As I reported this morning, Elizabeth Warren has released her plan to pay for “Medicare for All” and it’s a cluster of terrible assumptions and veiled tax hikes on the working class. The idea that payroll tax hikes, repealing the Trump tax cuts, unregulated immigration, and slamming businesses with new taxes wouldn’t hugely damage the middle class is laughable on its face.
Because Warren is the chosen one though, the media rushed to hang on her every word and proclaim that she had silenced her critics.
Take this stupidity for example.
MSNBCers are calling Warren's released health care plan a "clapback" to her critics this morning.
— David Rutz (@DavidRutz) November 1, 2019
with actual clapping pic.twitter.com/e8DJm5x6zX
— David Rutz (@DavidRutz) November 1, 2019
Other outlets kept it a bit more professional but the repeated line all day was that Warren had figured out how pay for her plan without hurting the middle class. This was repeated over and over with no critical analysis at all. You can see my previous piece on the subject to discover why that’s an outright lie. But the media are gonna media all over the place.
Meanwhile, Republican Ben Sasse released a statement that pretty much sums up my feelings toward this insanity.
Gotta admire the honesty there. If there’s one thing Trump has done to improve our political environment, it’s ripping away the insufferable decorum surrounding garbage like this. If someone is suggesting we turn the healthcare system into a communist dumpster fire, just calling it that works much better than the lofty fluff we used to endure.
As a reminder, the federal budget is a little over $3.5 trillion a year. Warren wants to spend $52T over ten years on her plan, which means she wants to well more than double the yearly federal budget for a single program. And she says she’s going to do this by not taxing the middle class.
Sasse is right. It’s make-believe math to think that could work. She might as well be saying she’s going to pay for it with unicorn farts and dancing gnomes. Yet, somehow our intrepid, fact-loving media don’t seem curious at all to pry apart the discrepancies within her new white paper. Think back to 2017 when Republicans were trying to pass the tax cuts and there was a new article in The Washington Post every two hours telling you how it couldn’t work. They were wrong of course, but the point is that they sure found time to dig deep in that instance.
With Warren though, they’ll lay off. They don’t want Biden and Warren makes them feel like Obama made them feel, just in a much more white bread way.