Klobuchar and Bloomberg’s Plans Lack Important Details

Tomorrow, voters in 15 jurisdictions will tell the Democratic Party which candidate they want to see go against Donald Trump in November and lead the nation for the next four years. In January, PPI published an estimate of what four candidates’ agendas would cost over 10 years and how each candidate would offset those costs to shed light on how those candidates would lead. That estimate included Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Mayor Pete Buttigieg (who ended his campaign yesterday), and Vice President Joe Biden, but it did not include two other prominent candidates – Senator Amy Klobuchar and Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Both of these candidates’ agendas would affect federal spending and revenue, but PPI decided that these candidates’ agendas could not be fairly compared to their rivals’ at this time, both because many of their proposals were not specific enough to score and there were not enough independent estimates of their proposals. All candidates should continue to provide detail on what they want the country and federal budget to look like during the next administration so that voters understand the decision they will make in the voting booth. 

Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) 

Senator Amy Klobuchar provides offsets and pay-fors for many of her proposals, but her agenda lacks many key details, making it difficult to fairly assess its cost at this time. For example, Klobuchar says her public option for health insurance would let people buy into “Medicare or Medicaid,” but federal spending on this public option could vary considerably depending on which health care program it was based on. To tackle climate change, Klobuchar explains some of the policies she would spend money on to “[expand] renewable energy and [transform] the energy sector,” but she has not given specific dollar figures for most of these policies. PPI found few independent estimates of Klobuchar’s proposals, which made it difficult to fairly compare her agenda to those of her competitors. 

Klobuchar has committed to “lowering the debt to GDP ratio by the end of her first term” – an admirable goal, but one for which the numbers do not add up. Klobuchar would raise $300 billion over 10 years for a deficit reduction “fund” by increasing the corporate income tax by 2 percentage points (on top of other plans to raise the tax) and conducting a “government-wide budget review” to identify duplicative spending. But according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, it would take about $3.5 trillion of deficit reduction over the next 10 years to hold debt steady at the end of the next President’s term, and $5.2 trillion to hold debt to what it will be at the start of the next President’s term. Whichever of these goals Klobuchar were to pursue, a $300 billion investment would not come close to achieving it. 

Former Mayor Mike Bloomberg (D-NY)

Like Klobuchar, some of Bloomberg’s proposals lack important details that make it difficult to assess what they would cost, and independent sources have assessed fewer of his plans than those of other candidates.  He has committed to increasing tax credits that benefit low income people, but has not explained how much he would expand them by. Like the four candidates PPI scored, he says he would create a “minimum benefit” for Social Security, but he has not specified what that benefit would be, as Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, and Biden all do. And unlike his opponents, Bloomberg has yet to articulate a single policy to improve Social Security’s solvency, promising only to “consider options for preserving and strengthening Social Security’s long-term finances” even as he embraces costly benefit expansions. His campaign claims that the tax plans he has proposed would raise $5 trillion over 10 years and that these tax increases would fully pay for his new spending, but there are not enough independent estimates of his plans to verify his revenue estimate, let alone whether it would cover his equally ambiguous spending amounts.

Other Candidates Have Produced Far More Detailed Plans

The other four leading Democratic presidential candidates at the time of our estimate (Sanders, Warren, Biden, and Buttigieg) all provided enough details to at least generally estimate the fiscal impact of their agendas, and outside sources estimated at least some of their plans independently. Even without these details, it is relatively safe to say that Klobuchar’s and Bloomberg’s agendas will not be nearly as expensive as those of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who have proposed to increase spending by $53 trillion and $35 trillion, respectively. PPI estimates that Warren has proposed $8 trillion more in new spending than new revenue, while Sanders’ deficit is a whopping $25 trillion – neither of which Klobuchar or Bloomberg are likely to exceed. But their proposed spending could exceed what Pete Buttigieg campaigned on (less than $8 trillion of new spending), and their shortfalls may exceed those of Joe Biden (who has offset all but $2 trillion of new spending – the entirety of which would be for long-term public investments).

Any of these limiting factors may change: candidates are regularly proposing new policies, independent analysts are still releasing new estimates of their impacts, and small changes in publicly-available details could have big effects on a policy’s estimated cost (or the ability to make an estimate at all). But candidates should provide enough detail to estimate the general impact that their plans will have on the government’s finances so voters can make informed decisions. 

The House is poised to vote on a bill tomorrow that is a poster child for how Congress can’t seem to let reason and facts – rather than moral posturing and virtue signaling – drive policy.

The bill is H.R. 2339, advertised as a vaping bill meant to address the real problem of high underage vaping rates.  A noble cause that already received Congressional action with a 21+ law passed late last year.

The current version of this bill is so much more.  It would impose a full-on, total prohibition of any flavored tobacco products despite the fact that apart from e-cigarettes, underage use of every tobacco product category in the U.S. is at all-time lows with a downward trajectory.  Government data on menthol cigarettes, for example, shows teen use of menthol cigarettes at 1.3%. You read that right – 1.3%.

Pragmatic progressives oppose this bill because it goes in exactly the wrong direction on reduced-harm products.  Rather than working to give addicted smokers more options for switching to flavored non-combustible alternatives, it outlaws them — end of discussion.  For oral nicotine products, the ban is permanent – even the FDA can’t override the ban no matter the science or the evidence.  Indeed, there are several flavored products on the market right now that the FDA has already found are a less harmful alternative for smokers. This counterproductive legislation tells folks looking for alternatives simply, “Too bad.”  

But we in the pragmatic progressive community are not alone.

A growing chorus of objections from some of the most progressive members of Congress, along with a coalition of civil justice groups like the ACLU and National Drug Policy Alliance, are joining this fight. 

Here’s how the ACLU put it: “With a criminal legal system that incarcerates Blacks at nearly six times the rate of white Americans and a prison population that is 67 percent Black and Latinx, any prohibition on menthol and flavored tobacco products promises continued over-criminalization and mass incarceration of people of color. We hope we can work together to avoid repetitions of policies that are intended to protect youth and communities of color, but instead, only further engrain systemic criminalization and racism.”

None of these issues would be dogging this bill if the proponents had stuck to the plan as advertised – reversing underage e-vapor use.  Instead of narrowing the bill so that the solution fits the problem, proponents go after legal products for adults 21 and older, and on a

scale that’s hard to fathom.  Consider this:  flavored tobacco products on the market today have a larger retail market than the entire U.S. cannabis market, legal and illegal.  This leads to the question: If the criminal prohibition of cannabis has caused incalculable harm for social justice, and alcohol prohibition too was determined as a colossal failure, why on earth would we expect a different outcome with flavored tobacco products?

I am a progressive — a “stupid” progressive — according to Mr. Pallone, but I along with 40 million adult smokers in the United States deserve hope that comes from innovative products — not condescension — and our progressive communities should not be subjected to adults being arrested for smoking a cigarette.  The current version of this bill should be rejected by all, especially those of us in the progressive community. 

WASHINGTON— After repeated calls for Bernie Sanders to put pen to paper on the costs for his extraordinary campaign pledges, his magic math simply doesn’t add up.

Ahead of tonight’s Democratic Debate in Charleston, South Carolina, Sen. Bernie Sanders has published a new document where he claims to fully cover the costs of his gargantuan expansions of federal programs. But an independent review by the Progressive Policy Institute finds that these numbers can’t be taken at face value.

“Sanders wants voters to reward him for proposing a left-wing wishlist of spending increases and take him at his word that taxes on billionaires will pay for it, but the math just doesn’t add up,” said Ben Ritz, Director of PPI’s Center for Funding America’s Future. “Sanders has already embraced every tax increase on wealthy Americans imaginable and still comes up several trillions of dollars short.”

Key highlights from Ritz’s analysis include:

• Sanders has now proposed over $53 trillion of new spending over the next 10 years – an amount that would roughly double the size of the federal government.
• The document Sanders published last night, along with others released earlier in his campaign, claim to collectively raise less than $43 trillion in new revenue – meaning that he’s at least $10 trillion short. But these revenue projections are well outside the mainstream of what independent analysts estimate.
• More realistically, if Congress were to adopt every single revenue option Sanders has offered for consideration, it would fall nearly $25 trillion short of his proposed spending increases over the next decade – leaving a gap nearly equal to the total value of all goods and services produced by the U.S. economy in one year.

“At a time when President Trump has plunged the nation into trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, the worst thing Democrats could do is let him off the hook by nominating a candidate who is promising them the same kind of voodoo economics on a far greater scale,” Ritz said.

As Democrats debate tonight in South Carolina, will the moderators finally press Senator Sanders on whether middle-class and young Americans will be willing to accept the burden of financing a revolution through dramatically higher taxes or a doubling of government debt?

For a complete analysis, read the full article on Forbes.

President Trump, in yesterday’s 2021 budget address, called for cutting the U.S. Department of Education budget by 8 percent. That is obviously terrible, but it is, at least, less than the 12 percent he wanted to axe in 2019 or the 10 percent reduction he called for in 2020.

Slashing eight percent of the federal education budget equals a $6.1 billion cut. Trump proposes to convert the lion’s share of that to a federal tax credit of up to $5 billion a year for donations to “scholarship programs.” The “Education Freedom Scholarship” (EFS) would gift individuals and domestic businesses with a federal tax credit for money they give to state-approved scholarship-granting organizations that offer scholarships to private schools, including religious schools. Most of these private schools are not accountable to state governments for their performance, despite accepting the public money.

But Trump’s real 2021 fiscal malpractice is his proposal to collapse all current grant programs into lump sum block grants that states can spend as they see fit. This includes the federal Charter School Program (CSP), which helps fund new chartered public schools.

Charter schools are publicly funded but operated by private organizations, most of them non-profits. They do not charge tuition, and they must be authorized and renewed by a state approved body—usually a government agency, state board of education, local school board, or public university. Almost all are open enrollment, meaning they cannot choose their students and must hold lotteries when demand exceeds space. 

Because they operate free of school district bureaucracy, charters can innovate and design classrooms that meet their students’ needs. Numerous studies have proven that they generate positive results for their students, especially low income, minority children. Most charter teachers choose not to unionize, so the teachers unions detest them, and their attacks have politicized the issue. 

Which brings up an important point about Trump’s timing. This year, 11 states will elect their governor, while 44 states will hold elections for one or both of their legislative houses. Block-granting the federal CSP would pour gasoline on the political fire that has raged over charter schools in the states. By their own reporting, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) spent a combined $93.3 million on politics in 2017− and that was an off year. In 2020 it is staggering to imagine what they will spend—and the pressure all that money will put on politicians running for office. There couldn’t be a worse moment to dissolve the CSP and turn its resources over to state elected officials. 

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools says CSP is especially important to small or single-site schools, which have little access to resources. Many of those are run by African-American or Hispanic educators seeking to create alternatives for students trapped in failing inner-city schools that are constrained by bureaucratic rules and inflexible union contracts. If Trump’s budget were to pass as presented, these educators would be cut off at the knees, and the five million students who are on charter school waiting lists would suffer. They would have no choice but to remain trapped in failing schools, or to hope for a voucher and that a private school admitted them. Congress must push back hard against Trump’s disastrous vision for the future of education.