The Magical Thinking Behind Warren’s Medicare for All Plan

Sen. Elizabeth Warren Friday fulfilled her pledge to propose a specific plan to finance Medicare-For-All. She deserves enormous credit for abandoning her earlier dismissals of the $30 trillion financing question and producing a plan that spells out the required new taxes. However, promising to shield middle-class families from new taxes forces Warren to propose an unrealistic level of health-care savings, as well as new taxes on businesses and investors that are nearly unprecedented in the modern economy. A more realistic accounting of this plan would likely leave a substantial funding hole even before the questions about how the economy would respond to this avalanche of taxes.