2020 Democratic Primary Thread: Focus on House & Senate races

storyteller

storyteller

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King Kreole said:
See, this is what Liz talks about when she rails against a smallness of vision and political incrementalist cowardice, and I find it...interesting...that these objections are now coming from the "revolution, not reform" crowd.

It strikes me as naive to believe you can institute M4A without impacting the state of labor rights or tax structure or even immigration reform. Requiring contractors to pay a head tax is not a magic wand that will make these massive interconnected issues disappear. So yes, she has interlinked healthcare reform with reform in other areas of the social economy because they are already interlinked and she is a structural, intersectional thinker. This seems to be a big dividing line between pro-Liz and anti-Liz factions. If you don't see how all these massive social institutions are interrelated and how you can't make large alterations to one without impacting the other, then you're probably not going to find this plan, or Liz in general, particularly appealing. But those of us who think in structural terms can appreciate how Liz is connecting the dots. Which is one of the reasons we find her plan(s) superior. You seem to be advocating for a movement isolationist approach to social change, whereas Liz's vision is one where linking movements together increases their power and builds a large-scale change. Now immigration rights groups and labor rights groups and anti-War groups have a vested interest in getting M4A passed. All these groups pushing together in the same direction. Some might call that...a revolution. :sas1:
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I don't think there's any good way to spin the head tax to leftist wonks. The critiques of it are coming from the left where intersectional concepts are pretty much all we work with. The problem here is one I'd liken to Yang's VAT...can it be set up in a way that is workable? Yes. But the margin for error is slim before it becomes regressive. That said, this is the only part of the bill that I've seen which is problematic. Everything else is kinda great and seems to run in line with Bernie. I'd much rather debate funding mechanisms to cover everybody than have to debate whether universal coverage is the best solution for our nation. In this specific funding debate though, I'm with the other lefties that think the head tax is more about dodging right wing pedantry than practicality.



Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has, as promised, released a plan to pay for her Medicare for All health insurance plan. She has come up with a clever way to make workers indirectly pay for a share of that single-payer government system while making it look like a new tax on employers.

Her plan has many elements, but let’s focus on just one: A new fee (or tax) on employers equal to 98 percent of their current health insurance costs. In effect, rather than paying insurance companies to cover their employees, firms would pay the government to insure their workers. Warren estimates this levy would raise $8.8 trillion over the next 10 years, just a bit less than she estimates firms would pay in health costs under the current system.

A simple example

To take a really simple (and unrealistically low) example: Imagine a company offers its workers insurance that costs an average of $10,000 annually. The firm pays $7,000 and its workers pay $3,000. Under Warren’s plan, the company would no longer have to provide insurance coverage to its employees, who all would get government funded health care.

Thus, in this simple example, Warren would require the firm to write an annual check to the government for $6,860 ($7,000 times .98) per worker.

Because she’d base the tax on what employers currently pay for health coverage, she’d perversely punish those companies that offer the most generous (and costly) health insurance. This would be especially dramatic for small businesses: They’d be exempt from the tax if they do not offer health insurance today but would owe the tax if they currently do cover their workers.

Why should you care?

As a worker, you might say, why do I care about any of this? I’m getting insurance now. I’ll get it under Medicare for All. My employer pays a tax. It costs me nothing. Plus, I’ll no longer have to pay my share of workplace insurance or most co-pays and deductibles.

But the story isn’t quite that simple. Workers, it turns out, will be paying some of this tax themselves—but indirectly.

Here’s why: When employers pay for your health insurance, they are using money that they otherwise might be paying you other compensation, such as wages Absent Warren’s new tax, a firm that no longer has to pay for insurance will likely use some of its cost savings to raise wages or other benefits. Thus, absent the tax, workers would get government-financed health care plus a raise. The only problem: It would blow a huge hole in the federal budget.

A regressive tax

With the tax, they will get no raise since the total cost of hiring a worker will remain roughly the same. The new tax will simply substitute for the cost of today’s employer-sponsored health care (less 2 percent). Thus, workers still will be paying a tax. But it will be indirect—and very hard to explain.

Warren acknowledges this when she exempts unionized firms, who would be allowed to reduce their tax payments if they pass along their health care costs savings in the form of wages, pensions, or benefits.

However, her proposal would be regressive. Warren’s indirect levy is effectively a flat tax on all workers at the same firm. By contrast, a straightforward income tax or well-designed payroll tax would be much more progressive. At least according to the conventional analysis that analyzes taxes separately from the government programs they finance.

Give Warren credit for putting forward a plan to pay for Medicare for All. And she has found a clever way to make middle-income people finance a portion of government health insurance without paying a direct tax. But make no mistake, they still will be paying.
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Matt Bruenig's article has been passed around a lot, so I won't quote it but link it as well...
Warren’s Perpetual Medicare Head Tax Is Unworkable and Bad
 
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storyteller said:
I don't think there's any good way to spin the head tax to leftist wonks. The critiques of it are coming from the left where intersectional concepts are pretty much all we work with. The problem here is one I'd liken to Yang's VAT...can it be set up in a way that is workable? Yes. But the margin for error is slim before it becomes regressive. That said, this is the only part of the bill that I've seen which is problematic. Everything else is kinda great and seems to run in line with Bernie. I'd much rather debate funding mechanisms to cover everybody than have to debate whether universal coverage is the best solution for our nation. In this specific funding debate though, I'm with the other lefties that think the head tax is more about dodging right wing pedantry than practicality.





Matt Bruenig's article has been passed around a lot, so I won't quote it but link it as well...
Warren’s Perpetual Medicare Head Tax Is Unworkable and Bad
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Exactly. There is nothing sycophantic to Bernie about this. It’s just a simple fact that if you follow Warren’s reason they costs for a typical middle class family might go down like 200 dollars a year but everything would be covered. With Bernie’s funding method you’re looking at a decrease of thousands of dollars. I’m happy the debate is happening and people need to see beyond their rooting interests.
 
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MSNBC announces Tyler Perry Studios as site for November debate
The fifth Democratic presidential debate, hosted by MSNBC and The Washington Post, will be held at Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta on Nov. 20.

The debate will be feature four moderators, all of whom are women: Rachel Maddow, host of MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show"; Andrea Mitchell, host of MSNBC's "Andrea Mitchell Reports" and NBC News' chief foreign affairs correspondent; Kristen Welker, NBC News' White House correspondent; and Ashley Parker, a White House reporter for The Washington Post.
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King Kreole

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Mephistopheles said:
I didn't say contracting happened because of Obamacare. Due to agreed-upon increase in the ease and implementation of contracting and outsourcing work, it makes it very easy for businesses to do so in order to avoid the head tax. They can't avoid payroll tax. They can avoid a head tax and many will. Any projections of cost based on expected revenue from head tax can't be relied upon as long as evasion is so easy. You don't have that problem with a payroll tax. Math isn't right wing thinking.
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The incentives to avoid Warren's head tax are there with Bernie's payroll tax as well, just through a different mechanism, because both have small-business carveouts. Liz's are based on employee headcount (<50) and Bernie's is based on employee payroll (<$2M), so yes, you can avoid payroll tax. Any incentive for a large employer to break themselves apart to game the system via headcount are present in the payroll tax route as well. But again, this is chicken little territory because the ACA has the exact same 50 employee headcount carveout trigger and, as you just admitted, it hasn't caused massive waves of contracting. For the vast majority of businesses, the idea of voluntarily breaking up or undergoing existentially large corporate reorganization all to avoid paying 2% less in healthcare costs is ridiculous.

Mephistopheles said:
Possibly. Or it could be that Warren supporters such as yourself just get so enamored and jerk off to policy papers to that extent that you place that feeling over how things will actually get done. Nobody gives a fukk about your plan if it only works on paper. Single payer healthcare is the probably the most important policy goal for the next President. It'll be one of the first things President Bernie or Liz pushes. I found it preferable to go into it with an approach that doesn't presuppose a myriad of assumptions and moving parts in which funding is dependent upon other large-scale reform legislation to exist. That's how the ACA got sabotaged (exchanges not competing across state lines, SCOTUS ruling Medicaid expansion is optional for states, price controls getting gutted, etc.) I don't understand. When the first round of critiques of Liz' plan came here you were basically saying who cares about the details it won't get passed as is anyway. Now you've done a 180 and are self-aggrandizing about how Warren supporters have superior wonkiness, vision, and judgment.

If you implement Bernie's vision which involves increases in payroll taxes, and increases in incomes of higher percentage brackets, you have a more robust framework to work with without allowing business to evade contributions and depend on getting immigration reform and tax reform passed. That you can build about that framework and dovetail other policy reforms into the larger picture as practical.
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Man, do you really believe the difference between M4A passing and M4A being shot down is whether 1/3 of the funding is raised via an employer-side head tax vs an employer-side payroll tax? This is some real forest for the trees shyt. There are currently only 15 Senators who claim to support this bill, and only 2 of them are going to bat for it now that it's game time. And you're sitting here actively arguing against building out a broader coalition of support across social movements because you think you can smuggle fukking MEDICARE FOR ALL through in the dead of the night without people noticing if you make it skinny and "robust" enough. That's an opinion borne out of typical anxious Democratic posture and belies a misunderstanding of the political reality we're living in. The road to passing M4A does not deviate along the lines of payroll tax vs head tax. The people you're hoping to appease with these maneuvers are going to fight against M4A anyway because they're profiting off of the bloat of the current healthcare system. No amount of crossed t's or dotted i's will magically swing them over to our side. I don't understand how you can reference the sabotaging of the ACA and believe that Obama's problem was that he wasn't careful enough in his policy design as opposed to ideological constraints. The fight is coming, don't play yourself. All M4A plans are chock-full of assumptions and moving parts. There are assumptions about pricing and administrative efficiencies and job transformations and business reactions, etc in both Bernie and Liz's plans. These exact same lines you're using here against Liz will be used by right-wing forces when President Sanders tries to pass M4A. We're talking about the biggest institutional transformation in our lifetimes here. If you're crying uncle at a head tax vs a payroll tax, you ain't built for this, I'm just being real.

And my point stands that there is practically no avenue to pass M4A at this point in history (ironically in part because of the attitude you're displaying right now), so the practical benefit of M4A discussions is not about designing the plan as it will actually exist, but rather designing a plan that will shift the Overton Window and building the mass levels of public support that will be needed to actually eventually get it passed. This is why Ady Barkan was praising Liz for this move, she did the work to make M4A more palatable to the general public while simultaneously harnessing the power of other mass movements. Her brilliance here is not in designing an optimal universal health care funding bill (although it's pretty damn close), but in designing an optimal universal health care funding strategy in this political environment. Calling it disastrous as Breunig did is some Bitter Bernie Bro bullshyt. Bernie's vision is an increase in payroll taxes plus an increase in income taxes for all brackets over $29K, so that's certainly not just high percentage brackets. That universality is both a boon and a hurdle.

And Liz's plan doesn't necessitate waiting on immigration reform and tax reform being passed before M4A can be implemented, because those are funding mechanisms and government programs spend before they fund. The order would be a political calculation, the same as it would be for Bernie and his various funding mechanisms.

Mephistopheles said:
By labor reorganization I meant what we're already talking about: contracting/outsourcing/moving to firms with less than 50, and yes those things are easy to do.
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And as I mentioned, and you yourself agreed with, labor reorganization is a broad, long-term trend that is not the result of government healthcare expansion. The 50 headcount incentive is far too small for the kind of exponential increase in mass displacement and labor reorganization you're forecasting, which is why we didn't see a massive wave of 50 headcount companies pop up when the ACA implemented the exact same incentive.
 
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