from a piece originally written for Bloomberg Politics and featured in an email from Brookings Institute, where it appears in a piece on the Brookings website titled The real loser of the 2016 campaign is policy in which Reeves takes to task both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
I offer this for informational purposes, neither to advocate for or against any candidate, although for those who do not know I am a Clinton supporter.
Reeves writes from the perspective someone working in a policy think tank, and is very concerned that appeals to populism not rooted in policy reality are problematic.
Here are the two paragraphs in question:
To be clear: I’m not saying that Sanders and Trump are equivalent. Trump plays on fear and loathing; Sanders indulges utopian idealism. But like Trump, the main purpose of Sanders’ policies is to signal a broad set of values, rather than chart a realistic way forward. Even the most progressive analysts of health care policy, like my Brookings colleague Henry Aaron, consider the Sanders plan for a single-payer health care system to be a pipe dream. As Aaron writes: “We know that single-payer mechanisms work in some countries. But those systems evolved over decades, based on gradual and incremental change from what existed before. That is the way that public policy is made in democracies.” Indeed. But not the way public policy is being made on the campaign trail.
Likewise, Sanders’ fiscal policies simply do not stack up, even if he can make the economy grow like it’s the ‘60s (the 1860s, that is). But don’t take my word for it: ask ultra-liberal economist Paul Krugman. Or indeed the four Democrat former chairs of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers who jointly wrote to warn of the fuzzy math at the heart of Sanders’ tax and spending plans. Sanders is playing fantasy fiscal policy.
Make of it what you will.
Peace.