If he were doing it based on polling, ok…but he’s had this position since the start.
His democratic reforms, call to decriminalize all drugs (a la Portugal), racial justice plan are all pretty progressive.
The two big issues he’s to the right of Warren on are health care and free college (which isn’t progressive, it’s regressive, but whatever). Of course those are the two issues that define the conversation. Everything else, it’s pretty close.
as promised:
I bet if you counted the pro-Warren and Bernie posts vs. mine about Pete, i’d be waaaaaaaaaaaaaay behind.
I can’t help but notice that you ignored the most important part of my post to then pivot into some stuff we mostly agree on (that he’s overall pretty progressive, but not as much on some key 2020 issues).
The key part you ignored was:
What percentage of people who prefer his plan do you think would say yes when asked if Warren’s plan would cost the middle class more?
The issue here goes beyond which plan polls better right now, in an environment where the plan that would be the best when implemented (true Medicare for All/single payer) is being attacked disingenuously based on an intentional misconstruing of the end cost to the average American.
That’s why I say Pete can fuck off on healthcare. If he was up there arguing about giving people choices and about the merits of his glidepath to single payer, I’d have no problem with it even though I disagree. But I know how intelligent he is, so I know that he knows that his attacks on Warren are disingenuous. For that, he can fuck off on healthcare.
Can you admit that your favorite candidate is being disingenuous in his primary line of attack on Medicare for All? Can you see why that’s a huge problem to a lot of us?
I hate the “how will you pay for it” shit in general.
I do wish he’d stick with the choice thing, and he did pivot to that later. Giving people a choice is a good argument and one that will play well with unions and others who actually do like their plan. One lady last night was telling me that she was union for years, they fought hard to get a great health care plan, and she’d be pissed if it was taken away. Pete’s choice line works on her.
As for the attacks on Warren, disingenuous or not (I don’t like it, but I also don’t think it was disingenuous), she really needs to be better on her answer, because the question will keep coming. Props to Bernie for answering it. In all honesty, I’m disappointed in her, because for someone who is so detailed and strong on policy, not having an answer for this question seems out of character. Yes, yes, we can all agree that costs will go down, but she needs to come up with a better “elevator speech” explanation of HOW they’ll go down that people stupider than us can understand.
2009, the Dems had Obama, had the House, and a ‘supermajority’ (60 Senate seats not 60 Senators) in the Senate.
How did we end up in the compromise bill with something that could only be passed through reconciliation? You gotta stop this kind of tunnel vision with the way the bodies are divided up right now. We’re not hitting 60 Senators for a long time, and that will only happen if the GOP is completely self-destructive. If the filibuster goes, that doesn’t matter, but I wouldn’t be confident that the filibuster is going to go until I see it happen.
2009, Obama
Sounds to me like you’re saying that if 185 members of the House think we should push for M4A that it won’t get voted on because…Biden? Are you saying that if M4A passes 218-whatever, that a Democratic controlled Senate would not take it up? Is that what you’re saying? I hope you’re not saying that.
Again, the most likely scenario is Dems win pres, win House, still are down by 1 or 2 seats in the Senate. A detente. If things keep going the way they are, Dems can get the Senate with maybe a 2 or 3 seat advantage. If there’s an appetite for M4A, it will pass the House. It will pass the Senate (with a broken filibuster), and Biden will sign it. That’s my argument, and there’s no way to prove it wrong until a very particular set of circumstances that I don’t think will ever happen comes to pass.
We can just skip down to here, because the rest is just whatever. There’s no disagreement that a Sanders/Warren win is very good for M4A, but you somehow using all the rest of what you said to say that this will all of a sudden create spines for this DemE you hate so much is, I don’t even know what it is.
Again, if Pete or Joe win the nomination, it will not be because of their stances on healthcare
Overall, employee pay will probably increase. Employers SHOULD have more money and employees should demand raises (a) because they know that their company is now saving money on healthcare and (b) they know they will be paying higher taxes, so they’ll want a salary bump to compensate them.
That being said, it’s far from clear that most or all of the savings will go to employees, and certainly not clear that it will be enough to make up for additional taxes.
Warren and Sanders are both likely to increase corporate taxes, so saving $1 in health care costs will not necessarily mean that the company has an extra discretionary dollar.
Employees won’t be the only one trying to get their hands on that sweet cash. Shareholders are going to be asking for special dividends and share buy backs. A CEO might want to make that acquisition he’s had his eye on for a while now that he has extra cash flow. R&D or marketing departments are going to argue for “making long term investments” instead of just increasing your employee cost basis, etc.
Even if you assume that every $ saved in healthcare costs goes to employees, it’s unreasonable to assume that it will be evenly distributed amongst different employees. Workers with special skills, those who have the ability to collectively bargain for better wages and/or those who have the clearest insight into how much their employer currently spends on healthcare will almost certainly gain a bigger share of the savings than lower level, more replaceable workers.
Tl/dr: the economic interactions are too dynamic to definitively say that just because overall healthcare spending will decrease, that the cost savings will be distributed in a way that fully compensates middle class workers for a tax increase.
For low level employees there won’t be a pay increase, but companies were already paying a relatively small % of their overall healthcare cost if any at all. Often these employees aren’t going to see a tax hike and were already on medicaid or their private insurance was insanely expensive and or terrible.
For all mid level employees for whom a sizable % of their income was healthcare cost based there will be a tax hike associated with this and their employers will at a minimum need to true up that so that net pay doesn’t fall. Their benefits will probably improve as health insurance for these types of workers has been steadily degrading for decades with premiums going up along with every form of coinsurance.
For higher end employees they generally have a lot of negotiating power and will probably not lose net compensation. This is because of the ‘fuck you pay me’ nature of how people react to losses in income, particularly people with leverage. In economics it’s widely accepted that wages are extremely sticky, which is to say that people do not take pay decreases well. This is perceived as being extremely true by employers who will often do a round of layoffs where a number of employees lose ALL compensation rather than reducing compensation across all employees to avoid layoffs. This is because reducing pay across the board would just incentivize all their top performers to look elsewhere and be very bad for operations indeed. It’s better from their perspective to hurt a few people very badly than hurt everyone a little bit from the perspective of the companies bottom line.
I see the thumbnail economic situation more along the lines of: 1) in a competitive market no firm makes a profit, 2) healthcare is an employer cost, as is salary 3) healthcare and salary are the lowest an employer can pay, assuming a competitive employment market, 4) if the employer healthcare cost goes down, on day one, all firms will be making a profit, 5) firms will lower product costs to compete, but firms will also use the surplus to attract (or retain) employees at higher salary. So, basically, some significant amount of that surplus will be captured by employees.
Now, this is freshman economics. I’m sure junior and graduate level economics would add a ton to this picture, but their refinements would not undermine the basic framework.
So you believe that Pete thinks that the Warren/Sanders plan will cost the middle class more? You don’t think Pete is trying to take advantage of voters’ lack of understanding of the cost they pay in premiums versus taxes?
I agree. The issue is that Pete, Biden, Klobuchar, etc are just creating attack ad clips for the GOP to use to say, “Look, even prominent Dems know Warren is lying!”
I’m disappointed she’s not answering it better, but I also don’t want her to say in a sentence on camera “Taxes will go up,” because I know it’ll be taken out of context and used in the general.
This I agree with.
I think she should say, “Right now the average middle class American is paying $XXX per year between premiums, out of pocket costs, and taxes. With my plan, they’ll pay an average of $YYY per year between premiums and taxes. Costs will go down. Anyone asking specifically about taxes and ignoring the rest is intentionally trying to mislead. Simply put: costs on the middle class WILL GO DOWN. On top of that, you’ll never pay another copay, you’ll never argue about referrals, you’ll never be on the phone with an insurance company trying to figure out why something was covered or not. Lower costs, no hassle and truly universal coverage. It’s a win-win-win.”
I will have to come back to the LOLnunnehi logical circus that true Medicare for All could pass Congress under a Biden presidency later, I’m going to work.
No? I don’t know. I think they are both way smarter than me about this, but I also think Bernie standing right next to her and directly answering the question makes her non-answer look worse. I know its about sound bites, etc, but like I said, there are ways around that issue that don’t sound like dodging.
Another reason these 75-second debate answers are stupid and I’d rather do town halls for the rest of the election.
Not a bad model, but if we look at the real world cases:
Not all markets are perfectly competitive. There are many examples of profitable companies, virtual monopolies, etc.
Competitors do not all share the same cost structure when it comes to healthcare costs today. Location, number of employees, whether your workforce is unionized means that different companies will receive different benefits from M4A.
The employment market is far from perfectly efficient. As just one example, the possible need to move to take a new job provides enough friction that some employees will not leave even if a new job pays slight more.
I think you are directionally correct that workers as a whole and on average will see some of the gains, but the real world differs enough from the models that I just don’t think you can definitively tell a particular middle class worker that they will be better off. The second claim is where I think some of the M4A advocates get out over their skis.
Edit: Sorry meant to reply to cuze but it probably applies anyway. I can think of like 407 issues more important than m4a (which lets face it isnt happening) some of which include a big bloated corrupt narcissist destroying democracy one day at a time and little kids being ripped from their parents and thrown in dirty, unhygienic, crowded cells to await whatever terrible fate they get. Just off the top of my head
Gatekeeping is a terrible look and a large reason i avoid this thread and occasionally avoid this forum. It’s just so, so, so bad.
Especially on an issue like m4a LOL. Dude people literally revolted over the health insurance mandate. Now you want to sell them the govt running their healthcare. Whatever pot you have, i want some
Maybe I misunderstood the purpose of this thread. I thought it was to post about the primary race.
If it is literally who is running in 2020 why don’t we just post Elizabeth Warren and end it.
Also we would need to define bombard. Is one post a day bombarding? I personally like Skydivers posting. I have learned more about Mayor Pete from her than any news I consume (which isn’t a lot).
In other news, not sure how I missed this line last night, but ew, Kamala, just…ew.
Not only is it trans erasure, it’s also fucking weird and insulting to women who either cannot have kids or choose not to have kids.
I have a feeling there is a massive context problem here. There are some ‘views’ in the part that is quoted, but this just seems to be her saying no one has a right to tell a woman what to do with her body when they’re not the one who actually has to use their body for the purpose of what they’re trying to stop.
will