Honest socialists vs. Elizabeth Warren

Warren, in preparation for her 2020 presidential run, attached herself to many of Sanders’ most popular socialist policies. Sanders proposed a wealth tax for billionaires in 2017, and Warren rolled hers out in 2019.

Most notably, when Sanders introduced a Medicare for All bill in 2017, codifying the plan he had championed during his 2016 run, Warren signed on as a cosponsor. Maybe she just thought she could say “I’m with Bernie” and thus take that issue off the table.

But she’s not actually with Sanders. An exquisite exchange at the latest debate illuminated the self-contradiction that is Warren.

“Will you raise taxes on the middle class to pay for it, yes or no?” New York Times political editor Marc Lacey asked Warren.

Warren’s subsequent comment (we can’t rightly call it a “response”) took the viewers on a magical journey across America, including a jaunt to Puerto Rico. She told stories of three different voters she had met. She spoke about her 70,000 selfies, arguing that such self-portraits should be “a new measure of democracy.” She wrapped up by saying that she thinks Medicare for All would help sick people, a belief that had already been stipulated in the question.

So Lacey followed up. “Sen. Sanders acknowledges he’s going to raise taxes on the middle class to pay for Medicare for All. You’ve endorsed his plan. Should you acknowledge it, too?”

She didn’t acknowledge it.

In two subsequent remarks on the topic, the most she would say was that “costs are going to go up for the wealthy. They’re going to go up for big corporations. They will not go up for middle-class families.”

But what about taxes?

Pete Buttigieg couldn’t help but notice exactly what had just happened: “A yes or no question that didn’t get a yes or no answer.”

Buttigieg went on: “No plan has been laid out to explain how a multitrillion-dollar hole in this Medicare for All plan that Sen. Warren is putting forward is supposed to get filled in.”

But that’s not exactly true.

Sanders, who “wrote the damn bill,” as Sanders himself put it, explained what Warren wouldn’t.

“I do think it is appropriate to acknowledge that taxes will go up,” Sanders said after five minutes of Warren’s evasions. “They’re going to go up significantly for the wealthy. And for virtually everybody, the tax increase they pay will be substantially less — substantially less than what they were paying for premiums and out-of-pocket expansions.”

That is the honest articulation of the funding theory behind this legislation: Hike taxes on everyone, particularly the rich, then hope that for the middle class, the tax hike is smaller than the savings in medical expenses.

Sanders, who admits he is a socialist, is perfectly willing to say this. He believes in high taxes on everyone and in Washington as the redistributor of wealth. Warren can’t admit that, and if not for Sanders, she might get away with hiding what she’s up to.

We can guess why. For one thing, ordinary people, that is, non-accountants and non-socialists, don’t see paying taxes as the same thing as paying a service provider to provide services or paying an insurer to provide insurance. Not everyone is ready to embrace Uncle Sam as an all-powerful benign sovereign.

A second reason Warren might not be as frank as Sanders is that the math isn’t as simple as Sanders makes it out to be.

A recent study by the Urban Institute found that the Sanders-Warren plan would actually increase total healthcare spending by $7 trillion. That means Sanders and Warren can’t just redistribute healthcare costs around by removing them from the market and shifting them to Washington. They also have to shift spending from other things, such as food, education, and housing, into a new massive federal health insurance plan.

That means tax hikes for everyone.

An honest socialist could argue that these sacrifices are worth it. But a dishonest socialist, such as Elizabeth Warren, won’t fess up.