If Elizabeth Warren really wants to unrig the system, she should focus on the Dream Hoarders

Odds are that you have not been following the recent libertarian dust-up over the merits of an Elizabeth Warren presidency. To give a brief recap: The main contenders were Will Wilkinson and Jerry Taylor of the “liberaltarian” Niskanen Center, who have been Warren-friendly to varying degrees; their opponents were colleague Samuel Hammond, along with Tyler Cowen of the more traditionally libertarian Mercatus Center, who touched off the whole debate with a withering critique of Warren’s policies.

A point-by-point exploration of their arguments would exceed the space allotted for this column by several thousand inches. But I think one can sum up the libertarian approach to Warren with a single question: How big a problem do you think billionaires, and the mega-successful corporations they helm, pose to the average American? Actually, come to think of it, I think that’s about how you’d sum up the question of Warren from any angle.

Which is why this debate ultimately matters to a lot more people than just some cranky libertarians: It speaks directly to a whole lot of young people who see that the economy doesn’t work for them the way it did for their parents and grandparents, and therefore conclude that somewhere along the way, the people it is working for — the barons of finance, the giants of Silicon Valley — must have rigged the system in their favor.

To be fair, they’re not entirely wrong. As Adam Smith once wrote, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” Bankers and tech executives very much included. So I find myself nodding in agreement with Wilkinson — and, by extension, with the progressive base of the Democratic Party — when he says: “Warren’s general diagnosis of the problem — it’s a rigged system of anticompetitive rent-seeking enabled by insufficiently democratic and representative political institutions — is broadly similar to my own.”

Yet they’re not entirely right, either. Are big corporations, or billionaires, or banks, or tech giants, or health insurers and pharmaceutical firms — to name some of Warren’s favorite targets — really the reason that young people are struggling

  • with enormous student loans? Are they the reason that millennial homeownership lags that of their parents? Are they the
  • reason that recent college graduates are more likely than their elders to be underemployed? Have they
  • driven the cost of health insurance to its current stratospheric levels?

Sure, Warren may be eager to sic her Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on your mortgage lender if you fall afoul of some obscure clause, but that’s not the problem for most Americans. They’re much more likely to struggle with finding affordable housing in prosperous cities. In fairness, Warren does have a plan to ease the zoning regulations that cause the shortage — but for some reason she rarely talks about it on the campaign trail, possibly because it’s constitutionally dubious, but more likely because it would alienate her affluent suburban base.

Similarly, Warren is eager to forgive student loans — a $1.6 trillion transfer to some of the most affluent members of society — but not to attack degree creep, which has walled off most of the best jobs for those who hold a bachelor of arts while enriching a lot of colleges. She targets insurers and drugmakers, but not the hospitals and medical workers who drive most of our health-care costs.

Too many of her proposals are like this; they focus on corporate villains or billionaires while ignoring the much broader class of people that Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution dubbed the “Dream Hoardersthe well-educated upper-middle-class people who are desperate to pass their privilege onto their kids, and are unhappy about the steadily mounting cost of doing so. They’re Warren’s base.

Unfortunately, the Dream Hoarders — and I include myself in their number — are a much bigger problem for the rest of America than the billionaires whose wealth Warren promises to expropriate. Those billionaires got that way by building companies that disrupted cozy local monopolies, and they fund coding camps for high-school dropouts; Dream Hoarders

  • protect their professional licensing regimes and
  • insist on ever more extensive and expensive educations in the people they hire. Dream Hoarders also
  • pull every lever to keep their own housing prices high — and poorer kids out of their schools — while
  • using their wealth to carefully guide their children over the hurdles they’ve erected.

Which may be why the best predictor of a neighborhood with a low degree of income mobility is not the gap between the top 1 percent and everyone else — the gap that Warren focuses on with all her talk of taxing billionaires — but

If you really want to unrig the system, you need to focus less on a handful of billionaires than on the iron grip that the Dream Hoarders have on America’s most powerful institutions — including, to all appearances, Elizabeth Warren’s campaign.

Elizabeth Warren’s “Transition Plan” for Medicare For All Explained

Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., released her plan for transitioning the country to a Medicare For All health care system Friday, splitting the effort into two legislative pushes that would happen over her first term in office, but holding off — at first — on ending the role of private insurance companies.

Instead, she would pass legislation to offer new Medicare benefits to everyone first and then follow up with legislation to end existing employer plans by her third year in office, once the new system has a foothold.”

Hosts: Mark Thompson, Ana Kasparian, Michael Brooks

Can Warren Escape the Medicare Trap?

The candidate of plans needs a really good one right now.

On Sunday, Elizabeth Warren said that she would soon release a plan explaining how she intends to pay for “Medicare for all.” Like many policy wonks, I’ll be waiting with bated breath; this could be a make or break moment for her campaign, and possibly for the 2020 election.

There are three things you need to know about Medicare for all, which in the current debate has come to mean a pure single-payer health insurance system, in which the government provides all coverage, with no role for private insurers.

First, single-payer has a lot to recommend it as a way to achieve universal health care. It’s not the only route — every major advanced country besides the United States achieves universal coverage, but many of them get there via regulations and subsidies rather than by relying solely on public insurance. Still, single-payer is clean and simple, and many health economists would support it if we were starting from scratch.

But we aren’t starting from scratch, which is the second thing you need to know. More than half of Americans are covered by private health insurance, mainly through employers.

Not many people love their insurance companies, but that doesn’t mean that they’re eager to trade the coverage they know for a new system they don’t. Most people probably would end up better off under single-payer, but convincing them of that would be a hard sell; polls show much less support for Medicare for all than for a “public option” plan in which people could retain private insurance if they chose to.

Which brings me to the third point: In reality, single-payer won’t happen any time soon. Even if Democrats win in a landslide in 2020, taking control of the Senate as well as the White House, it’s very unlikely that they will have the votes to eliminate private insurance.

Warren, who has made policy seriousness a key part of her political persona — “Warren has a plan for that” — surely knows all of this. And early this year she seemed to recognize the problems with a purist single-payer approach, saying that she was open to different paths toward universal coverage.

Since then, however, she seems to have gone all in for the elimination of private insurance.

I have no inside information about what led her to take that plunge, but my guess is that she was trying to protect her left flank — to avoid alienating supporters of Bernie Sanders, who have made single-payer a kind of purity test one must pass to be considered a true progressive. And I’m not going to criticize her for engaging in a bit of political realism; after all, the case against Medicare for all is itself basically political.

At this point, however, it’s looking as if Warren may have painted herself into a corner.

Part, but only part, of the issue involves cost.

Journalists have been badgering Warren to get specific about how much taxes would have to go up to pay for Medicare for all. She has, with considerable justice, insisted that this is a bad way to frame the discussion, since any additional taxes would be offset by savings on the huge premiums workers and their employers now pay for private insurance — on average, more than $20,000 a year for a family plan.

The right question is whether the overall costs facing U.S. families would go up or down. Warren has been claiming that for most families, they would go down, but she hasn’t offered specifics. And this vagueness, which has started to seem like evasiveness, is more of a problem for her than it might be for other politicians. As I said, Warren has made policy seriousness a key aspect of her political persona, so her fogginess on health care really stands out.

The plan in the works will presumably try to dispel that fog, but doing so will be tricky. An independent estimate from the Urban Institute (which is, for what it’s worth, left-leaning) suggests that a highly comprehensive Medicare-for-all plan, similar to what Sanders is proposing, would substantially increase overall health spending, although a more modest plan wouldn’t.

But cost isn’t the only issue — in fact, I’m not sure how important it really is, given that full abolition of private insurance remains unlikely in practice. Also, let’s get real: If Warren gets the Democratic nomination, the outcome of the general election isn’t going to hinge on dueling think tank estimates.

The election might, however, hinge on the support of people who have good private coverage and would be nervous about making a leap into the unknown, no matter how many facts and figures Warren deploys.

So what I’ll want to see is whether Warren gives herself and her party enough flexibility to assuage these concerns. I’m not sure what form that flexibility might take. Maybe something like an extended transition period, with greatly enhanced Obamacare (which might actually be politically doable) in the interim?

Whatever Warren comes up with, this is a crucial moment. There are many excellent things in her overall policy agenda; but she won’t get a chance to do those things unless she can extricate herself from what looks like a health policy trap.