Is it something we want to make happen or not.

Yeah, it's POSSIBLE that it would expand the economy enough to increase tax revenues to cover this spending. But there's no guarantee of that.

It's exactly the same argument that the Republicans make about tax cuts, and we mock them mercilessly for it, and rightly so. These supply-side true believers say every penny of tax cuts will be paid for because the economy will expand and the overall amount of tax income will increase.

They aren't just making that shit up. There are SOME circumstances where a tax cut will stimulate the economy, even enough to pay for itself (generally the cuts have to be targeted to the poor and middle-class, but these GOPers aren't into details). That's why a tax cut was such a big part of the Obama stimulus.

But I'm sure I don't need to convince you that tax cuts DON'T always pay for themselves. And in some cases (like the latest giant federal tax cut) they don't even stimulate economic growth.

Similarly, federal spending doesn't NECESSARILY stimulate economic growth. And a lot of this stuff in this version of the Green New Deal is especially sketchy, in economic terms. That doesn't mean it isn't the right thing to do. I'm just saying it isn't easy to be sure that these initiatives will pay for themselves, in the short term or even in the long term.

Putting up solar panels and windmills, and retrofitting the energy grid to use them, would put a huge number of people to work. It would also put a huge number of people out of work by disrupting existing industries (particularly natural gas).

(Also, speaking as a physicist, it's questionable how much we'd gain in energy efficiency and environmental impact doing this, since it would require huge amounts of energy storage and transportation, both of which are quite inefficient, and can be heavily polluting, especially in the case of big batteries, which are the simplest way to store energy, but also require a lot of natural resources themselves, and produce significant pollutants over time. But that's part of the environmental argument, so separate from the economic argument.)

Medicare for All, again, might be stimulative in that it would save the average person quite a bit of money. But at the same time, if it ends private insurance (which I agree with most OKPs is an inefficient and inhuman relic of the past), then it would put millions of people out of work. In and of itself, this would cause a major recession or more likely a depression.

Now admittedly, that's ignoring the fact that the CONSUMERS of health care would be better off under Medicare for All. But if a hundred million people are saving money on health care (paying more in taxes but mostly saving more than that in premiums), but a few million people have their lives completely destroyed -- I don't see how that shakes out, and I don't see any of these "bold ideas" progressives putting any effort into figuring it out. And even less into using whatever we know about the economics of health care to inform their bold proposals.

It's a similar story on a slightly smaller scale for free College tuition. Again, it's the right thing to do, if we can ever get it done. But everybody who works for a private nonprofit university or college (including me) would be putting zero dollars into the economy or the federal treasury for the foreseeable future.


It would be great if we can find a way to do these things. And I'm not even certain that this approach is unaffordable. I just don't see the supporters showing any interest in the question of WHETHER it's possible. What worries me about so much of the new left is that the proposals seem specifically *designed* to be impossible. Designed that way so that we never have to find out whether they could have worked or not. It's like we've all just given up on progress and just want to feel better about ourselves as everything we care about goes down the shithole.