Bernie Sanders’ plans may be expensive but inaction would cost much more
In Wednesday night’s Democratic debate, the former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg charged that the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders’ policy proposals would cost $50tn. Holy Indiana.
Larry Summers, formerly chief White House economic adviser for Barack Obama, puts the price tag at $60tn. “We are in a kind of new era of radical proposal,” he told CNN.
Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, claims Sanders’ agenda would at least double federal spending.
Putting aside the accuracy of these cost estimates, they omit the other side of the equation: what, by comparison, is the cost of doing nothing?
A Green New Deal might be expensive but doing nothing about climate change will almost certainly cost far more. California is already burning, the midwest and south are flooding, New England is eroding, Florida is sinking. If we don’t launch something as bold as a Green New Deal, we’ll spend trillions coping with the consequences of our failure to be bold.
Medicare for All will cost a lot, but the price of doing nothing about America’s increasingly dysfunctional healthcare system will soon be in the stratosphere. The nation already pays more for healthcare per person and has worse health outcomes than any other advanced country. A new study in the Lancet estimates that Medicare for All would save $450bn and prevent 68,000 unnecessary deaths each year. [Continue reading…]