Dana Milbank: “The pie-in-the-sky proposals from Trump, Sanders and Cruz build up unrealistic hopes among their followers.” (Washington Post, 4/8/16)
We know that the Washington Post editors really hate Bernie Sanders and rarely miss an opportunity to show it. Dana Milbank got in the act big time today as he once again denounced Sanders (along with Donald Trump and Ted Cruz) in his column.
There was much good stuff in the column, but my favorite was when he told readers:
MacGuineas’ group [the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget] calculates that Sanders would increase government spending to unimaginable levels: to as much as 35 percent of gross domestic product, from the current 22 percent.
The key word here is “unimaginable.” Most Western European governments have ratios of government spending to GDP of more than 40 percent and some have ratios of more than 50 percent. Apparently Mr. Milbank finds the whole European continent unimaginable.
What is especially striking is that most of the increase in government spending would be the result of the government diverting payments for employer-provided health insurance to a government-run universal Medicare system. Apparently Milbank thinks it intolerable that the money taken out of workers’ paychecks to be sent to private insurers would instead be taken out of workers’ paychecks to be sent to the government, even if it would lead to savings of several hundred billion dollars a year in administrative costs and insurance industry profits. In Dana Milbank land, this is the height of irresponsibility.
What is perhaps most incredible is Milbank’s notion of irresponsible. His sole measure of responsibility is the size of the government budget deficit and debt, which are for all practical purposes meaningless numbers. (If the government puts in place patent protection that requires us to pay an extra $400 billion a year for prescription drugs, this adds zero to the budget deficit or debt, and therefore doesn’t concern Milbank. However, if it borrowed an extra $400 billion a year to pay for developing new drugs, he would be furious.)
On the other hand, forcing millions of people to be out of work because of deficits that are too small apparently does not bother Milbank in the least. Since the crash in 2008, we have needlessly foregone more than $7 trillion in potential output. Millions of people have been kept out of work, with their children thereby growing up in families that were in or near poverty levels. We also have the stories like the children in Flint exposed to lead, all because Milbank and his friends want to whine about budget deficits.
Many might view this set of policies as being irresponsible. But in Milbank’s worldview, which is widely shared in Washington policy circles, it doesn’t matter what you do to the country as long as you keep the deficit down.
Economist Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. A version of this post originally appeared on CEPR’s blog Beat the Press (4/10/16).
Messages can be sent to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com, or via Twitter @washingtonpost. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
What really bothers me is the huge scale of the BS that we have had to bear from the Republicans as they have assumed the mantle of fiscal responsibility that is every bit as transparent as the Emperors New Clothes.
When do we get these huge budget deficits? Whenever we have Republicans as President.
The only exception to that has been Obama who was stuck with debt, thanks to W. Bush, higher than the debt for WWII and did nothing to stop it.
The only sane conclusion is to wonder why this is? And the answer has out in the open starting up in the face since the 90’s when it because common knowledge that the Republicans/Conservatives talked about in the open clearly … the idea is to give everything to rich people and corporations, base the country solely on money, tax working people, and borrow money from the rich and corporations until the burden of interest gets so huge that the people who are apparently too stupid to understand, channel all their hate to the government and end or go along with ending all social programs, and the country as we know it ,or have known it since the end of WWII.
This is a New World Order than no one has gotten to really hear clearly, debate or take any votes on. The reason is simple, it if was put in plain and simple about 80% of Americans would vote for a European style Socialist country, but which we really put in gear with FDR’s New Deal.
There was an attempted coup by the billionaires of the time that does not get much airplay if any. Not taken seriously but the most famous General of his day was approached to lead an army on Washington to depose President Roosevelt. Instead the coup was revealed and cancelled and the new strategy of using money over the next 70 years and creeping oligarchical power was begun.
The vision of the country of the Conservatives was basically the vision that we had just fought a World War against, and we are still fighting it today.
They bought up the military contractors, then the energy companies, then the media companies, then the health care and pharma, … everything is corporatized, run and owned as a tyranny, under corporate management, and citizens can go to hell unless they have some value to the corporate state.
To serve this end we make people stupid, we treat them like crap until they go crazy and cannot think or do not want to serve the country. We do not education people, we toxify their environments to make them sick, we criminal them when they seek to kill their pain with drugs, and we stereotype and vilify them in the media and by the laws we make.
The fact is that even if we have to run a deficit what Bernie Sanders wants to do is the morally right thing to do – BUT amazingly our country is so rich that if the rich and corporations just pay their taxes, and we tax Wall St. speculation and get rid of the leaches on our health care system we can have it all.
The reason the oligarchy is fighting so hard against Bernie’s plan, and the whole New Deal, pseudo-Socialist ideas is that this will repair itself fast, and it is something that once people see they will never accept the lies and domination of the economic elite again – PERIOD.
It’s ridiculous to lump in Bernie Sanders’ social policy proposals with Trump’s. Sanders is at least speaking rationally to (most of) the real issues. Not even speaking to Millbank having picked his numbers out of thin ethers, let’s grant for the sake of argument Sanders proposals would boost government spending from 22 to as much as 35% of GDP. So? The vast military and security apparatus sucks up more than half of federal discretionary spending, according to Chris Hedges $1.6 trillion this year, that makes us less not more safe. The military has more than 800 military bases in more than 130 countries. How about we brings those resources home along with the shocked soldiers stolen from their families? “Sometimes I feel,” lamented Bob Dylan, “like all the world’s an armed camp, with one half of humanity guarding the other half.” There is plenty of money when the right people, the oligarchs, want it. There’s not any to solve real human problems? Mike Whitney reports the Wall Street bailout of 2008 as $15 trillion. In Illinois, which is enduring budgetary crises on multiple fronts, there’s not $30 billion to bailout the city of Chicago’s teacher’s fund pension obligations. Schools have closed on a massive scale while the hedge fund manager governor sits pretty in Springfield. And don’t forget the senseless wars Dean Baker. Never mind the carnage and mass murder, Joseph Stiglitz was reporting already in 2006 that when all costs were finally tallied, Bush’s Iraq adventure would cost $3 trillion. That was before Obama promised to end it, after which he committed, and is committing more troops to Iraq in 2016. Way to go Barack. Ditto on Guantanamo. Also on jailing the gangsters on Wall Street. I’m hoped and changed right down to the elastic of my socks.
“AS LONG AS YOU KEEP THE DEFICIT DOWN”
More to the point, so long as you keep the laboring-class down, namely, keep the lower-half of society enslaved by poverty. For the educated upper-half owns all the wealth and any tax that would trickle down to the lower-half, such as free education or free healthcare, would come directly from the profits of the slave owner class, the upper-half, the voting majority actually.
TO — potshot
Yes the military consumes 10% of GDP, but let us not forget the medical industry that consumes double that amount, a full 20% of GDP. For the average American diet is 50% fat and it clogs up every internal organ in the body.
So, eat nothing processed by man or animal, a most perfect 10% fat diet.