Bernie Sanders' proposals are bold solutions The United States is an enormously rich country with hugely pressing problems stemming from a past generation of rising inequality and a future of climate change: Opposing view

Josh Bivens | Opinion contributor

Show Caption Hide Caption How the DNC changed its rules since Sanders, Clinton in 2016 The primaries are here! How does one get elected in the first place and what is in store for the Democratic National Convention in 2020? We explain.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., does indeed have ambitious spending plans. The key thing people should realize, however, is that these plans are largely not introducing new costs on American families. Instead, they’re rearranging current costs already baked in, with an aim to managing them more fairly and efficiently.

Take “Medicare for All.” The price tag (a roughly middle-of-the-road estimate is the $24.4 trillion over 10 years from the Progressive Policy Institute) doesn’t represent new costs for health care for American families. Instead, it just changes how we pay for these costs, replacing “premiums” with “taxes.” Even better, many analyses show that such plans could well reduce the total costs of health care on American families, even as they cover more people.

Or take his plans for climate change. We could decide to ignore the Sanders plan (or other climate change plans) and do nothing to forestall climate change. But this won’t save us and our descendants any money. It will cost us money — a lot more — as we deal with the consequences of a warming planet, which include widespread flooding, droughts, loss of fresh water sources and major dislocation of people who flee places that are no longer habitable.

The same reasoning applies to education. It is frequently claimed that a college degree is the new high school degree, the minimum qualification necessary to have success in the U.S. economy. But high school degrees are offered universally for free at public schools. Why not college degrees?

OUR VIEW: Bernie Sanders' spending numbers add up. Way, way up.

The United States is an enormously rich country with hugely pressing problems stemming from a past generation of rising inequality and a future of climate change. Why would we not go for bold solutions?

Josh Bivens is director of research at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank.

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