On Wednesday Donald Trump demanded
that Congress move quickly to enact his tax reform plan. But so far he
has not, in fact, offered any such plan. Not only is there no detailed
legislative proposal, his administration hasn’t even settled on the
basic outlines of what it wants.
Meanwhile, 17 Senate Democrats — more than a third of the caucus — have signed on
to Bernie Sanders’s call for expanding Medicare to cover the whole
population. So far, however, Sanders hasn’t produced either an estimate
of how much that would cost or a specific proposal about how to pay for
it.
I
don’t mean to suggest that these cases are comparable: The distinctive
Trumpian mix of ignorance and fraudulence has no counterpart among
Democrats. Still, both stories raise the question of how much, if at
all, policy clarity matters for politicians’ ability to win elections
and, maybe more important, to govern.
About
elections: The fact that Trump is in the White House suggests that
politicians can get away with telling voters just about anything that
sounds good. After all, Trump promised to cut taxes, protect Social
Security and Medicare from cuts, provide health insurance to all
Americans and pay off the national debt, and he paid no price for the
obvious inconsistency of these promises.
Hey,
arithmetic has a well-known liberal bias — and the commitment of the
mainstream media to “balance” virtually guarantees enough false
equivalence to obscure even the most obvious fraud.
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On the other hand, the ignominious failure of Trumpcare shows that reality sometimes does matter.
True,
Republicans long paid no price for lying about Obamacare; in fact,
those lies helped them take control of Congress. But when they gained
control of the White House, too, so that the prospect of repealing the
Affordable Care Act became real, the lies caught up with them.
Once
the public realized that tens of millions would lose coverage under
Republican plans, there was a huge backlash; that backlash may give
Democrats the House next year, despite all the gerrymandering and other
structural disadvantages they face.
The
story of tax reform — actually, given the likely content of whatever
legislative proposal may finally emerge, we should call it tax “reform” —
is starting to look a bit similar. During the campaign Trump could get
away with posing as an economic populist while offering a tax plan
that would add $6 trillion to the deficit, with half the benefit going
to the richest 1 percent of the population. But this kind of
bait-and-switch may not work once an actual bill is on the table.
In
fact, Trump himself seems to be experiencing cognitive dissonance. “The
rich will not be gaining at all with this plan,” he declared Wednesday.
Like his claims that Trumpcare wouldn’t cause anyone to lose coverage,
this statement raises questions about what’s going on in his mind: Is he
oblivious, lying, or both?
But
in any case, such statements are going to make it even harder to pass
anything: The contrast between what he’s claiming and anything
Republicans in Congress will be willing to support is so great as to
practically invite ridicule and another popular backlash.
I’d add that tax cuts for corporations and the rich have little popular support.
Even many self-identified Republicans, especially among the
working-class voters who supported Trump, tell pollsters that
corporations and the wealthy pay too little, not too much. Trump seems
to imagine that he can rally broad voter support for his tax plans, but
it’s hard to see how.
But is the push for single-payer health care taking Democrats down a similar path?
Unlike
just about everything Trump and company are proposing, Medicare for all
is a substantively good idea. Yet actually making it happen would
probably mean facing down a serious political backlash. For one thing,
it would require a substantial increase in taxes. For another, it would
mean telling scores of millions of Americans who get health coverage
though their employers, and are generally satisfied with their coverage,
that they need to give it up and accept something different. You can
say that the new system would be better — but will they believe it?
Such
concerns may not seem very salient right now: Given Republican control
of the White House, single-payer is going to be at best an aspiration
for the next three-plus years. But what if rigid support for
single-payer — as opposed to somewhat flexible support for universal
coverage, however achieved — becomes a litmus test? In that case,
Democrats could eventually find themselves facing a Trumpcare-type
debacle, unable either to implement their unrealistic vision or to let
it go.
The
point is that while unrealistic promises may not hurt you in elections,
they can become a big problem when you try to govern. Having a vision
for the future is good, but being real about the difficulties is also
good. Democrats, take heed.
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