Tipsheet

Kamala on How She'd Pay For Her Big Government Agenda: 'It's Not About a Cost'

This answer reminds me a little bit of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asserting that self-assigned moral righteousness is more important than being "precisely, factually, and semantically correct," in that it's an entirely unserious cop-out.  Pretending that factual accuracy is a minor annoyance is both revealing and irresponsible. So is waving off the enormous price tags for massive proposed expansions of government as irrelevant.   It's not a cost, you see, it's an "investment:" 


It's a snappy, superficial sound byte, but it doesn't answer the fundamental question.  Harris and other Democrats are welcome to try to make the case to the American people that their various statist "investments" are worth the costs -- but that doesn't eliminate those costs.  They still exist in reality, and they must be paid for somehow.  As we've discussed at length, just one major piece of the Left's agenda -- single-payer healthcare -- would mean well over $3 trillion in new spending every single year, in perpetuity.  Paying for that would require giant, across-the-board tax increases on all American families and businesses.  This includes small businesses, as well as working and middle class households.  

Everyone would get hit, and the tax hikes would not be modest.  And that's just a one agenda item.  Once you toss the 'Green New Deal' into the mix, all of the numbers just balloon even further.  The New York Times' analysis of how expensive it would be drew ire from liberal readers, many of whom apparently believe that the urgency to act renders the math unimportant.  This tweet prompted furious complaints:  


Grappling with fiscal realities, it seems, is enabling the "deniers."  This Times account ended up firing off a string of quasi-apologetic and defensive tweets.  Meanwhile, there's this wild component of the Green New Deal's infamous FAQ document:


This truly nutty theory, which is absolutely not accepted by nearly any serious economists, posits the following:

MMT has many elements, and its advocates tend to express these in terms that aren’t familiar to many mainstream economists. But the central argument that the U.S. government doesn’t really have a budget constraint — and thus, that taxes are never needed to pay for federal spending — is simple enough to grasp. Basically, it’s because the government can print dollars whenever it wants. 

Will Democratic proponents of endless new "investments" embrace this insanity? Or will they be forced to address the literal fact that these are costs that must be paid by someone?  On that score, I'll leave you with yet another push to spend even more money -- this time, to expand a major entitlement program that is (a) already going insolvent and (b) already running annual cash deficits:


What could go wrong? Eh, who cares? People with big ideas, no matter how reckless, are apparently the "boss." Haven't you heard?