Jeb! Bush attacks Bernie Sanders' economic proposals ($18TRILLION$18TRILLION$18 TRILLION!!)

[seafan]

The UK Guardian reports:

An energised Jeb Bush has said Bernie Sanders is the “front runner” in the Democratic presidential race as he used a Republican rally to rail against the Vermont senator’s proposals.

Bush told the Mackinac Republican leadership conference Sanders is the leading Democrat in a nod to recent polls showing the senator has taken the lead from Hillary Clinton in the crucial early voting state of Iowa.

It was not all niceties, however. Bush proceeded to lambast the self-declared socialist Democrat.

Sanders has “proposed $18 trillion of new spending” over the next decade “and it’s only September, in the year before the election,” he said, drawing laughter from the room.

The former Florida governor then summoned the spirit of Dr Evil, the fictional villain in the Austin Powers films, saying “if Dr Evil heard Bernie Sanders was talking about $18 trillion, he’d have a heart attack”.

[font size=3]SIGH......[/font]


Of course, the Wall Street Journal pushed this distortion in the first place.... yesterday.

Washington Post: No, Bernie Sanders is not going to bankrupt America to the tune of $18 trillion, September 15, 2015

.....Sanders does want to spend significant amounts of money, almost all of it is on things we’re already paying for; he just wants to change how we pay for them. In some ways it’s by spreading out a cost currently borne by a limited number of people to all taxpayers. His plan for free public college would do this: right now, it’s paid for by students and their families, while under Sanders’ plan we’d all pay for it in the same way we all pay for parks or the military or food safety.

But the bulk of what Sanders wants to do is in the first category: to have us pay through taxes for things we’re already paying for in other ways. Depending on your perspective on government, you may think that’s a bad idea. But we shouldn’t treat his proposals as though they’re going to cost us $18 trillion on top of what we’re already paying.

And there’s another problem with that scary $18 trillion figure, which is what the Journal says is the 10-year cost of Sanders’ ideas: fully $15 trillion of it comes not from an analysis of anything Sanders has proposed, but from the fact that Sanders has said he’d like to see a single-payer health insurance system, and there’s a single-payer plan in Congress that has been estimated to cost $15 trillion. Sanders hasn’t actually released any health care plan, so we have no idea what his might cost.

But health care is nevertheless a good place to examine why these big numbers can be so misleading. At the moment, total health care spending in the United States runs over $3 trillion a year; according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, over the next decade (from 2015-2024), America will spend a total of $42 trillion on health care. This is money that you and I and everyone else spends. We spend it in a variety of ways: through our health-insurance premiums, through the reduced salaries we get if our employers pick up part or all of the cost of those premiums, through our co-pays and deductibles, and through our taxes that fund Medicare, Medicaid, ACA subsidies, and the VA health care system. We’re already paying about $10,000 a year per capita for health care.

So let’s say that Bernie Sanders became president and passed a single-payer health care system of some sort. And let’s say that it did indeed cost $15 trillion over 10 years. Would that be $15 trillion in new money we’d be spending? No, it would be money that we’re already spending on health care, but now it would go through government. If I told you I could cut your health insurance premiums by $1,000 and increase your taxes by $1,000, you wouldn’t have lost $1,000. You’d be in the same place you are now.

.....

Many more details in the above piece.


But, to Jeb Bush and his pals at the Establishment Journal, it's more important to peddle lies.

[whatchamacallit]

1. Hillary supporters arm in arm with the WSJ and Jeb Bush

So surprising!

[ChisolmTrailDem]

2. One response in is two posts that should be in GD-P. nt