Thread by @Brian_Riedl

🧵NEW report from me. This one was fun. With all the progressive movement's passion and assurance of brilliant, bold solutions, I gave them the respect of deeply diving into leading progressive bills & proposals. To put it gently, I was not impressed. (1/) manhattan-institute.org/progressives-e…

It wasn't that leading progressive proposals on M4A, tax hikes, climate, and defense cuts were misguided or against my preferences. Its that there were almost completely substanceless. Vaporware. Gimmicks. Too empty to even be implemented if passed. (2/)

For a movement that prides itself on wonky grand plans to solve huge problems, the leading progressive bills make utopian promises of huge new benefits and then assign a commission or agency to figure out how to make it all work.

They simply don't do their homework. (3/)

Start with Medicare-For-All. The entire concept rests on two promises: 1) Squeezing out efficiencies with a bold new (tighter) formula system to pay providers, and 2) nationalizing $32 trillion in ten-year private health care spending and funding it instead with a new tax. (4/)

How do the leading Sanders & Jayapal M4A bills solve those two key issues? They don't! They simply assign HHS to design a new provider system with no mechanism to ensure real savings. And they leave out the tax switch entirely. So the entire system is completely unfinanced. (5/)

As Health Affairs notes, these bills promise trillions in new benefits, and then simply assign HHS to figure out how to make it all work. They do not even attempt to design the needed $32 trillion (10-yr) shift from private premiums to taxes. The whole bills are a punt. (6/)

Item 2: Tax the Rich. Progressives often claim taxing the rich can close the $15 trillion ten-year deficit AND finance tens of trillions for M4A, UBI, Green New Deal, Biden's spending, social spending, etc. But the actual tax-the-rich proposals never actually appear. Why? (7/)

Because the math doesn't work. Layering virtually every progressive tax on top of each other would produce the highest marginal tax rates in the developed world - and raise at most $10.8T over the decade. It would not even balance the budget, much less pay for new proposals. (8/)

Item 3: Progressives often demand that we finance social spending by cutting by 10%, 20%, even 30% of the $9 trillion scheduled for defense over the decade.

Defense has grown at inflation since 2008, so would need a broader reduction plan than merely reversing recent hikes.(9/)

CBO says that cutting DOD 10% could require laying off 30% of active forces, losing full counterattack capabilities, skipping major weapons systems, and/or scaling back global commitments. So need a real plan to reorganize military around these cuts. (10/)

Yet the House progressive "Defense Spending Reduction Caucus" lead bill is ... just 333 words and demands DOD cut by 12% by asking CBO for savings ideas.

Seriously. That's it. The leading progressive legislation to overhaul the military is for DOD to ask CBO for ideas. (11/)

Not to be outdone, Sen. Sanders wrote a 140-word (!) proposal to cut the military by 10% with no directions or specifics as well. Even Senate Democrats chastised him for not seeming to have done any homework or research to write a serious or implementable overhaul of DOD. (12/)

Finally, climate. The IRA did some, but progressives are quick to assert that we must reorganize the entire economy to produce net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 or else we face disaster. Sounds bad. So where's the specific legislative blueprint to solve this? (13/)

The AOC/Markey Green New Deal was just a list of goals. The “100% Clean Economy Act of 2019” with 170 cosponsors, & “Clean Economy Act of 2020” with 33 cosponsors simply direct the federal govt to come up with a climate plan. They offer no substantive blueprint whatsoever. (14/)

So Congress in 2019 established the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis to “investigate, study, make findings, and develop recommendations on policies, strategies, and innovations to solve the climate crisis." Dozens of hearings over three years w/ top experts. (15/)

Did the committee, hearings, and all those experts produce specific policy legislation to achieve the carbon goal, so we could measure the new regulations against a global temperature reduction, and decide whether to pass it?

Of course not. They just wrote another report. (16/)

The report’s main recommendation was for someone else to draft legislation. And that future legislation would simply set a nonbinding goal to reduce emissions. Then perhaps a federal agency would begin looking for ideas of exactly how to reduce emissions. (17/)

Essentially, Congress created a special committee on the climate that wrote a plan to assign someone to draft a legislative plan that would, in turn, ask someone else to come up with a plan.

There is still no actual specific, implementable legislative bill. Just hot air. (18/)

In fairness, the report also had hundreds of pages of general climate ideas (many merely assigning agencies to come up with ideas). But no comprehensive legislative language that could be measured, scored, analyzed, and passed. Again, another progressive punt. (19/)

So on issue after issue, progressives promise bold, even revolutionary ideas - but fail to back them up with any serious proposals. And no, Its not bc a movement with millions of committed activists, lawmakers, and academics, never got around to designing actual policies. (20/)

Progressives fail to build specific legislative policies because their utopian promises are often half-baked, contradictory, unworkable, or mathematically impossible. There is no way to square the circle. So the movement remains stuck in empty rhetoric and slogans. (21/)

Yes, conservatives often lack serious proposals too But progressives are the ones promising to overhaul health care, taxes, defense, climate. They consider themselves more serious, intellectual, and substantive than the right. But their bills are just as empty & unserious. (22/)

Congress cannot enact slogans. Progressive proposals are not defeated by a cabal of sinister, bad-faith actors but rather by their own reliance on promising utopian solutions that even their leading advocates cannot turn into coherent legislation. (23/23)
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Anyway, I dissect the leading progressive health, tax, defense, and climate policies here. Enjoy!

manhattan-institute.org/progressives-e…