In last week’s Democratic debate, former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg charged that Sen. Bernie Sanders’ policy proposals would cost $50 trillion. Holy Indiana.
Larry Summers, formerly the chief White House economic adviser for Barack Obama, puts the price tag at $60 trillion. “We are in a kind of new era of radical proposal,” he told CNN.
Putting aside the accuracy of these cost estimates, they omit the other side of the equation: What, by comparison, is the cost of doing nothing?
A Green New Deal might be expensive, but doing nothing about climate change will almost certainly cost far more. If we don’t launch something as bold as a Green New Deal, we’ll spend trillions coping with the consequences of our failure to be bold.
“Medicare for All” will cost a lot, but the price of doing nothing about America’s increasingly dysfunctional health care system will soon be in the stratosphere. A new study in The Lancet estimates that Medicare for All would save $450 billion and prevent 68,000 unnecessary deaths each year.