Elizabeth Warren lacks the stones to dominate the left lane of the Democratic presidential primaries. We know this because tonight, at the Detroit debate, she equivocated on whether her "Medicare for all" plan would raise taxes on the middle class. At least Bernie Sanders, the original socialist of the Senate, was willing to admit it.

The middle class would pay "less out of pocket," Warren asserted, contradicting every financial evaluation of a plan that would overturn the employer-sponsored, private health insurance plans of 150 million Americans and replace it with a Medicare package featuring benefits far more generous than the public system in its existing form.

Seeing as "Medicare for all" would cost at least $32.6 trillion — and that's generously assuming that it could continue to pay an average reimbursement rate 40% lower than that of current private health insurance rates that subsidize public plans — Warren's insistence that her plan would only raise taxes on billionaires and corporations seems to be an overt lie.

Warren's primary mechanism for paying for her socialist wish list is her likely-unconstitutional wealth tax, which her own advisers estimate would raise only $2.75 trillion in a decade, or roughly 8% of "Medicare for all." Her wealth tax, if the Supreme Court allowed it to go into effect, would penalize households with assets valued at more than $50 million.

If the math doesn't make it clear on its own, let me make Warren's performance clear: she is lying to you and she thinks that you are stupid.

No nation on earth has universal healthcare, much less with the scale of benefits boasted by "Medicare for all," without increasing taxes in some capacity on the middle class. In Austria, the marginal tax rate for income above 35,000 euros is 40%, on top of a regressive value-added tax. In Finland, the marginal tax rate for income above 37,000 euros is 57%, again, ignoring the VAT. Those are just a couple of the more obscure examples of the middle class paying a lot more for a healthcare system that has wait times for care that Americans would never tolerate.

"We’re Democrats, we don’t take away healthcare. Republicans do," Warren told the debate stage. Well, without an explanation of either how she'd fund the bare-bones reimbursement rates of "Medicare for all" or how she'd ensure that physicians wouldn't leave the market en masse when she forces a pay cut on them, this reads like a very clever lie told by a Harvard Law professor.

CNN's moderators deserve credit for holding Warren to account, and she ought to have given her supporters pause with her willfully dishonest answer.