There Have Been 21 Debate Questions About Paying for Social Programs, Zero About Paying for War

By Sarah Lazare, In These Times

03 March 20

Democratic debate moderators are sending the message that we can afford policies that spread militarism—but not those that protect human life.

n a survey of 10 Democratic presidential debates spanning eight months, In These Times found that moderators have asked candidates a total of 21 questions about how they plan to pay for their political agendas. In every single case, moderators demanded to know who will bear the cost of social goods like Medicare for All, climate change mitigation and free college. There was not a single instance where a debate moderator asked a candidate how she or he plans to pay for U.S. wars.

Debate moderators have tremendous power to shape political discourse, and the cumulative effect of this line of questioning is to give the overarching impression that U.S. society cannot afford programs that save or improve lives, or prevent planetary catastrophe. But when it comes to U.S. militarism—which accounts for roughly half of the discretionary federal budget—cost is apparently never an issue.

Medicare for All has been the primary target. Of the 21 “How will you pay for it?” questions, 14 raised concern about the program, described by Bernie Sanders as a “single-payer, national health insurance program to provide everyone in America with comprehensive healthcare coverage, free at the point of service.” An additional question raised concern about proposals for “new” government healthcare benefits. (This count includes questions that simultaneously raised concerns about other programs.)

On July 3, 2019, night one of the second democratic debate, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked four questions in close succession, grilling candidates on how Medicare for All would be paid for. “At the last debate, you said you’re, quote, ‘with Bernie on Medicare for All,’” he said to Elizabeth Warren. “Now, Senator Sanders has said that people in the middle class will pay more in taxes to help pay for Medicare for all, though that will be offset by the elimination of insurance premiums and other costs. Are you also, quote, ‘with Bernie’ on Medicare for All’ when it comes to raising taxes on middle-class Americans to pay for it?”

CNN’s Abby Phillip took a similar line of questioning at the seventh Democratic debate on January 14. “Senator Sanders, you’ve consistently refused to say exactly how much your Medicare for All plan is going to cost,” she said. “Don’t voters deserve to see the price tag before you send them a bill that could cost tens of trillions of dollars?” Her next question was for Joe Biden: “Vice President Biden,” she said, “does Senator Sanders owe voters a price tag on his healthcare plan?”

The implication of these moderators’ questions—that the cost of Medicare for All is so great it will hurt ordinary people—disregards the tremendous harm being inflicted on ordinary people right now by a staggeringly expensive healthcare system.

According to a Gallup poll published in December 2019, 25% of people in the United States said that “they or a family member put off treatment for a serious medical condition in the past year because of the cost”—an increase of 6% over the previous year. Research in 2019 found that 66.5% of all bankruptcies were because of medical issues—either inability to pay for the cost or time missed from work (the Affordable Care Act did not make a dent in these numbers).

The “middle class,” whom moderates claim to champion, is vulnerable under the status quo: According to the the Federal Reserve’s 2018 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, one third of Americans deemed middle income can’t afford a $400 emergency. In a society where Americans are forced to turn to GoFundMe to raise money for cancer treatment or insulin, moderators could have chosen, instead, to probe how candidates will treat free and universal medical care as their highest priority.

Medicare for All hasn’t been the only target. Since the debates began, there have been at least three questions about how climate crisis mitigation will be paid for. One, asked on September 12 by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, lumped in the Green New Deal with a handful of other social programs. “Both Senators Warren and Sanders want to replace Obamacare with Medicare for all,” Stephanopoulos said to Joe Biden. “You want to build on Obamacare, and not scrap it. They proposed spending far more than you to combat climate change and tackle student loan debt, and they would raise more in taxes than you to pay for their programs. Are Senators Warren and Sanders pushing too far beyond where Democrats want to go, and where the country needs to go?”

But when it comes to climate change, there is no middle ground between “pushing too far” and not doing enough. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in October 2018 that we have 12 years to keep global warming to a maximum of 1.5°C—an outcome that could prevent the worst of droughts, floods, storms, extreme weather and the resulting human deaths. Keeping global warming below catastrophic levels “would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society,” the IPCC says. By reflexively putting the Green New Deal in the category of programs that try to do too much too soon, Stephanopoulos sent the false message to the debate’s 14 million viewers that society does not need dramatic action to stem the climate crisis—and should regard with skepticism any programs that promise ambitious, bold action.

The questions didn’t stop there. Three total raised concerns about the cost of cancelling student debt and providing free college. On night two of the first Democratic debate, June 27, 2019,  NBC’s Savannah Guthrie said, “Senator Harris there’s a lot of talk in this primary about new government benefits such as student loan cancellation, free college, healthcare and more. Do you think that Democrats have a responsibility to explain how they will pay for every proposal?” Such a question disregards the economic and moral crisis of education debt, which has left half of student loan borrowers with the impression that they will be in debt forever, according to a 2019 survey by Fidelity. Dressed in the ostensibly morally neutral terms of budgeting, such questions—in fact—deal out the moral judgment that the plight of these borrowers should not be a priority.

Other “How will you pay for it?” questions included one targeting Andrew Yang’s proposal for a guaranteed income and one targeting Kamala Harris’ proposal for paid family leave. Perhaps the most eyebrow-raising question was put to Warren by the Washington Post’s Ashley Parker: “You've said that the border wall that President Trump has proposed is, quote, ‘a monument to hate and division.’ Would you ask taxpayers to pay to take down any part of the wall on the nation's southern border?”

This question exposes the right-wing ideology that underpins “What about the taxpayers?” questions. The border wall is a symbol and an instrument of racist ideology, at a time of escalating crises of deaths and detentions at the border. Yet by appealing to some unknown cost to “taxpayers,” Parker focuses her question on the cost of tearing it down—not the tremendous moral cost of letting it stand.

The normalcy of war

The moral bankruptcy of this deficit scaremongering is exposed by the fact that the financial costs of U.S. wars, military base expansions, drone strikes, proxy battles and hostile military exercises were never once interrogated by debate moderators. The 2020 National Defense Authorization Act—approved by Democrats and Republicans alike—provides President Trump a $738 billion military budget, a $22 billion increase over the prior year. Meanwhile, the United States spends more on the military than the next seven countries combined.

According to the logic of fiscal responsibility, such questions would be especially relevant because many candidates are embracing costly militaristic programs. At the tenth Democratic debate on February 25, Michael Bloomberg was asked if he would “pull all combat troops out of the Middle East.” The billionaire replied, “No. You want to cut it back as much as you can, but I think, if we learned something from 9/11, people plan things overseas and execute them here. We have to be able to stop terrorism. And there's no guarantees that you're going to be able to do it, but we have to have some troops in places where terrorists congregate, and to not do so is just irresponsible.”

While the exact implications of this statement are unclear, it appears Bloomberg is embracing the so-called “war on terror,” a nebulous term that encompasses many of the U.S. wars fought following September 11, 2001. According to the Costs of War project of Brown University, post-9/11 wars have cost a total of $6.4 trillion. Yet, no moderator cited this high price tag nor asked Bloomberg how he plans to pay for the continuation of such wars. Of course, U.S. wars are bad because of the human lives they take and harm—and this would still be the case if the wars cost zero dollars. One estimate finds that the U.S. war in Iraq killed 1 million Iraqi people—a horrific injustice and cruelty no matter the price tag. But this inconsistency in moderators’ deficit fearmongering reveals that the true function of this handwringing is to advance right-wing ideologies aimed at shrinking public goods while expanding the violent apparatus of U.S. empire.

Moderators have had plenty of other opportunities to ask candidates about how they will pay for U.S. militarism. Mayor Pete Buttigieg, whose foreign policy positions have been vague and have prone to shifting, just dropped out of the presidential race, but the lack of scrutiny given to his positions remains instructive. He said in a June 2019 foreign policy speech that he is in favor of “deterrence” against China, ongoing “counterterrorism missions” in Afghanistan and “isolating dictatorship” in Latin America. Any one of these plans—depending on interpretation—could include a tremendous price tag. What would it mean to isolate “dictatorship” in Latin America? Expand U.S. bases in countries near Venezuela? Deploy more U.S. troops near the border? Engage in undercover operations to advance a political leader more favorable to the United States? What is the price tag of such operations? Surely Chuck Todd and Jake Tapper want to know.

One might respond that high spending on the military is in line with the status quo, while high spending on medical care marks an increase—so politicians have more responsibility to explain how they intend to pay for the latter. Yet, “normalcy” is no excuse: The reality is that every year, Democrats and Republicans alike make the decision to approve an astronomical military budget. By treating pre-existing funding priorities as a given, and raising concerns about any shift in funding priorities, moderators are reinforcing the status quo for no reason other than it is the status quo, thereby marginalizing challenges to that status quo.

What’s more, the amount spent on war is not staying the same—it’s increasing. Adjusting for inflation, U.S. military spending is at its highest levels ever, save for the height of the Iraq War. And the increase in military spending in real dollars from 2017 to 2018—the biggest since just after 9/11—was $61 billion. This increase, implemented with virtually no public debate, and no handwringing from any of the above media outlets or pundits, cost “taxpayers” $14 billion more per year than Sanders’ plan to make college tuition free for every student in the United States. The latter, of course, has been subject to numerous “How will you pay for it?” questions from moderators. The Pentagon increase—despite being a new financial burden—has resulted in zero such budgetary concerns.

The answer is not, of course, to simply replace moral condemnations of war with calls for fiscal responsibility. Even if drone wars are less costly than traditional ground invasions, they are still cruel and unjust and should be condemned. Rather, moderators’ inconsistencies should prompt us to interrogate—and reject—the moral judgments implicit in their deficit scolding. 

When moderators tell their millions of viewers over and over that they should be concerned about the costs of Medicare for All, but not the cost of maintaining a sprawling network of 800 of military bases, they are saying we can afford policies that spread militarism—but not those that protect human life. They are doing the work of austerity ideologues and their billionaire backers—not the ordinary “taxpayers” they claim to represent.

Don't Tell Cable Pundits That Bernie Sanders Is Leading Nationally Among Black Voters

By Nausicaa Renner, Aída Chávez and Akela Lacy, The Intercept

02 March 20

 

t 7 p.m. sharp, multiple networks called South Carolina for Joe Biden, breathing a collective sigh of relief.

The results, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said, called the viability of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign into question. “If anybody knows anything about winning the Democratic nomination and about what it takes for a Democratic nominee to win a general election, it is black voters,” Maddow said. “And if Sen. Sanders continues to underperform systematically with black voters, and if we see him get shellacked — not just beaten but shellacked tonight in South Carolina — because of his performance with black voters, that’s an existential question about that nomination.”

“I want every Democrat in the country to see what that looked like tonight: That is what winning looks like,” celebrated James Carville, an old-time political operative MSNBC brings on to panic its viewers. “That is the job of a political party. Not utopian fantasies, but winning elections.”

“The single most important demographic in the Democratic Party spoke up tonight,” said Carville on MSNBC, wearing a U.S. Marine Corps baseball cap. He said Sanders needs to answer for his lack of support in the state: “We get all enamored, and tonight we were reminded of what and who the Democratic Party is.”

“We cannot win unless we prove there’s excitement in the African American community,” said former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, an ex-head of the Democratic National Committee, on CNN, going on to endorse Biden officially on air.

Maddow’s, McAuliffe’s, and Carville’s point — which became a major theme of cable coverage for the night — is, in the abstract, undeniable: A Democratic presidential candidate who can’t win the black vote can’t win the nomination. But the cable analysis carried on as if the only available information on the preferences of black voters came from South Carolina. In fact, black voters nationally have regularly been surveyed and, recently, Sanders has taken the lead among the demographic — a fact that was, at best, only mentioned in passing.

Last week, the Reuters/Ipsos poll found Sanders besting Biden by 3 percentage points nationally among black voters — certainly a relevant data point when considering whether Sanders can win among black voters. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found Biden up 2 percentage points among black voters, while the Hill/HarrisX poll had Sanders up by 9. A Morning Consult survey recently found Sanders beating Biden by 5 points among all black primary voters, and thumping him by a 3-1 margin among black voters under 45.

In other words, the national picture does not exactly portend a “shellacking” among black voters — important context that was kept from MSNBC viewers, who would be left to conclude that the same minority-voter problem that hobbled Sanders’s campaign in 2016 remains a major obstacle. It simply isn’t true.

After SC, @maddow says that if Bernie Sanders "continues to underperform systematically with black voters... that's a existential question."

In reality, among black voters, Bernie finished #2 in NV & is #1 nationally! He's systematically leading. (https://t.co/3YdoKJh8sj) pic.twitter.com/rAzQNpiNpT

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) March 1, 2020

A handful of commentators, including former Sen. Claire McCaskill, a vituperative opponent of Sanders, acknowledged that South Carolina’s results may not necessarily translate into victory for Biden nationwide. “Unfortunately,” said McCaskill on MSNBC, “there aren’t a lot of Jim Clyburns.” Clyburn, an iconic civil rights leader and the uncontested party leader in South Carolina, as well as the number three Democrat in the House, endorsed Biden last week, giving his campaign the kind of boost that can’t be replicated elsewhere.

There are other reasons to suspect that Biden’s campaign won’t be able to sustain its high note after South Carolina. The state is one of the demographically oldest. According to CNN exit polls, 6 percent of voters were between the ages of 17 and 24, and 5 percent were between the ages of 25 and 29. Around 28 percent of voters in South Carolina were under age 45, compared to 45 percent in Iowa, 35 percent in New Hampshire, and 36 percent in Nevada.

What’s more, Biden spent an enormous proportion of his resources in South Carolina, which he hasn’t done in Super Tuesday states or beyond, and is running low on cash.

In 2016, Sanders was truly shellacked in South Carolina, losing a two-way race to Hillary Clinton by nearly 50 points. She beat him among black voters 86-14, according to exit polls. This year’s exit survey found black voters making up 57 percent of the electorate, with Biden winning 64 percent of that vote to Sanders’s 15 and Tom Steyer’s 13. (Steyer, who only performed as well as he did thanks to the millions he poured into the state, dropped out of the race as the totals came in.)

Everybody else was shellacked: Sen. Elizabeth Warren won 5 percent of the black vote, Pete Buttigieg 3, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar zero. Fortunately for them, they were barely mentioned during the TV coverage.

While MSNBC more or less omitted the forward-looking picture of the race, Fox News was more sanguine about Biden’s chances. Ari Fleischer, former press secretary to President George W. Bush, played down what the win could mean for Biden in other states. Only one of the 14 races Biden will compete in on Super Tuesday have a demographic similar to South Carolina: Alabama. “If he cannot win anywhere without huge numbers of African American votes, the upcoming battlefield is not favorable to him still,” Fleischer said.

Former interim Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile told Fox News that Biden and other candidates now needed to show they could build a diverse coalition and bring the resources to compete in large and small states to amass delegates they need heading into the July convention. “The name of the game is delegates,” Brazile said. “For Joe Biden, clearly this was a victory that he desperately needed today in South Carolina.”

Overall, Biden is trailing Sanders in a number of recent national polls from Morning Consult, Fox News, and Yahoo/YouGov. The same is true in California, the state with the most delegates, where a Monmouth University poll released last week showed Sanders with support from 24 percent of likely California primary voters, and Biden with 17 percent. A Los Angeles Times/Berkeley poll released this week showed Sanders leading with 34 percent of likely California primary voters, with Warren at 17 percent and Biden, who had led the poll in June, at 8 percent. “Based on his 34% support in the poll, this state alone likely will give him well over 10% of the 1,991 delegates he would need to win the nomination at the national convention this summer,” the LA Times reported.

With the votes nearly all counted, Biden was heading for roughly a 29-point win in South Carolina, with only Biden and Sanders claiming delegates to the national convention; none of the rest seemed likely to meet the 15 percent threshold.

For Biden, it was a big first win of his presidential race — of any of his three presidential races, in fact: He had never won a primary or caucus victory before. “This is leap day, and he needed to leap back into this race,” said former Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod on CNN. “This could narrow down very quickly to a race between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.”