When Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks, liberals swoon over her supposed mastery of policy. She markets T-shirts emblazoned with her refrain that she “has a plan for that.” Even those political journalists who question her chances of capturing the Democratic nomination accept this basic premise, and their skepticism is often framed as: Can somebody so wonky appeal to a broader electorate? The truth is that when it comes to policy, Warren is a fraud.
Whatever reputation Warren may have had as an academic, as a presidential candidate, she has churned out or endorsed one half-baked policy after another.
True policy innovation requires creativity and grappling with genuine challenges to achieving one’s vision. Rather than seriously working through issues, Warren’s simple solution for everything involves giving away lots of free stuff and insisting that only major corporations and the ultra-wealthy will pay more. Any legitimate questions about her policies are waved away with triumphant lines about the need to think more boldly.
All of this was on full display on a litany of issues during the second Democratic debate.
To start, there’s healthcare. It’s the most important policy issue of all and yet Warren, the supposed policy genius in the race, has decided not to release her own plan at all, and instead piggyback on the radical proposal of her rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
There are many different paths Warren could have taken to achieve her goal of universal coverage, from embracing an optional government-run plan, to increasing subsidies, to creating a role for supplemental private insurance.
By backing Sanders, Warren has adopted the extreme position that the government has to kick 180 million people off of their private healthcare plans to put then on a single comprehensive government plan, and effectively eliminate private insurance, all within four years. This is such a radical position that it goes further than socialist Canada, where two-thirds of the public has private insurance offering benefits that aren’t on the government plan, including dental, vision, and prescription drugs — all of which promise to be covered by the Sanders plan Warren has endorsed.
Even liberal economist Paul Krugman was left scratching his head. “I found last night’s debate bitterly disappointing,” he tweeted. “I had hoped that Warren would use the occasion to start climbing out of the hole she’s stumbled into on health care. Instead she dug it deeper.”
Warren also dishonestly dodged questions about whether the $32 trillion healthcare plan would require raising middle class taxes — something that Sanders, the author of the bill, has even acknowledged. Instead, Warren said, “So giant corporations and billionaires are going to pay more. Middle-class families are going to pay less out of pocket for their healthcare.”
Such populist statements don’t address the inevitable policy trade-offs. Other countries that have national healthcare systems place greater tax burdens on the middle class, often in the form of value added taxes. She could make the argument that they’d be paying more in taxes, but that will be offset by money they’d be saving on healthcare. But the idea that only billionaires and corporations are going to pay more is not a serious argument.
In June, when pressed by Vox’s Ezra Klein on how she would get her plans passed given Democrats at best would have a slim majority, Warren said, “I think this is one of the reasons to run on plans because if I get elected on those plans, it gives me the capacity to turn around and say to my colleagues, ‘Hey that’s what I ran on, that’s what the majority of the American people voted for, that’s what they got out and fought for. So as the Democratic Party, that’s what we got to do.’”
But it kind of defeats the whole purpose of that strategy if she claims that she can provide free healthcare without raising middle-class taxes, and then comes in and explains what she meant was, those middle-class tax hikes would be offset by savings on healthcare.
Warren has also endorsed the Green New Deal, which embraces the idea that the climate threat is so urgent that addressing it requires implementing “Medicare for all,” guaranteed jobs, free college, affordable housing, and a host of other unrelated issues. This is on top of the unachievable, but more relevant, goal of replacing 83% of the nation’s energy sources with renewables within a decade. As Green New Deal co-author Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff put it, the plan “wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” but instead was a “how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
Warren has also proposed a wealth tax that she describes as “just two cents” of every dollar of wealth above $50 million. She says that it would raise enough money to pay for universal pre-K, higher salaries for all childcare workers, free college, and cancellation of student loan debt for 95% of people.
Yet this is all based on an estimate that her tax would raise $2.75 trillion, a claim that even President Barack Obama’s former economic adviser Larry Summers has argued we should greet with significant skepticism. European countries that have tried wealth taxes have abandoned them, because they raise less money than hoped for as super wealthy people have more flexibility when it comes to tax strategy, and also, the taxes are difficult to administer.
Warren, not content to believe she can reshape the U.S. economy, also proposed using trade policy to impose her economic vision on the rest of the world. In her new trade plan, she would not engage in a trade deal with nations unless they met certain standards, and she would renegotiate all current trade deals. “Make them pay workers more. Let their workers unionize. Raise their environmental standards before they come to us and say they want to be able to sell their products,” she said. The standards she wants to set are so strict that they would eliminate trade with major trading partners, all of which would drastically raise living costs on the middle-class in the form of higher prices.
As the debate turned to foreign policy, Warren argued that it was essential for the United States to declare it would never use nuclear weapons first because, “it reduces the likelihood that someone miscalculates, someone misunderstands.” She made it sound as if the U.S. has been perpetually on the brink of nuclear war, yet somehow we managed to avoid a nuclear war for nearly 75 years with the current policy in place. What’s more, the Obama administration looked into scrapping the first-strike policy, but in 2010 decided to keep it, recognizing “the real world we continue to live in” and acknowledging that there were still, “a narrow range of contingencies in which U.S. nuclear weapons may still play a role in deterring a conventional or [Chemical and Biological Weapons] attack against the United States or its allies and partners.” For a supposed wizard of policy, Warren’s idea that the U.S. should tell the entire world that we will be willing to absorb a nuclear attack before deploying nuclear weapons has not been well thought out.
Warren may be banking on the fact that if President Trump managed to capture the White House making wild promises without specifics, she can skate past the thornier details of her proposals. But if she’s going to pursue such an approach, she should no longer be described as a great policy innovator.
