By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, February 07, 2019
The age of Trump is supposedly an age of Republican
radicalism, a phenomenon about which we hear daily — indeed, hourly, if we
endure cable-news commentary and talk radio.
But that Republican radicalism is almost nowhere to be
found in the Republican policy agenda. President Donald Trump is a wild man on
Twitter; in the Oval Office, pen in hand, he’s Jeb Bush. His signature
domestic-policy achievement is a mostly conventional Republican tax cut that
actually conflicted with much of what he had promised during the campaign, when
he talked about jacking up taxes on investors and multinational business
concerns. One of the least appreciated aspects of Trump’s presidency (so far)
is that the president has been quietly — but thoroughly — dominated by the
Republican leadership in Congress, even as he has loudly — but fruitlessly —
proclaimed himself the boss. When it comes to the items on Trump’s agenda that
conflict either in substance or in priority with the congressional-GOP agenda —
new immigration restrictions, border wall, $1 trillion infrastructure program,
neo-mercantilist trade policy — Senator Mitch McConnell & Co. simply
decline to take up the president’s to-do list. As he learns about the political
contours of his recently adopted party and the conservative movement that has
helped to organize it, President Trump becomes a more conventional Republican
day by day — on policy.
The radicalism of Donald Trump’s Republican party is
rhetorical — the party’s language is unsparing and confrontational, its stance
unyielding, its understanding of itself in relation to the major American
institutions increasingly countercultural. But even though it is wed to an
utterly conventional GOP political playbook, that rhetorical radicalism has
provided the Democrats with what they take to be a plenary indulgence of
reciprocal radicalism — not only in rhetoric but in substance.
This current of Democratic radicalism predates Trump and
Trumpism — it was evident in the antiwar movement of the Bush years and the
Occupy Wall Street movement that emerged toward the end of that administration.
(Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is among the contenders for the 2020 Democratic
presidential nomination, boasts that she laid the intellectual foundations for
Occupy.) Both the protests against the Iraq War and the slow-motion riot that
began in Zuccotti Park and never quite subsided saw ordinary and purportedly
responsible Democrats, including both intellectuals and officeholders, making
common cause with far-left radicals of many different stripes: Louis
Farrakhan–style anti-Semites, Soviet nostalgists marching around Lower
Manhattan in East German military uniforms. Anarchists such as David Graeber
came into fashion (and have not gone out) along with old-fashioned Marxists
such as Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian psychoanalytic philosopher and apologist
for political violence. Outside the realm of academics, imitators such as
intellectual manquée Elizabeth
Bruenig, now of the Washington Post,
openly took up the banner of socialism. “Tankies” began to gleefully make the
case for Josef Stalin’s liberal use of artillery and genocidal famine as
instruments of political persuasion. The usual campus Maoists and mau-mauists
began making their way off the quad and into the centers of Democratic power,
carried there in no small part by the 2016 Democratic primary campaign of
Senator Bernie Sanders, the Brooklyn socialist who represents Vermont in the
Senate.
Trump’s victory helped to supercharge that emboldened
radicalism, partly because of who he is and how he comports himself but chiefly
because he was supposed to lose and didn’t.
Hence the emerging 2020 Democratic agenda as articulated
by those seeking the party’s presidential nomination, an agenda that owes a
good deal more to Hugo Chávez than to Jack Kennedy — or even to Hillary Rodham
Clinton, whose failure as a candidate liberated progressive activists from the
burden of pretending not to detest her relatively business-friendly approach
and the Wall Street Democrats behind it.
As of this writing, that 2020 agenda has two major
pieces: One is adopting a Soviet model of health care — no, not a British
model; the British haven’t abolished private insurance, as Senator Kamala
Harris proposes to do — and the other is wealth confiscation. Republicans,
unfortunately, already are falling into the error of presenting as the
principal argument against this radicalism that the latter will prove
insufficient to pay for the former.
The budget math is not the most important argument, but
the numbers are worth considering: The “Medicare for all” national-monopoly
model of health care proposed by Senators Sanders, Harris, Warren, Gillibrand,
and others is projected to cost about $3.5 trillion
a year — and that is a relatively friendly estimate. That figure exceeds all
federal tax revenue — all of it — for
2018. That health-care entitlement alone would cost more than Social Security,
Medicare, Medicaid, and defense combined, and would represent a near-doubling
of federal expenditures. It would require more than doubling total federal
taxes just to keep the deficit where it is, which is right around the $1
trillion mark, an unsustainable level that is in and of itself a major policy
problem.
The defects of the monopoly model of health care already
are evident in all of the places where such monopolies have been created, not
only in distant backwaters but in economically advanced countries such as the
United Kingdom and Canada, where delays, poor quality of care, and corruption
are ongoing problems that are getting worse. In Canada, the average delay
between referral to a specialist and treatment has gone from about six weeks in
the 1990s to nearly three months today. Patients crippled by joint failures can
wait nearly a year for a knee replacement. In November, a House of Lords
committee warned the British government that the figures produced by the
National Health Service do not accurately reflect the prevalence of bribery and
fraud in that system. Scottish hospitals are in crisis over deadly infections
caused by unsanitary conditions, including deaths of children from diseases
transmitted in the hospital by pigeon droppings. It is worth keeping in mind
when evaluating these horror stories that both Canadian and British
public-sector institutions reliably outperform their American counterparts when
it comes to effectiveness, transparency, and honesty. The NHS is not great. The
NHS as run by something like Cory Booker’s former mayoral administration in
Newark would be worse.
There are many ways to get to universality in health-care
coverage, and it should be emphasized that very few countries actually have a
single, unitary, national-monopoly system of the kind Democrats are envisioning.
Neither liberal Western European countries such as Germany nor the Northern
European welfare states so admired by American progressives typically rely on
such systems. Far from being a Scandinavian answer to the NHS, Sweden has a
broadly decentralized system in which administration and responsibility lie
with the county governments or, in some cases, with municipalities. This helps
to create accountability; for example, if a Swedish patient does not receive
timely care from a local provider (“timely” of course being elastic; in the
Swedish context, it generally means three months, part of what health-care
scholar Arne Björnberg describes as the system’s “seemingly never-ending story
of access/waiting time problems”), then the county government is obliged to
send him elsewhere for care — and to pay for his care and his travel both. That
kind of accountability is hard to provide in a national system with 325 million
patients, as indeed the U.S. experience with both Medicare and Medicaid has
made abundantly clear. The Swiss system, which the architects of the Affordable
Care Act attempted partly to replicate, relies exclusively on private
insurance, and it emphasizes cross-jurisdictional competition, consumer choice,
and individual responsibility. There is no single-payer system in Germany or
France. Germany, in fact, is rated by the Euro Health Index as having the most
consumer-driven system in Europe.
If the goal is to increase Americans’ access to
high-quality health care and to minimize the financial risk and uncertainty
associated with the American system — both worthy goals — then instituting a
political monopoly and abolishing private insurance is not the most obvious
plan of action. If the goal is to prove that you are more radical than Joe Biden
— and more anti-Trump than Starbucks founder Howard Schultz — then monopolies
and authoritarianism are just the thing.
Much the same thing applies to Democratic radicalism on
taxes: The politics of vendetta produce results at odds with the goal of raising
revenue.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is — angels
and ministers of grace defend us! — too young to run for president this time
around, has hit upon the idea of raising tax rates to 70 percent on very
high-income households: those earning $10 million and up.
But even assuming (unlikely as it is) no change in the
economic behavior of high-earning Americans in response to such radically
higher taxes, the Ocasio-Cortez proposal and others like it would raise, even
according to friendly projections, only a trivial amount of money relative to
the cost of their policy proposals. But as Vanessa Williamson (no relation) of
the Brookings Institution makes clear, revenue is not the point. Revenge is.
“The revenue question is the wrong question,” she writes:
Not because talking about revenue
plays into a Republican strategy of deeply hypocritical deficit fear
mongering — though it does. Not because extracting money from rich people
is easy; there are serious technical questions about how to implement taxes on
the very wealthy. The problem with using revenue to justify progressive
taxation is that over time, an effective progressive tax system should actually
raise less and less money.
Progressive taxation should work as
a corrective tax, like tobacco taxes or a carbon tax. . . . Taxes on the
wealthy discourage a different societal ill: exploitative capitalism.
Progressive tax policy is a powerful corrective to economic inequality and
wealth concentration.
Which is to say: The current progressive conception of
justice holds that making the wealthy less wealthy is morally necessary and
worthy even if doing so does nothing at all to make the poor more wealthy or to
provide the government with additional revenue with which to offer services to
those in need. Wealth itself is to be understood as a sinful vice, like
smoking, to be punished and if possible reduced through vengeful taxation.
Understood from that point of view, Senator Sanders’s
proposed 77 percent tax on the estates of wealthy Americans and Senator
Warren’s proposal to impose a 2 percent net-worth tax on similar households
make more sense: Senator Sanders’s proposal would raise less than 1 percent of
what he wants to spend on a single new health-care entitlement, but it would inconvenience
a few billionaires and rob them of the opportunity to take their families from
shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves at some Monaco baccarat table.
It is notable that Senator Harris is also campaigning for
a very large tax cut: nearly $3 trillion in savings for Americans earning
incomes into the six figures but short of Mark Zuckerberg money. Her plan would
add mightily to the deficit but, unlike most of what the Democrats are talking
about, it has a good chance of making its way through a partly or wholly
Republican-controlled Congress without too many bumps and scratches. Naked
malice and venom may get you through the primary, but a middle-class tax cut is
the way to a second term.
The Democrats are setting themselves up for
disappointment in 2020. They believe that the answer to a glowering and
polarizing figure such as Donald Trump is an equally divisive figure — and
agenda — of their own. Howard Schultz already knows that he cannot run in his
own party, even though Senator Sanders — who is not a member of the Democratic
party — can. Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, the most experienced and
reasonable of the likely Democratic contenders — and the one with by far the
best actual record in office — already is being denounced as just another rich
old white man who is a part of the problem more than of the solution. The
proverb holds that revenge is a dish best served cold, but the Democrats are going
into the primary season hot, hot, hot.
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