Progressives (Liberals)

She wanted to reform everything except the Democratic Party itself.
[...]
Mr. Sanders’s most loyal followers are as much part of a counterculture as they are members of a political campaign. Rather than asking the best and brightest to lead the way beyond left and right, they have come up with a novel fusion of populism and socialism that marries a critique of the inequalities generated by capitalism with a rejection of technocratic nudging and meritocratic striving. Tell them that Elizabeth Warren is the real radical, and they’ll ask what you can expect from an administration dominated by products of the same elite institutions that ran the Obama White House. Insist that they should be practical, and they’ll wonder how progressives will be able to change the country if they can’t even change the Democratic Party. See the world from this perspective, and Ms. Warren looks like the left wing of a broken status quo, not the start of something different.

Yes, the Sanders campaign has its fair share of Ivy-trained policy specialists. But to its millennial base, the difference between their tribe and the rest of the party is obvious at first sight. It’s what separates Ms. Ocasio-Cortez from Katie Porter, Jacobin from Vox and Democratic Socialists of America from the Democratic Renaissance Project. They can’t stand MSNBC; their attitude toward Russia, Ukraine and impeachment tended toward indifference; and don’t get them started on “The West Wing.” While Mr. Sanders offered them red meat, the other candidates were trying to sell an Impossible Burger.

The problem for Mr. Sanders is that this group is still a distinct minority among Democrats, and the populist revolution that was supposed to sweep new voters to the polls has failed to arrive. But Democratic leaders shouldn’t celebrate for long. Mr. Sanders remains a formidable opponent, and President Trump will be waiting in the fall. The Democratic establishment has put all its chips on Mr. Biden, and the costs will be high if the gamble doesn’t pay off.

Progressives who thought Mr. Buttigieg could bring about real change will remember how quickly he lined up with Mr. Biden. Warren backers will recall how difficult it was to translate elite support into votes. Meanwhile, every year more young people are entering adulthood disillusioned with a system that loads them up with debt and then drops them on an escalator to nowhere. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will turn 35, the minimum age required to serve as president, on Oct. 13, 2024.

Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg has decided to form an independent expenditure campaign that will absorb hundreds of his presidential campaign staffers in six swing states to work to elect the Democratic nominee this fall.

The group, with a name that is still undisclosed because its trademark application is in process, would also be a vehicle for Bloomberg to spend money on advertising to attack President Trump and support the Democratic nominee, according to a person familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Bloomberg is set to do the right thing.

Democrats lead by at least 4 in 4 GOP held Senate seats

Super Tuesday’s true meaning? Americans are desperate to show we’re better than Trump

gnashing of teeth.

If you ever wondered how much Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) vast array of policy proposals would cost, we now have a reasonably good estimate from his own staff. The answer is about $50 trillion over the next decade. Sanders may or may not be a “democratic socialist” — whatever that means — but he clearly is a soak-the-rich radical who would dramatically expand the government’s role, from cradle to grave.

Whether most Americans prefer Sanders’s statist agenda to the alleged abuses of corporations and Wall Street (the notorious “top 1 percent”) is what defines this election. Whatever the case, Sanders is proposing a hugely expensive transformation.

Let’s examine the $50 trillion. The list below shows various spending programs that Sanders has proposed, with one important exception: The first item on the list is the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of the deficits under existing policies for the next decade. That figure is $13.1 trillion.

Sanders’s Spending, 2021-2030:

1. Deficits under existing policies: $13.1 trillion

2. “Free” college for all and the cancellation of existing student debt: $2.2 trillion

3. Expand Social Security and other retirement benefits: $1.4 trillion (estimated by the Progressive Policy Institute)

4. Housing for all: $2.5 trillion

5. Eliminating household medical debt: $81 billion

6. Green New Deal (programs to stop global warming): $16.3 trillion

7. Universal child care and preschool: $1.5 trillion

8. Medicare-for-all: $17.5 trillion

Total: $54.6 trillion

We can round off the total to $50 trillion. The object is not a precise estimate down to the last penny. The goal is to determine a correct order of magnitude for Sanders’s plans. An estimate by the Progressive Policy Institute, a research and advocacy group, reached a similar total: $53 trillion.

To put these numbers in perspective, the CBO projects that, under existing laws, the federal government will spend $60.7 trillion over a decade. If Sanders’s program costs $50 trillion over the same period, the size of government would expand by roughly 80 percent. If all the spending were covered by deficits, the publicly held federal debt would rise from $16.8 trillion in 2019 to $66.8 trillion in 2030. If all the spending were covered by tax increases, the overall level of taxation would roughly double.

Granted, all these projections are subject to qualifications. Still, they reveal the make-believe quality of Sanders’s agenda, which is also largely mirrored by the proposals of his Democratic rival Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.). The presumption seems to be that if you want a new social program, whether Medicaid-for-all or free college, all you have to do is dial it up and the super-rich will pay for it.

This is a fantasy that, unfortunately, is sustained by simplistic media coverage that ignores the collective impact of all these various proposals.

“Sanders’s proposals won’t raise nearly as much money as he thinks they will,” says Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. “Even if they did, they won’t pay for everything he wants.”

For example, Sanders proposes a wealth tax on taxpayers with a net worth (assets minus liabilities) of $32 million or more. The tax would gradually rise from 1 percent up to 8 percent on fortunes exceeding $10 billion. Sanders estimates this would raise $4.35 trillion over a decade.

Not likely, says Gleckman. About half of the wealth of the rich is contained in privately held businesses that, unlike publicly traded stocks, are hard to value. He thinks the tax would raise far less than expected. “Rich people won’t stand by and pay taxes,” he says. “They will hire expensive lawyers to avoid taxes.” Similar problems would erode revenue from a proposed tax on financial transactions, he says.

Even with some added tax revenue, there still would be a $25 trillion gap between Sanders’s spending plans and an equivalent amount of new tax revenue, says analyst Ben Ritz of the PPI. Federal spending would approach 40 percent of gross domestic product, up from about 20 percent now.

The crucial issue is not deficits; it’s what kind of government Americans want. Sanders and Warren advocate a high-tax-and-benefits system, patterned on European welfare states. Government expands power at the expense of private control. In truth, we’ve already gone a considerable distance down this path.

Do we want to go further? Our society is part socialist and part capitalist. The Sanders-Warren vision would make it less capitalist. The federal government would become an even larger apparatus for transferring wealth and income from one group to another. Economic growth would matter less than economic redistribution.

The danger of the Sanders-Warren approach is that we may overload the political system, assigning it more tasks than it could possibly accomplish — and making more promises than it could possibly keep. The irony is palpable:

What is undertaken to raise government’s reputation may actually have the opposite effect by fanning disillusion.

It's unscientific, but I'm seeing polls that have Biden way out in front of Bernie in Michigan and Florida. The word is, if he wins those two primaries it's all over but the gnashing of teeth.

To put these numbers in perspective, the CBO projects that, under existing laws, the federal government will spend $60.7 trillion over a decade. If Sanders's program costs $50 trillion over the same period, the size of government would expand by roughly 80 percent. If all the spending were covered by deficits, the publicly held federal debt would rise from $16.8 trillion in 2019 to $66.8 trillion in 2030. If all the spending were covered by tax increases, the overall level of taxation would roughly double.

ironically the tiny-handed MAGAsaurus, while a bit younger, looks a lot worse than either of our guys.

Jeet Heer
@HeerJeet
Assuming the most conservative estimates of 0.5% mortality, this is a call for the death of 37,500,000 people world wide or or 1,750,000 Americans, all in order to shore up the stock market.

Political Polls
@PpollingNumbers
· 6h
Warren's Supporters Second Choice:

Sanders 47%
Biden 46%

National @Reuters/@Ipsos (3/4-5)