 So, as many of you know, Elizabeth Warren just released a financing plan for Medicare Frawl and what she manages to do is devise a plan that would fully fund Medicare Frawl within 10 years while not raising taxes on the middle and working class. Now, I'll just write off the bad state, the obvious. This is very clearly a direct response to her critics in the Democratic Party primary who have been pressing her to explain how she's going to pay for Medicare Frawl. And at the last debate, she obviously didn't want to directly say she would raise taxes on lower and middle class earners in order to pay for Medicare Frawl, so this is what she came up with. Now, while I can say that I appreciate the fact that she is reaffirming her commitment to Medicare Frawl because this is real single payer, right? This isn't a diet version of Medicare Frawl. You know, it is a little bit frustrating because in some ways this does undermine what we've been fighting for in Medicare Frawl for purposes of political expediency. So I want to talk about the policy as well as the politics because unfortunately, more often than not, politics does influence the policy. And in this instance, politics is having a relatively negative impact arguably on the policy itself. So let me remind you what happened when Kamala Harris, back when she was one of the front runners, was being criticized for her position of wanting to eliminate private insurance. Well, she capitulated, right? She came out with her own Medicare for All diet version, which actually keeps private insurance companies intact. And what she essentially proposed was a public option where private insurance can still cover essential care and there's no ban on duplicative coverage. And really the entire plan that she proposed, it undermined why we want Medicare Frawl because we care more about the delivery of healthcare. And in order to make sure that the goal is the delivery of good, robust, comprehensive healthcare, we have to decommodify healthcare. We have to get the private insurance out of it. But she didn't do that. Now, what she wanted to do was have her cake and eat it too, right? She wanted to get the critics off of her back and, you know, qualifiers about what would potentially happen if she got rid of private insurance. But she also wanted to make it clear to progressives that she's with us, right? That she supports Medicare for All. But unfortunately for her, she got none of what she wanted to accomplish because at that next Democratic primary debate, as you'll remember, well, the centrists were just treating her as if she supported Medicare for All. But simultaneously, she let down progressives by introducing what is effectively a public or private option. And now we're at a point where her campaign is essentially on the ropes because neither centrists or progressives take her seriously. So the reason why I'm talking about Kamala Harris is because there's a really important lesson here. The lesson is sometimes when you try to appease everyone, you end up appeasing no one. And that's exactly what happened to Kamala Harris. So Elizabeth Warren is kind of facing a similar situation where she needs to confirm that she does support real single-payer Medicare for All. But at the same time, she wants to quell criticisms from the center and make it seem as if she's serious and she has a way to pay for Medicare for All. But rather than planting her feet in the ground and standing strong and actually explaining her position and educating people like Bernie did, she tried to craft a plan to fully fund Medicare for All while not actually raising taxes on the middle class. Now, to her credit, she actually does manage to accomplish this. And she did find a way to finance Medicare for All in its entirety. And I'm not inherently against a plan that wouldn't raise taxes on the middle class if the system is actually sustainable and has longevity. But as always, the devil is in the details. So let's look at the details here. So first of all, she correctly states that overall health care costs would, in fact, decrease under a Medicare for All system and that the total increase in federal spending will mostly be offset by savings in administrative costs and by redirecting money that we're already spending on health care federally for CHIP, the Affordable Care Act and whatnot. That in and of itself will bring down the total increase that we need for federal spending in order to fully fund Medicare for All. And she estimates that 20.5 trillion will be what we need to raise federal spending by in order to actually pay for Medicare for All. So the question is, where does that additional 20.5 trillion come from? If you're Bernie Sanders, you know, on his proposal, he has no specific way to pay for it, but he attaches various options as to how we might be able to finance it. But he explains most of this money will come from a small payroll tax. If you make less than $29,000 per year, you're not going to see that payroll tax. But if you make more than that, then yes, you will see a small payroll tax. And as your income increases, so too will that payroll tax. But disproportionately, the rich will be financing the system. And Bernie always explains that even if you're paying more in taxes, you're going to be paying less overall when it comes to health care costs, because he's eliminating your monthly health insurance premium. You're not going to be paying for copays and deductibles. So it's really important that we explain the details here. But Elizabeth Warren, she argues that you don't need to raise taxes on the middle class by one penny to finance Medicare for All. That's a direct quote. So she had the chance to explain her position, explain what Medicare for All does as we all understand it. We increase taxes, but cut costs overall, right? People will net save money. So she was faced with a similar situation as Kamala was, and she chose to not plant her feet in the ground. But the way that she tried to appease critics and really also appease people who support Medicare for All is a lot more clever, it's a lot more strategic than Kamala. Because what Elizabeth Warren actually proposes is real single-payer Medicare for All, unlike Kamala Harris. And Elizabeth Warren is essentially supporting Bernie's bill, which does in fact get rid of private insurance, which does matter. And she manages to finance it in its entirety. But how does she do that? Well, there's a number of ways, many ways that I think are actually fully feasible. She wants to crack down on tax evasion and fraud that alone will produce an extra 2.3 trillion in revenue, with a financial transaction tax on Wall Street and fees on big banks that engage in risky behavior along with changes in the tax code to make sure that corporations actually pay their fair share, a minimum tax on foreign earnings on large multinational corporations of 35% by increasing her wealth tax from 2 to 6 cents by taxing capital gains. Now, here's what I really like. She wants to cut defense spending in part by eliminating the overseas contingency operation fund. Now, on top of that, she wants to do immigration reform, which will net an additional $400 billion over 10 years in federal revenue, according to the Congressional Budget Office. And last but certainly not least, perhaps most important, as she puts it, she's going to pay for this by asking employers to pay a little less than what they are already projected to pay for health care. We can get almost halfway to where we need to go to cover the cost of my Medicare for All plan by doing this. Now, when you add all of those things together, she goes into great detail in her plan, you get roughly $20.5 trillion overall. But there's a couple of things that I don't understand why she included. So immigration reform in and of itself is incredibly important, but you need to decouple that from Medicare for All because what you're doing is you're essentially telling us that in order to get Medicare for All passed, we have to take on two monumental political battles, which will be very difficult. And if you really want that extra $400 billion in revenue, all you've got to do is tick up that wall tax by another percentage point and you make up for it. So I don't necessarily think that this is the smartest way in that regard, although Pramila Jayapal did reach out to Warren's team for clarification about this specific point. And Warren did say that immigration reform is just one option. And that really what she's proposing is a menu of things we can do to in fact fully fund Medicare for All without raising taxes on the middle class. So you can definitely make the case that we do need to decouple bigger issues like immigration reform from Medicare for All, so that way we're not trying to take on too many things at once, because that's just you're making it a lot more difficult. You're putting up an unnecessary political barrier. We do need to do immigration reform, but we need to tackle that separately and not try to do that while we're fighting for Medicare for All, because then we're going to have to make the case for Medicare for All and immigration reform and argue about the details with regard to Medicare for All and immigration reform. And it just gets too messy. But because she's only saying this is an option, I think that's important. And overall, this isn't my biggest issue. What I do take issue with is the fact that over and over and over again in her plan, she describes Medicare for All as a long term goal. And to proponents of Medicare for All, this is not something that we view as a long term goal. This is a short term goal. This is a short term goal that we want passed in January of 2021 and fully implemented no later than 2025, but ideally in 2023. So when you say over and over again that this is a long term goal, I don't know what that means. And I don't really know how to take that. But given her history of being wishy-washy on the issue of Medicare for All, I can't not see this as another red flag. Will you fight for this in the short term? Well, I mean, probably not because you're saying explicitly over and over again that this is a long term goal. Now on top of that, another thing that concerns me with this funding plan is what she's essentially proposing to make up for most of what she needs to get to that $20.5 trillion mark is a head tax. And what that ends up doing is jeopardizing the long term sustainability of Medicare for All with a head tax that ultimately is regressive in its implementation. And in an op-ed for Jacob and Matt Brunig of the People's Policy Project explains the issues with the head tax. What Warren is proposing here in ordinary fiscal language is a Medicare head tax. This is a departure from the normal Medicare payroll tax proposals. The distributive difference between them is that the Medicare payroll tax charges a specific percentage of each worker's earnings while the Medicare head tax charges a specific dollar amount per worker. To illustrate the difference, I have the following two graphs. The first one shows the difference in terms of employer side taxes paid by worker earnings level. Under the 8% employer side payroll tax, the employer tax is paid for a worker earning $15,000 per year is $1200 while the employer tax is paid for a worker earning $200,000 per year is $16,000. Under the 9,500 employer side head tax, the employer tax is paid is $9,500 for both workers. The second graph is the same as the first except the vertical axis is done as percent of earnings rather than dollar amounts. In this graph, the 9,500 head tax is equal to 63% of the earnings of the worker making $15,000 per year but only equal to 5% of the earnings of the worker making $200,000 per year. For the employer side payroll tax it is 8% for everyone. Needless to say, the Medicare payroll tax is far superior to the Medicare head tax, distributively speaking. Specifically, the Medicare head tax charges middle and low income earners massively more than the Medicare payroll tax does. So what she's proposing here is a regressive tax and she's doing this also she can argue that she's not raising taxes on middle and low income earners but the problem with this is it's akin to a flat tax right? The way that Republicans and Libertarians pitch a flat tax is they say it's preferable because it's more simplistic right? Everyone pays the same rate no matter how much money you make but the problem with that is you know if you're paying hypothetically speaking 12% of your income if you're a minimum wage worker 12% of your income is a lot more burdensome than 12% of a multi-millionaire's income so a progressive tax rate is preferable because as your income rises so too should the percentage of taxes that you pay because you can afford it. So what she's doing here she's proposing a regressive tax that at the end of the day it's essentially begging to be gained and what she's saying here is that if you are a company that doesn't have employees but you just have a bunch of independent contractors you're exempt if you are a smaller company with less than 50 employees you're also exempt but if the Affordable Care Act taught us anything it's that these companies are going to do whatever they can to skirt taxes so companies like Uber and Lyft they're just automatically exempt they're not paying into Medicare for all on top of that if you are a small company and you are getting ready to hire your 51st employee well rather than just hiring them as an employee you're going to make them contract independently with you it's just it's a system that is opening itself up to exploitation what did the Affordable Care Act mandate it said any company who has more than 50 workers who has full-time workers must offer healthcare so what did companies do well a lot of people were just demoted to part-time positions and a lot of these full-time positions essentially were done away with now for me as someone who worked at Walmart I know firsthand that these companies like Walmart they're very strict about the hours you work because in order to be legally compliant they have to make sure that you don't veer into full-time because they don't want to offer you healthcare so even if we went a minute over hour a lot of time we would be in trouble like three write-ups and you're fired that's it so I remember having to literally just leave projects in the middle of an aisle to rush to clock out to make sure that it didn't go over my time that's what happened because they didn't want to offer me healthcare they didn't want me to start getting into full-time so what do they do they just kept me at part-time and that's another issue that Matt Brunig brings up here aside from it just being regressive and a regressive way to fund Medicare for all all just because you want to be able to say I'm not raising taxes in the middle and working class well what you're doing is you're setting up a system that actually jeopardizes the long-term health of our Medicare for all system because you have to make sure that Medicare for all is fully funded otherwise it's not going to work and in the event we don't fully fund Medicare for all what's going to happen well that will lead to dissatisfaction which will lead to cries for privatization and maybe we start offering skimpier benefits since it's not fully funded maybe we start out with dental and vision but then we start to chip away and privatize those portions of Medicare for all and that Brunig explains very specifically how companies will game the system and they will game it he writes separate from the distributive problems of warrants head tax the two exclusions also make the proposal clearly unworkable and easily gamed all companies have to do to avoid rather large head tax charges is spin-off workers into independent contractor status or spin them off into firms with less than 50 employees that they can then contract with for services once some employers start doing this the average Medicare employer contribution will have to go up to keep revenue stable which will push even more employers to restructure their labor into independent contracting or outsourcing the small firms and at that point the death spiral is off to the races the genius of the payroll tax of course is that it is unable to be evaded like this every dollar of labor income even independent contractor income is charged the same no restructuring can save you from it so i mean this is why the details are so important this is why we need politicians to do more than just affirm and reaffirm support for Medicare for all if you establish a system that is implemented in a way that allows it to be gamed that allows for exploitation well then you underfunded which then leads to republicans and corporate democrats pointing to the failure of government run system and they start to chip away at it and look here's the thing about Medicare for all even if we pass bernie's version as it is it's still going to be undermined right if people love it and they see the benefits of Medicare for all and we get it they're still going to be this concerted effort to chip away at it you know to kind of nibble around the edges and opt for more and more privatization so that's going to be an inevitable fact of reality that we're gonna have to deal with unless we get rid of capitalism but that's not something that is a short-term goal that's actually feasible so we have to work within the confines of the system that we have and acknowledge that we need to design a system that is foolproof that can't be exploited that can't be easily gamed that anyone who undermines it in a very direct way they're going to have to explain to their constituents what they're doing why they're undermining this very popular Medicare for all system so while i can admire the fact that elizabeth warren isn't wavering on Medicare for all and she's reconfirming her commitment to it the details matter how we implement this it matters now on top of that here's how she may be undermining the fight for Medicare for all because now she actually did to her credit come up with the way even if it may be regressive to fully fund Medicare for all without raising taxes on the middle and working class so now what's going to happen well people are going to point to bernie and they're going to say bernie elizabeth warren found a way to fully fund Medicare for all without raising taxes on the middle and working class why aren't you doing this so then that will devolve into a conversation about you know the benefits of a payroll tax versus a head tax and at that point we're just putting people to sleep i mean it's hard enough to convey the simple fact to people that overall health care costs go down in spite of an apparel tax but now we're muddying the waters even more also elizabeth warren can appease her critics who are just going to move the goalpost anyway so i mean there's a reason why she's being criticized for this in spite of her reaffirming her support for Medicare for all and there's a reason why the man who wrote the damn bill himself had to come out and explain why this may not be the best idea bernie sanders said the function of health care is to provide health care to all people not to make a hundred billion in profits for the insurance companies and the drug companies so elizabeth warren and i agree on that we do disagree on how you fund it i think the approach that i have in fact will be much more progressive in terms of protecting the financial well-being of middle income families sanders told abc news he thinks warren's plan could have a very negative impact on creating jobs because of the funds it would draw from employers warren's plan calls for nearly nine trillion from employers who would pay the government a slightly smaller percentage of what they currently pay to supply their employees with health insurance warren's plan calls it an employer medicare contribution quote i think that that would probably have a very negative impact on creating those jobs or providing wages increased wages and benefits for those workers sanders told abc news so i think we have a better way which is a seven point five percent payroll tax which is far more i think progressive because it'll not impact employers of low wage workers but hit significantly employers of upper income people so that's what i'm looking for in an advocate for medicare for all that assures me that bernie sanders really will fight for medicare for all because unlike elizabeth warren he's explaining the details of his plan what elizabeth warren is doing is she's trying to appease critics who will never be appeased who are never going to be on board with her version of medicare for all even if it's fully funded joe biden has already come out to criticize this plan and the way she's funding it saying that what she's doing here is mathematical gymnastics so i need someone who's going to firmly plant his or her feet in the ground and not waver but elizabeth warren here even if she's confirming to us that it is single pair that she's fighting for this is a sign of weakness and in her own plan again let me reiterate here she mentioned that this is a long-term goal multiple times so i'm arguing about the details of her plan but that's if we accept that she's even going to fight for it timothy higginbotham in a piece for jack been titled elizabeth warren is jeopardizing our fight for medicare for all he concisely explained why bernie sanders really is the only person we can trust on this issue quote in refusing to take the bait on the bogus how do we pay for a question sanders remains focused on the real obstacles to victory he takes every opportunity given to him to straightforwardly explain how medicare for all will benefit americans unlike warren who rarely mentions it in her stump speech while pointing his finger straight at those who have financial and power-based interests in defeating his plan but simply sanders is correct that winning medicare for all requires a political revolution not wonky payfors with him in the white house we have a fighting chance with warren we shouldn't hold our breath and that is exactly it if you are on the progressive left i said this once i'll say it again this isn't even debatable bernie sanders is the best option he's the most trustworthy and reliable in health care and we know this because he has said the same thing with regards to medicare for all and single payer for 40 plus years he's never wavered on it so if you want medicare for all bernie sanders is our sure bet and let me explain something elizabeth warren did not release this plan for proponents of medicare for all she didn't release this for you and i she released this for her critics to get them off of her back but rather than trying to pander to people who are never going to be on your side rather than trying to assuage the fears of people who like to purport that any and all tax increases are always bad no matter what you know she could have just said let me explain to you why even if we raise taxes that's an easier way to finance medicare for all it's more secure but it's also still going to save people money overall but rather than educating people she chose to not do that she pander to the taxes are bad no matter what crowd and i think that in the end that's bad so i don't really have anything else to say about this i'm going to leave you with a message from fdr or a warning from fdr rather who warned us about people who are making this argument the exact argument that elizabeth warren is now making and let me warn the nation against the smooth evasion we believe in social security we believe in work for the unemployed we believe in saving homes cross our hearts and hope to die