Bernie Sanders finally released a list detailing how he’d pay for his trillion-dollar proposals, but the numbers fall far short of his policies’ projected costs.
Let’s focus on his signature policy, Medicare for All. Economists have estimated that a complete government-funded healthcare system would cost about $32 trillion over 10 years, a number Sanders agreed with during a 60 Minutes interview last week.
To reach that total, Sanders laid out a host of new taxes and premiums. He’d create a 4% income-based premium for employees, exempting the first $29,000 for families with four or more children. This would bring in about $4 trillion. He’d also enact a 7.5% income-based premium for employers, exempting the first $1 million for small businesses. This would raise about $5.4 trillion. Eliminating current health tax expenditures would free up about $5.2 trillion, and taxing capital gains would raise another $2.5 trillion. Raising the federal corporate tax to 35% would bring in another $1 trillion.
These are all estimates, of course. Even so, Sanders only reached about $17.5 trillion, about half of what he’d need to implement Medicare for All. If Sanders has plans to fill this gap, he hasn’t mentioned them.
Sanders’s decision to release this list at all is significant given his habitual unwillingness to answer questions about specific costs. But, in doing so, Sanders may have just made the same mistake Elizabeth Warren made back in November when she unrolled her comprehensive healthcare plan. Warren’s numbers didn’t add up either, and the consequent criticism was believed to be a major factor in her campaign’s decline.
Sanders has been able to avoid similar criticism by avoiding the question of costs entirely. Now that he’s pledged himself to a specific set of numbers, that strategy won’t work anymore.
It’s unlikely Sanders will take as hard a hit as Warren did back in November. His primary wins in the first three states all but guarantee he’ll have the political momentum to keep moving forward.
But make no mistake: This list does not help Sanders. If anything, it reveals how unrealistic his platform really is.
The voters rallying behind Sanders support him not because he has all the answers but because he’s promised to at least ask the necessary questions. The fervor for Sanders’s campaign is not rooted in specific policies so much as it’s rooted in the moral problems those policies seek to address. In other words, the vision has always been more important than the details.
By filling in those details, Sanders is unwittingly clouding that vision. The question is: Will his supporters stick around? Or will they flee alongside Warren’s?
