Left-wing think tank: Warren's healthcare plan costs more than Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid combined

Who would have thought that eliminating a massive private industry, taking over 1/6 of the economy, and forcing every American into a federally run healthcare program would be impossibly expensive?

The answer of course, is everyone. Everyone knows that the plans being offered by the likes of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are completely unsustainable. Still, the single-payer pipe dream lives on in the socialist heart. Money doesn’t matter, since affordable healthcare isn’t really the goal. The goal is really about federal control over every facet of American life, using healthcare costs as both a stick and carrot.

Usually it’s conservatives who make the “it’s too expensive” argument. However, every now and then, reality encroaches upon the left-wing bubble. They can’t afford to keep their promises and, deep down, they know it.

The disconnect between promise and price isn’t just going to be a problem should one of them end up in office. It’s going to be a problem in the next election. Even left-wing think tanks are sounding the alarm.

Via The Atlantic:

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The Urban Institute, a center-left think tank highly respected among Democrats, is projecting that a plan similar to what Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders are pushing would require $34 trillion in additional federal spending over its first decade in operation. That’s more than the federal government’s total cost over the coming decade for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid combined, according to the most recent Congressional Budget Office projections.

In recent history, only during the height of World War II has the federal government tried to increase taxes, as a share of the economy, as fast as would be required to offset the cost of a single-payer plan, federal figures show. There are “no analogous peacetime tax increases,” says Leonard Burman, a public-administration professor at Syracuse University and a former top tax official in both the Bill Clinton administration and at the CBO. Raising that much more tax revenue “is plausible in the sense that it is theoretically possible,” Burman told me. “But the revolution that would come along with it would get in the way.”

In other words, Warren and Bernie would need to raise taxes to such an onerous level that the people would rise up in the streets. How much is that, exactly?  Well….

The Urban Institute estimates that a single-payer plan would require $32 trillion in new tax revenue over the coming decade. That’s slightly less revenue than its projected cost, because it would generate some offsetting savings by eliminating certain tax benefits the government now provides, such as the exclusion for employer-provided health care.

How big a lift is it to raise $32 trillion? It’s almost 50 percent more than the total revenue the CBO projects Washington will collect from the personal income tax over the next decade (about $23.3 trillion).

Remember, this is a left-wing group making this argument. The Atlantic may call them “center-left” but The Atlantic is so far left that everything looks centrist from their perspective.  These are liberals, calling out hardcore progressives, over a scheme they know is completely unworkable.

Hang on. Scratch that.  It’s not just “unworkable.”  It’s so far outside of the realm of coherent fiscal policy that lefties are actually arguing it would kickstart an uprising.

This is the nation that Warren and Bernie want to create.