Medicare for All: We are already spending $1 trillion per year on the federal level for healthcare between Medicare, Medicaid, the VA. If we’re gonna add another $2 trillion per year to cover everyone, you’d have employers paying a Medicare for All Tax and abandon the premiums they pay for each employee and not have to worry about exponential increases every year. There is a total of 155 million employees in the United States, so the total corporate spending on healthcare is about $1.5 trillion per year.
In addition, Medicare currently spends about $700 billion per year, which adds with the previous amount to $2.2 trillion per year.
Going by the first a rate of cost increase (5% per year), that $2.2 trillion per year adds up to $27.7 trillion over 10 years.
So, by applying a tax on corporations equal to their current spending on employee healthcare and removing existing Medicare spending from the total, that leaves $4.9 trillion dollars over 10 years to be covered by new taxes. That's $490 billion per year if I don't bother to do the inflation calculation this time. The current US federal tax revenue is $3.3 trillion per year, so the extra money needed works out to an 15% increase in revenue which would probably be increasing Medicare payroll taxes and doing real tax reform not the giveaways to the rich.
Federal Jobs Guarantee cost varies. CBPP projects $540B. No one's run a full-blown job guarantee before, so we don't have past examples to model from. But economists at the Levy Institute
took a crack at it, and estimated the final net increase in federal spending would be between $260 and $354 billion in the first five years. Then it would fall to $235 to $326 billion over the following five years. The program isn't designed to compete with the private sector for workers. It's not going to continuously jack up its own wage offers to hold onto everyone it employs. As the private sector strengthens from the job guarantee's stimulus, it should draw people off the program and back into private sector employment. Spending on the job guarantee will then shrink, and ultimately stabilize at a lower level. For example: A much more modest version of a job guarantee
was attempted in Argentina in the early 2000s. And it shrank 40 percent in just three years as private employment expanded, before the government cut it off. It almost certainly would've gone lower.
Student loan debt forgiveness is totally do-able considering the FED pumped trillions after the financial crisis into banks, asset holdings, and that cash went into inflating a stock market
Free College would be covered by the $80B increase in the defense budget
Expanding Social Security involves lifting the cap on taxable income which is currently at $117,000 or so.
Paid Family Leave, I've seen estimates between $100-$300B a year. It depends on how many weeks, and what kind of model we want to follow. I haven't seen the plan they plastered on the screen.
