Reply #17: Dennis's plan might seem more sketchy than Kerry's [View All]

[Mairead]

Or perhaps not.

Dennis's policy is that it's a matter of national security to have a manufacturing capability that goes all the way from raw materials such as steel up through finished goods.

So he would kickstart the rebuilding by dedicating $500G to infrastructure repair, which would also give work to about 2M people--a sort of 'WPA v2'.

What's not clear to me right now about his policy is the money flow. Where would that 500G come from and go to? I have the ugly suspicion that a G or so might subsidise building modern materials fabs, and that in general the money would come from our pockets.

Kerry takes a conventional approach, certainly: tax credits for the wealthy business owners, which would naturally come out of our pockets.

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Dennis's position on healthcare, of course, is now well known: medicare for all, funded in part by a 7.7% payroll tax and part by aggregating all the current general-revenue monies that are making their way into healthcare by some pathway.

I think the payroll-tax idea is actually rather clever, though perhaps I'm giving Dennis more credit than he deserves. Once it's established that businesses will pay half, then it seems to me that they have an incentive to keep people employed, as otherwise the percentage of payroll tax they'll pay will have to rise with unemployment.