Robert Reich | The Humongous Costs of Inaction

26 February 20

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Robert Reich | The Humongous Costs of Inaction

Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
Reich writes: "In last Wednesday night's Democratic debate, former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg charged that Senator Bernie Sanders' policy proposals would cost $50 trillion. Holy Indiana."

Larry Summers, formerly chief White House economic advisor 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 healthcare 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.

Investing in universal childcare, public higher education and woefully outdated and dilapidated infrastructure will be expensive too, but the cost of not making these investments would be astronomical. American productivity is already suffering and millions of families can’t afford decent childcare, college or housing – whose soaring costs are closely related to inadequate transportation and water systems.

Focusing only on the costs of doing something about these problems without mentioning the costs of doing nothing is misleading, but this asymmetry is widespread. 

Journalists wanting to appear serious about public policy continue to rip into Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (whose policies are almost as ambitious) for the costs of their proposals but never ask self-styled moderates like Buttigieg how they plan to cope with the costs of doing nothing or too little.

A related criticism of Sanders and Warren is that they haven’t come up with ways to pay for their proposals. Sanders “only explained $25 trillion worth of revenue, which means the hole in there is bigger than the size of the entire economy of the United States,” charged Mayor Pete.

Sanders’ and Warren’s wealth tax would go a long way toward paying for their plans.

But even if their wealth tax paid a small fraction of the costs of their proposals, so what? As long as every additional dollar of spending reduces by more than a dollar the future costs of climate change, inadequate healthcare and insufficient public investment, it makes sense to spend more.

Republican administrations have doled out gigantic tax cuts to big corporations and the wealthy without announcing specific cuts in public spending or other tax increases because – despite decades of evidence to the contrary – they claim the cuts will generate economic growth that will more than make up for any lost revenue.

Yet when Warren and Sanders propose ambitious plans for reducing empirically verifiable costs of large and growing public problems, they are skewered by fellow Democrats and the press for not having ways to pay for them.

A third line of criticism is that Sanders’ and Warren’s proposals are just too big. It would be safer to move cautiously and incrementally.

This argument might be convincing if the problems Sanders and Warren address were growing slowly. But experts on the environment, health, education and infrastructure are nearly unanimous: these problems are worsening exponentially.

Young people understand this, perhaps because they will bear more of the costs of inaction. An Emerson poll of Iowa found that 44% of Democrats under 50 support Sanders and 10% favor Warren. In New Hampshire, Sanders won more voters under 30 than the other candidates combined, according to CNN exit polls. In Nevada, he captured an astonishing 65 percent of voters under 30. 

The reason to support Sanders’ and Warren’s proposals isn’t because they inspire and mobilize voters. It is because they are necessary.

We can no longer pretend that climate change, a wildly dysfunctional healthcare system and a yawning deficit in public investment pose insignificant challenges. Doing nothing or doing too little will make them far worse. 

Obsessing about the cost of addressing them without acknowledging the cost of failing to address them is dangerously irresponsible,

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Bernie Sanders. (photo: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

ALSO SEE: Bloomberg Campaign Tweets Fake Sanders' Quotes Praising Dictators

Bernie Sanders Was Right About Cuba
Ben Burgis, Jacobin
Burgis writes: "Bernie Sanders was right to applaud Cuba's literacy programs even as he criticized the country's undemocratic political system. He has nothing to apologize for."

ver the weekend, in an interview with Anderson Cooper for 60 Minutes, Democratic presidential front-runner Bernie Sanders was asked about old video clips in which he praised the achievements of the Cuban Revolution without endorsing the island nation’s undemocratic political system. Sanders’s response to Cooper was a nuanced evaluation of the pros and cons of the Cuban model from a democratic socialist point of view.

“We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba,” he said, but “it’s unfair to simply say that everything is bad.” He then cited the enormously successful literacy program that Fidel Castro initiated immediately after the revolution, noting that it would be absurd to say the policy was “a bad thing” because “Castro did it.” Finally, answering Cooper’s follow-up question, Sanders unequivocally condemned the Cuban government’s jailing of political dissidents.

These manifestly reasonable comments were immediately denounced not just by conservatives like Kevin D. Williamson, who wrote a piece on the controversy for the National Review entitled “Bernie Sanders is a Moral Monster,” but also by Democrats like Florida congresswomen Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Donna Shalala, former Democratic National Committee head Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and most of Sanders’s rivals in the race for the Democratic nomination.

Generally speaking, the critics chose to focus on the middle part of the 60 Minutes clip, simply pretending that the snippet didn’t begin with Sanders denouncing the “authoritarian nature” of the Cuban government and end with him deploring that government’s jailing of dissidents. Williamson, for example, vaguely noted that Sanders said “some criticisms” of Cuba’s leaders were unfair and then immediately launched into a rant about how Castro “lined up political dissidents and shot them.” Similarly, former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg tweeted that Sanders “doesn’t recognize” that “we need a president who will be extremely clear” about human rights violations abroad.

The Narnia Standard

Are these critics attacking Sanders based on a willful misrepresentation of his comments? In the cases I just quoted, that certainly seems to be the case. Still, there may be a (slightly) more charitable way to interpret at least some of their complaints.

For example, in a CNN town hall on Monday, Pete Buttigieg responded to a quote in which Sanders said that “teaching people to read and write is a good thing” by faulting him for asking people to see the “bright side of the Castro regime.” Instead, Mayor Buttigieg insisted, we should “stand unequivocally against dictatorships everywhere in the world.”

To Buttigieg, it’s not good enough that Sanders clearly and unambiguously condemned the authoritarian aspects of Cuba’s system because his comments weren’t “unequivocal” in the sense of being entirely critical rather than including a mix of criticism and praise. The principle Buttigieg is appealing to is that it’s wrong to praise any policy of a dictatorship. Apparently, the “unequivocally” anti-dictatorship stand is to talk about all undemocratic countries “everywhere in the world” as if they lacked any positive features whatsoever — like Narnia before Aslan, where it was “always winter and never Christmas.”

This certainly seems to be the standard Sanders’s critics applied in a previous iteration of the same “praise for Communist dictatorships” attack, when clips were dredged up from the press conference that Sanders, then the mayor of Burlington, gave when he and his entourage returned from a trip to the USSR in 1988. Even though Sanders took time in the press conference to criticize the Soviet Union for its lack of democracy and for the poor quality of its housing and hospitals, the fact that he praised the undeniable architectural impressiveness of Soviet subway stations was treated as evidence that Sanders might as well have been a Stalinist — never mind that the man has spent his entire political career, even in his fire-breathing radical youth in Vermont’s Liberty Union Party, calling himself a “democratic” socialist precisely to differentiate his vision of a good society from the Soviet model.

One obvious problem with the Narnia standard for “unequivocal” criticism of authoritarian regimes is that it requires you to deny easily verified facts. Cuba did make tremendous strides in literacy, infant mortality, racial desegregation, doctor-patient ratio, and many other areas after the revolution. When the subject comes up, is a properly “unequivocal” opponent of dictatorships supposed to pretend not to know that all of this happened? Is the rule that you always have to respond by changing the subject?

Unsurprisingly, hardly anyone plays by this rule in practice. As commentator Eric Levitz points out in his excellent piece on the controversy, every president in the last several decades, Democrat or Republican, has “found positive things to say” about a regime in Saudi Arabia whose human rights record is far, far worse than Cuba’s.

Take one of the most indefensible parts of the Cuban state’s record: gay rights. In the years immediately after the revolution, gay men were arrested and put in labor camps. Since then, the situation has dramatically improved — so much so that in recent years, state-sanctioned gay pride parades have been held in the streets of Havana. Compare this to contemporary Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality remains a beheading offense.

And even in the specific case of Cuba, centrist Democrats haven’t generally held one another to the Narnia standard. For example, to the best of my knowledge, no major Democrat criticized Barack Obama for praising Cuba’s education system — in a speech he delivered in Cuba, no less — in 2016.

The Sanders Difference

Is the difference between Sanders’s comments and Obama’s that some worry Sanders secretly longs to import the authoritarian aspects of Cuba’s system to the United States? If so, this isn’t a rational concern. As Levitz points out, Sanders is a fervent believer in democratic rights — so much so that he’s taken considerably heat for suggesting that those in prison should still have the right to vote. His rating from the American Civil Liberties Union is 100 percent, and his commitment to free speech has led him to criticize student activists for shouting down right-wing speakers on college campuses.

Perhaps the worry isn’t that Sanders wants America to become an authoritarian one-party state, but that he thinks, in some sense, that it’s fine for Cuba to be such a state. This certainly seems to be what Kevin Williamson is suggesting when he writes that Sanders is “rather like the apologists for antebellum slavery who say, ‘Well, think of how much better-fed they were than they would have been in Africa.’”

Is the Cuban Revolution supposed to be the equivalent of the transatlantic slave trade in this analogy? If so, an obvious difference is that Africans lost their freedom. Far from replacing a democracy with a dictatorship, the Cuban Revolution replaced a dictatorship that oversaw monumental economic inequality, poverty, misery, illiteracy, de jure racial segregation, and high infant mortality with a dictatorship that promoted racial equality and redistributed much of the wealth of the ruling oligarchs to promote social goods like health care and education. And, as indicated by his condemnation of the “authoritarian nature” of Cuba’s leadership and his call for political prisoners to be freed, Sanders thinks that it would be better if Cubans — without losing their social rights to health care, higher education, and the rest — also gained the democratic rights he defends so passionately in the United States.

This is a fundamentally decent and principled position. Sanders should be commended for taking it. And if he becomes president despite his refusal to reduce complicated realities to the cartoonish slogans of two-dimensional anti-communism, he’ll have succeeded in showing future candidates that they don’t need to pander to the most extreme elements of the Cuban-American community in order to win.

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Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagen. (photo: Reuters)

Trump Says Sotomayor, Ginsburg Should Recuse Themselves From Cases Involving Him
Krishnadev Calamur, NPR
Calamur writes: "President Trump criticized remarks by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg as 'inappropriate' and said the Supreme Court justices should recuse themselves from cases involving the president."
READ MORE

Bloomberg's campaign office. (photo: Spencer Platt)

Bloomberg's Paid "Volunteers" Are Telling Voters to Support Other Candidates
Luke Darby, GQ
Darby writes: "Billionaire Michael Bloomberg is trying a novel strategy to win the Democratic presidential nomination. The former New York City mayor, who was a Republican up until 2013, is skipping the first four races completely and has bet big on Super Tuesday - when a third of the delegates are up for grabs - and the primaries that come after."

EXCERPT:

Despite the $2,500 paycheck, "deputy field organizers" aren't exactly turning out sizzling content. Per the Times:

Rather than create their own content, organizers often use the exact text, images and links provided to them by the campaign. The result has been a stiff outpouring of tweets, Facebook and Instagram posts with little to no engagement and sometimes half-hearted text messages. Some organizers were so robotic in their tweeting, Twitter suspended their accounts Friday evening after The Times inquired about whether their behavior complied with the platform’s rules on spam and manipulation.

One organizer in Los Angeles told the Times, "When I text my friends—depending on the friend—a lot of people think it’s spam or my account was hacked. Once people realize it’s actually me who’s making these and it’s not spam, they kind of just figure I’m being paid for it."

At one point, another organizer texted his friends, "Sam Donaldson just nailed it: Mike Bloomberg is the president we need to unite our country!" using the exact wording suggested by the Bloomberg campaign. He promptly followed up with a text reading, "Please disregard, vote Bernie or Warren."

Both Sanders and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren have proposed wealth taxes that would see billionaires like Bloomberg pay substantially more than they do now. So far, the $460 million the Bloomberg campaign has spent on ads, memes, influencers, and copy/paste promoters is a lot less than the $4.7 billion he would likely pay if Bernie Sanders became president.

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David Xol-Cholom of Guatemala hugs his son Byron at Los Angeles international airport last month as they reunite after being separated about one and half years ago. (photo: Ringo HW Chiu/AP)

Trump's Separation of Families Constitutes Torture, Doctors Find
Amanda Holpuch, Guardian UK
Holpuch writes: "The trauma Donald Trump's administration caused to young children and parents separated at the US-Mexico border constitutes torture, according to evaluations of 26 children and adults by the group Physicians for Human Rights (PHR)."
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Mr. Mubarak never resigned publicly. Apparently stumbling in a speech on Feb. 10, 2011, he failed to choke out the words. The next day, against a tide of public anger, Omar Suleiman, the longtime chief of intelligence and newly installed vice president, read a statement on television signaling the end of Mr. Mubarak's reign. (photo: Ed Ou/NYT)

Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak Dies at 91
Patrick Smith and Charlene Gubash, NBC News
Excerpt: "Hosni Mubarak, the former stalwart U.S. ally who ruled Egypt with an iron fist for three decades until he was overthrown in the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, has died at age 91."
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Oil rig, Beaufort Sea. (photo: Getty Images)

Fossil-Fuel Subsidies Must End
Geoffrey Supran, Peter Erickson, Doug Koplow, Michael Lazarus, Peter Newell, Naomi Oreskes and Harro van Asselt, Scientific American
Excerpt: "When it comes to tackling the climate crisis, ending $400 billion of annual subsidies to the fossil-fuel industry worldwide seems like a no-brainer. For the past decade, world leaders have been resolving and reaffirming the need to phase them out."
READ MORE

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