In a war, you don’t fight all your battles at once. You concentrate your forces and win discrete victories. You avoid opening unnecessary flanks. 1/
In a class war, the “pay fors” people are not trying to help, not trying earnestly to work through policy conundra for the good of the nation. 2/
They are trying to multiply and tightly couple the political battles policy insurgents must fight, to create a multifront war a failure on any of which means defeat. 3/
Yes, very large benefits programs like Medicare For All, absent new taxes, would likely be inflationary, though just how much in this disinflationary period nobody knows, and fiscal balance in an accounting sense is absolutely not a reliable guide. 4/
But suppose (I am not necessarily advocating this) we enacted M4A with no revenue at all, and let it run for two or three years. All of a sudden, we find inflation accelerating, which nobody likes. Something Will Need To Be Done. 5/
Which is more likely, at that point, repealing a benefit extraordinarily popular in every country where it exists and returning to the present nightmare, or having the Fed raise rates and Congress enact a variety of new taxes, the details of which we’d fight over then? 6/
Which approach is likely to yield better tax policy on the merits, a big bang of untried taxation attached to a giant new bill or a variety of new measures, enacted over time, in response to undesirably high interest rates or inflation? 7/
In practice, we absolutely should pick off as much “low hanging fruit” as we can on the revenue side, since inflationary consequences of a program of this scale are foreseeable, and why create more problems for our future selves than we need to? 8/
And of course we should ensure the program we pass is capable of restraining costs going forward. That, not tax policy, is the hinge on which its long-term success will ride. 9/
But don’t get suckered into an ambush and make good policy today contingent on bitter distributional battles that may or may not have to be fought out tomorrow. 10/
A nation in which healthcare is a right, which can absolutely afford to pay for that right in real terms (because we are overpaying for less now), will figure out from which pockets it wants to divide the tab when it needs to. And will be a much, much better nation for it. /fin
