Dems’ dreams cost up to $50T
Presidential candidates’ plans for progress come with hefty price tag
In 2019, Democrats running for president announced a slate of multitrillion-dollar proposals aimed at transforming the country and combating the economic and social ills they blame for giving rise to President Donald Trump.
But as the year comes to a close, the mounting price tag of those plans has become a point of contention between the liberal and moderate wings of the party.
“No one inside the Beltway seems to ask how much the status quo costs,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., wrote Thursday on Twitter, defending his proposals by citing estimates of deaths caused by air pollution and a lack of health care. “We have the resources — and a moral obligation — to pass Medicare for All and a Green New Deal.”
Sanders’ agenda would cost more
than $50 trillion over 10 years, more than the plans of any other Democratic candidate. Like the others, he would pay for his plans by raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy.
As Democrats seek to appeal to a broad swath of voters, candidates are airing proposals that include government-supported health care and child care, free college, student loan forgiveness, transformative climate policies, massive pay raises for teachers, and a universal basic income, among others.
A Washington Post review of the major spending proposals of the leading Democratic presidential candidates found 10-year costs ranging from about $4 trillion to more than $50 trillion. The annual federal budget now is about $4.5 trillion.
Even the most sparse of the 2020 plans dwarfs what successful Democrats pushed before. As she seized the Democratic nomination in 2016, Hillary Clinton proposed a 10-year agenda estimated at $1.45 trillion, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
The rapidly rising price tags and expansive reach of the current plans has led to charges of socialism from Republicans. But in recent weeks, more-moderate Democrats have been the most vocal critics of their liberal colleagues’ spending plans.
“On issue after issue, we’ve got to break out of the Washington mind-set that measures the bigness of an idea by how many trillions of dollars it adds to the budget or the boldness of an idea by how many fellow Americans it can antagonize,” South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg said during the Democratic presidential debate this month in Los Angeles.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who has said her priority as president would be a $1 trillion infrastructure program, has questioned the practicality of her competitors’ more expensive proposals.
“Where I disagree is, I just don’t think anyone has a monopoly on bold ideas,” she said during the debate. “I think you can be progressive and practical at the same time.”
The Post analysis focused only on the broad categories of health care, housing, the environment, criminal justice, education, child care and other anti-poverty initiatives. Using self-reported estimates from the campaigns of the candidates leading nationally and in early states — Sanders, Buttigieg, former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. — the review found a shared desire to strengthen the social safety net, enlarge the federal government and reduce inequality. But each arrived at different ways of doing so, with varying price tags.
Sanders, for example, would increase minimum salaries for teachers to $60,000 and provide free breakfast and lunch to every public school student in the country, as part of an agenda that tops $51 trillion over 10 years. Among a set of plans with a total 10-year cost exceeding $30 trillion, Warren proposes subsidizing child care for almost all Americans and reducing rental costs nationwide by 10 percent.
Biden’s agenda, a more moderate set of proposals costing more than $4.1 trillion over 10 years, calls for tripling funding at low-income schools and making community college free.
Buttigieg, who unveiled a $1.1 trillion 10-year economic plan in November, now has spelled out more than $5.5 trillion in federal initiatives. He has criticized Warren and Sanders for their free college programs that would provide a universal benefit, regardless of income.
Trump has seized on the Democrats’ spending proposals and led the GOP characterization of them as socialists. He has warned that the true outcome of Democrats’ plans would be higher taxes.
“They say, ‘We’re going to give away your health care. We’re going to do free education. We’re going to cut student loan debt down to nothing,’” Trump said in September during a speech to the House Republican Conference in Baltimore. “Everything is given away.”
Yet Trump signed a $1.4 trillion spending bill this month that will add more red ink to the record $23 trillion national debt. Republicans’ signature legislative achievement under Trump, a massive 2017 tax cut whose benefits skewed toward corporations and the wealthy, has helped pushed the annual federal deficit past $1 trillion.
But many Republicans, following Trump’s lead, have largely abandoned the concerns about debt and deficits they expressed during former president Barack Obama’s tenure.
Democrats have likewise felt free to sidestep discussions about the $23 trillion national debt during their primary contest, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.
“The fetters around fiscal responsibility have been thrown off,” said Zandi, who has analyzed the spending plans of several Democratic presidential candidates. “There’s no real political constituency for fiscal discipline either on the Republican or Democratic side.”
Indeed, several trailing Democratic candidates have, like Klobuchar and Biden, been critical of the spending surge — but have found voters largely shrugging off their concerns.