty much all these plans are unknowns and are Constitutionally questionable. Whether it’s a Wealth Tax or Medicare for All, we shouldn’t read them as literal plans that the candidates are going to enact unchanged if they get elected. These plans are more ideas, statement of purposes, that will be modified and altered, so we shouldn’t get all riled up about one versus another.
Edited to add that a large part of point #2 comes from another article that the author wrote for Slate recently:
" This is what makes the whole conversation about Medicare for All so surreal. On the primary trail, Warren and Bernie Sanders are trying to outdo one another over who has the best plan to nationalize the American health insurance system. Journalists and think tankers—myself included—are scrutinizing the detailed mechanics of their proposals while the candidates’ supporters snipe at one another. Just about every primary debate has started with a repetitious scuffle over single payer. The topic has sucked the oxygen out of almost any other major policy discussion.
Meanwhile, the people in Congress who would need to support any actual legislation are saying over and over again that it’s never going to happen. And they are almost certainly correct. Even if Democrats can retake the Senate—which would require a small miracle—there is more than enough opposition to kill a single-payer bill. Sitting Sen. Amy Klobuchar is campaigning for president on a platform that consists largely of trashing Medicare for All. Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, long one of the chamber’s most progressive members, says that it would be a “terrible mistake” for the Democratic nominee to support Medicare for All. Joe Manchin exists. Kyrsten Sinema exists. These are the facts on the ground. And while Bernie Sanders can threaten moderates like Manchin all he likes, American presidents don’t exactly have the greatest track record of bending a recalcitrant Congress to their wills, even when they’re relatively fresh off an election win and Capitol Hill is led by their own party. (See: Donald Trump and Obamacare repeal, George W. Bush and Social Security privatization, Bill Clinton and his health care plan.)
So why are we even talking about Medicare for All at this point?
One part of the answer is that presidential campaigns aren’t just about making realistic promises about what you’ll do in the White House, but are also about laying out a broader philosophical vision. They are also a chance to change public opinion: Single payer was barely on the public’s radar before Bernie Sanders ran in 2016. Now it’s mainstream. And while Sanders and Warren might have little chance of passing Medicare for All as president, their efforts to build support for it could pay off one day down the line when President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is entering her first 100 days in office. It’s fair to think about all this as part of a larger, ideological battle over the party’s very long-term future, not just on health care policy but regarding the entire size and role of government in society.
Ezra Klein articulated another reason we’re so focused on this thing that probably won’t happen, arguing in a very good article in Vox that what we’re really witnessing is a debate over political tactics, two clashing theories of change. The left believes that if it demands a full loaf on health care, then it might eventually get half once it comes time to pass a bill. The moderates, on the other hand, worry that if a Democratic president pushes for something too extreme on health care in 2021, nothing at all will pass. Warren and Sanders are trying to avoid a repeat of Obamacare, which was consciously designed as a compromise with conservatives and was watered down further as it progressed through Congress. The moderates are trying to avoid a repeat of the early 1990s, when Bill and Hillary Clinton’s health care push ended in total collapse.
But there’s an additional, possibly more cynical layer of this whole odd debate. Warren is fighting to win over Sanders voters (or at least trying to make herself acceptable to them) and has pretty clearly decided that hugging single payer for dear life is the only way she can do it. Early on in the campaign, she was wishy-washy on health care. It wasn’t really her issue. When Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal asked her in January whether she’d support banning private insurance or preferred something more like a public option, she basically answered: Yes, all of the above.
Warren got raked by the online left for answers like this. And within six months, she’d changed her tune, declaring “Yes, I’m with Bernie on Medicare for All” at a debate. I have no idea if she is or isn’t a true convert on the issue. But her position on single payer has definitely evolved and hardened through the campaign.
But while she’s trying to court left-wing primary voters, Warren obviously also has an eye on the general election. Sanders has been content to tell voters he will raise their taxes to pay for single payer but lower their health care costs. Warren clearly sees this line as a political loser and so has pieced together a $20 trillion plan that does policy acrobatics to avoid an explicit middle-class tax hike.
This is the tension largely keeping the single-payer debate at the center of the campaign. A serious Democratic contender is lashing herself to a policy that’s symbolically essential to the left while trying with all her might to make it palatable (or at least not a complete deal breaker) to the center, and it’s unclear whether she’ll succeed. Add to that the lack of support among important legislators in her own party and you get an odd policy spectacle that gives journalists something to talk about, even if the idea is DOA in Congress."
It’s also possible as Warren attends more events and meets with more people that she’s hearing the same narrative over and over again which is: People, even with insurance, are going bankrupt receiving necessary medical care.
As more and more people have this problem, something is going to need to be reformed. People will have no time for candidates who don’t think there still isn’t a problem.
Okay but thats pretty reasonable? If you’re going to shift millions of people to one healthcare system you need to plan that shit reaaaally carefully to get your ducks in a row make it work right. You can’t wave your hand and just say “Okay everybody has insurance now go nuts!” It would be a massive shitshow. Three years is a good goal and also allows for another midterm election cycle to hopefully vote in more supportive candidates so it actually passes, especially since with the 2020 election the numbers are dismal to get a democratic senate in place.
Honestly the first thing I want any person to do is to start codifying norms and cutting off foreign money in politics and establishing good governance standards again, Full stop 100% attention needs to be placed on that, Without a fix to that we won’t get anything we want.
It’s going to be a hard battle to just get ourselves back to a Obama standard of governance.
yeah, a lot of this current quilbbling over the specifics of Warren’s policy plans seems like they’re trying to paint realistic planning as her wavering in her promises
It’s two separate bills, one for an “enhanced” public option, and then a full single payer option bill down the line. That isn’t planning carefully, that’s just kicking the can down the road. We all know the entire political capital on healthcare will be spent on the first bill and then nothing will happen. Not to mention planning on passing a single payer bill in your third year after midterms is insane.
Additionally, Bernie’s M4A bill isn’t just “OK everyone has insurance now go nuts”, it’s a four year process to expand the existing medicare program and get everyone onboard gradually by reducing the age requirements.
Oh I’m not saying anything about Bernie’s plan, I’m down with Bernie’s plan for real I’m just saying this seems kind of disingenuous toward Warren. And you have a really valid point the two part plan might not be the best way to go and waste political capital but painting it as backtracking when its just clarifying a plan is dishonest.
I honestly doubt she expects the M4A part to happen if she wins.
What is disingenuous about questioning a candidate who has consistently said they are with Bernie’s M4A bill (and even co-sponsored it) now back tracking to a plan that looks more like Pete Buttigieg’s Medicare for All Who Want It?
It’s hard to pass any healthcare reform bill if you lose the General Election.
Good thing the incumbent is historically unpopular and actively getting impeached!
Like Trump wasn’t historically unpopular in 2016?
And remember, Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 but still won the presidency.
I want healthcare reform. I want Medicare for all. But more than either of those, I want Trump out of office.