Thursday, September 14, 2017

Helping Bernie Sanders to Improve His Argument

Yesterday Bernie had an Op-Ed in the New York Times about Medicare for all.  While I am sympathetic with the goal, I found the piece weak in many ways.  I assume I'm not the only reader in that category.  So I thought it might be useful to consider the various objections I had with the piece as well as some possible counters to those.

Even if hyperbole works with a live audience, to pump up the crowd, there needs to be an adult version of the argument that is based on rational analysis, not emotional appeal.

Here is the first paragraph from the piece:

This is a pivotal moment in American history. Do we, as a nation, join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee comprehensive health care to every person as a human right? Or do we maintain a system that is enormously expensive, wasteful and bureaucratic, and is designed to maximize profits for big insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, Wall Street and medical equipment suppliers?

In fact, it is not a pivotal moment at all, in the sense that no decision on this matter will be made now. And everyone understands this.  The Congress is controlled by the Republicans now, and they clearly won't go for this proposal.  Likewise, President Trump would veto this proposal if it ever reached his desk.

There may be good and sensible reasons to introduce the proposal now, rather than to wait until the Democrats have the upper hand.  I would have liked to read some of those reasons in this piece.  Part of this is not just the reasons themselves.  It is to understand that Bernie knows those reasons quite well.  It is hard to understand what the politician actually believes when the rhetoric is so hyperbolic.

The piece talked about the benefits of Medicare for All.  There was no mention of how to pay for it.  There was no mention of alternative uses of tax dollars - infrastructure, free college education (both of which Bernie has advocated for elsewhere), or debt relief, hence no sense of how those would be prioritized.  

I will have more to say about the tax issue below.  The point to note here is that it is easy to pander to the beneficiaries.  It is much harder to make the adult argument that this is the right thing to do, even if there will be those decent people who, narrowly considered, bear the burden without getting a reciprocal benefit.  If the harder argument isn't made now, will it be possible to make it later when it absolutely has to be made?  Or will the failure of making it now end up blocking the proposal later?

The focus in the piece is on the end goal.  There is no discussion at all on the path needed to reach that goal. There needs to be consideration of the path.  One might begin by a look at some recent history.  The last election where young people were really excited by the Democratic candidate was 2008, when many felt that then candidate Obama offered a fresh alternative.  Two years later, that energy was all but gone.  The Tea Party delivered The Great Shellacking.

In the interim ACA was passed.  It took about a year to get done.  At the outset, there was enthusiasm for a public option. At the end, there was no public option.  That may have been necessary to get the bill through Congress, but members of the public were not ready for that conclusion.  (Were there a public option, the Hobby Lobby case would never have happened as the public option would have offered a way out.  Indeed it is conceivable that Medicare for all wouldn't be necessary because it already was there in a veiled form in the public option.)

What lessons were learned from those experiences?  I'd like to hear about that.  What will be done so as to not have a repeat of the history afterwards?  How might the energy be sustained to elections beyond 2020?

The electoral strategy needs an explanation that is game theoried out. It can't merely be aspirational.  It needs to make sense strategically.  

Elsewhere I have read things by Bernie that argues the Democrats past approach has been ineffective and some alternative is needed to bring more voters to vote Democratic.  This either means that some voters who recently voted Republican would switch to the Democrats or that others who previously didn't vote at all would now vote and they'd support Democrats when doing so.  This would have to happen in sufficient numbers to alter the current electoral calculus where the Republicans maintain control.

In turn, to achieve this end an inspirational message that is credible is needed.  A blah message or one that is merely hot air will not work.  Reading some of the comments on the Chuck Schumer Op-Ed from a couple of months ago, A Better Deal for American Workers, that piece was taken as a blah message by many of the readers who commented. Indeed, that reaction might explain Bernie's hyperbole with his Op-Ed from yesterday.  But, what about whether the message is then taken as hot air?  Currently discouraged voters who opt not to vote because - the system is rigged and their vote won't matter - need to be convinced otherwise.  A hot air message will not convince them.  If I were them, I would not be convinced by the Op-Ed from yesterday.  I would need a demonstration that a lot more attention has been paid to making the message credible.

More on taxes and on voters like me.  My household is in the 5%.  We have quite decent healthcare.  And my taxes will likely go up if this proposal gets implemented.  Can you talk to me about why I should support Medicare for All? 

This is meant to speak to the prior point.  If enough voters like me were for the proposal, that would seem to make it credible.  If most voters like me were against the proposal on narrow, selfish grounds, that would seem to derail it. How would other voters know where voters like me stand on the matter?

As the piece was currently written, voters like me are ignored.  We're not part of the equation at all.  For quite a while, I have felt this is an error with the populist approach to economic issues.  It divides us rather than unifies us, perhaps because of a misconception - narrow selfishness is the sole motive. One needs to work through this assumption.  If the assumption is really true, can the message be credible?  Or is it then necessarily hot air?

My belief, one I've articulated in a series of posts called Socialism Reconsidered, is that voters like me have an important role to play - to enable the system to work by paying more in taxes.  Interestingly, this idea of paying more in taxes is getting attention elsewhere.  For example, David Leonhardt has had a couple of recent columns on the matter, When the Rich Said No to Getting Richer and Your Coming Tax Increase.  But non-economist upscale voters may have not yet heard this message.  And it might take some time to adjust to it, rather than merely accept it at first pass.  Getting such upscale voters to understand this would seem to be necessary work for now.  Can we get started on that agenda?

Further, one should ask what might be done now, while the Democrats are still in the minority, so it isn't all just talk but actually has some substance to it.  My previous post, speculative certainly but I believe interesting because it addresses this point, considers voluntary income transfers that might happen right now to illustrate both the support of being taxed further and the benefit of income transfers to the communities that receive them.  In that post, raising the minimum wage was the object.  That could be simulated via income transfers.  Medicare for All, I would conjecture, couldn't be simulated in this way.  For just that reason, it is probably the wrong policy to go after first.

That there is some sense of tactical considerations, in other words, needs to be in a piece like this.  Right now, the tactical is not there.

Conclusion

I have friends who are big fans of Bernie and other friends who were very strong supporters of Hillary.  I really don't know about the connection between Chuck Schumer and Hillary, but I wondered if this proposal from Bernie was coming against the judgment of the current party leadership. On the point about warfare between the two camps, which Thomas Edsall wrote about last week, one should ask, keeping a skeptical view, whether any message will necessarily be hot air as long as that struggle is ongoing and out in the open.

My sense of things is that the two sides need to find a way to make a truce.  Divide and conquer is a winning strategy - when applied to the other side of a conflict.  I don't believe it works well when it happens within one's own ranks.  In my reading of Bernie's Op-Ed, he wants to have his cake and eat it too.  He needs to decide for one, but not the other.

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