In Brian Riedl’s critique of the costs of Bernie Sanders’s proposals at City Journal there is a nugget of real wisdom:
This unprecedented outlay would more than double the size of the federal government. Over the next decade, Washington is already projected to spend $60 trillion, and state and local governments will spend another $29.7 trillion from non-federal sources. Adding Sanders’s $97.5 trillion—and then subtracting the $3 trillion saved by state governments under Medicare For All—would raise the total cost of government to $184 trillion, or 70 percent of the projected GDP over ten years
Such spending would far exceed even that of European social democracies. The 35 OECD countries average 43 percent of GDP in total government spending. Finland’s 57 percent tops the list, edging France and Denmark. Meantime, Sweden and Norway—regularly lauded as models for the U.S.—spend just under 50 percent of GDP. The U.S. government, at all levels, spends between 34 percent and 38 percent of GDP, depending on how one calculates.
The gap between 38% and 57% isn’t an enormous one and the difference between 34% and 43% isn’t that much, either. Our problem in the United States is not that government spending is too low. It is that we are not getting value for what we’re spending.
That’s what I miss in the present discourse. There’s a lot of bickering about whether to make government bigger or smaller and not nearly enough discussion about making it better.
” It is that we are not getting value for what we’re spending.”
Agreed, with the caveat that there is also disagreement on what we should spend on. The GOP and Democrats, looking at what they do and not what they say, are both willing to spend about the same amount of money. The GOP wants to spend more on defense and tax expenditures for the wealthy. The Democrats on social services of some sort.
Of course the candidates are trying to win the primary, not quarterback federal spending.
What irked me was Harris’ focus on “women’s reproductive issues “.Important, but hardly Presidential focal issue. Moderators should press them on issues involving the office.
I don’t really take the domestic proposals of candidates all that seriously for obvious reasons, but they do serve as useful signaling to show what kind of President a candidate might be and what they would do with the power of the office.
“Our problem in the United States is not that government spending is too low. It is that we are not getting value for what we’re spending.”
I’d take that further. Personally, I believe that the notion that a dollar spent by government is more efficiently spent than one by the private sector is ludicrous, knowable, and empirically false. So, why do people fall for this since, say, 1936??
Perhaps they really don’t. My daughter, who attends a liberal college, with plenty of liberals, reports that almost none of them actually believe the free beer promises politicians make. Its a high end school with high end people, so maybe a skewed sample. But who really believes this stuff?
My theory: the same personality type who believes they are going to win the lottery.
Agreed, lots of bickering and bold new ideas instead of looking at what we have already.
Medicaid for all, look up the <a href=https://bphc.hrsa.gov/about/index.html"Health Center Program at DHHS, which aims to: “Provide services regardless of patients’ ability to pay and charge for services on a sliding fee scale.”
You might want to distinguish between party objectives and talking points.
If you have evidence that Democrats don’t spend on defense, please produce it. The last Senate vote on a defense appropriations bill had only 8 votes against, evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats. That’s pretty typical of the history of defense appropriations bills. It’s a valence issue. Both parties support it.
The three largest “tax expenditures for the wealthy” are the home mortgage interest deduction, deduction of state and local taxes, and the charitable deduction. Democrats support all of them.
And one man’s “social services” is another man’s graft. In the early days of the PPACA billions were doled out to various NGOs with practically no oversight or measureable benefit. The same NGOs turned around and participated in GOTV campaigns.
The solution to all of these dubious undertakings is statutory performance metrics with enforcement but nobody wants to be the bad guy.
“Perhaps they really don’t. My daughter, who attends a liberal college, with plenty of liberals”
OMG, you are getting information about what liberals believe from a source other than right wing media and it doesn’t comport with your prior beliefs!
Steve