jhogue wrote: ↑Mon Mar 11, 2019 9:12 am
No, I mean that Schultz might do something reasonable that the voting public expects that a CEO might normally do, like put a price tag on the Green New Deal ($8-12 trillion dollars over the next decade alone according to one estimate, which amounts to something like $600,000 per U.S. household.)
https://conservativedailypost.com/trill ... er-600000/
Surprisingly, there's very little out there in the way of breaking down GND to concrete proposals and actual costs. However, some of them were (to my eye) low enough that we should be seriously considering them.
High speed rail is a standout. If it would really cost less than 4 trillion to lay down a national network of passenger rail track and buy high speed trains, then we should be doing this already. The only intercity passenger rail track in existence in the US right now is the Northeast Corridor (Boston to Richmond). All else is freight track, which is why train travel on every other route is so ridiculously slow. This is a national embarrassment, and could save us all a pile of $$ if fixed (air travel is much more expensive to run than train travel, plus much less convenient).
Upgraded electrical grid: This also looks surprisingly cheap, especially if you incorporate micro-energy on-site production like solar panels and window coatings.
Universal healthcare: the number provided ($36 trillion) is incredibly misleading. They totaled the amount currently spent on healthcare annually, then extrapolated to a 10 year period. What they didn't say is that 2/3 of health spending is Medicare and Medicaid, meaning it is ALREADY covered by state & federal budgets. To get to universal coverage would cost 1/3 the amount over 10 years, or $~1 trillion per year. You can immediately knock off about half that figure, which is the excess cost imposed on the entire system by private insurance companies. So in the end, universal coverage would cost $500 billion a year. But that's not actually a new cost, just a shift from insurance premiums paid by employers or out of pocket to the federal budget. So net cost actually negative on this one, assuming that we are currently paying at least this much for insurance premiums. But then we've had this discussion already. I assume doctors would still have the option of charging on a cash-pay basis for concierge care, just like they do now.
If you notice, these were all things that others (Obama, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk) have wanted to do for years. AOC didn't come up with these on her own. The remaining parts of the GND are crazy talk. I think the press is beginning to realize that she's a nut case, and they've already started the process of taking her down to avoid damaging Democrats' chances in 2020. Of course, the press will have to take her down while being politically correct by their own rules, which is going to be fun to watch.