Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute devotes his latest National Review Online column to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s march toward the political left.
Hillary continues to move further and further left. Having apparently decided she can’t run as herself — the slogan “Hey, at least I wasn’t indicted” is less than inspirational — she is doing her best to morph into the Democratic candidate that some people actually liked.
Last weekend, for instance, she moved closer to adopting Bernie’s health-care plan. She hasn’t gone all the way — Berniecare’s $38 trillion price tag is still a bit high for her — but she will push for a so-called “public option” for Obamacare. This would essentially establish a government-run single-payer system to compete with private insurance in every state. Because the government system is subsidized by taxpayers, it can artificially hold down prices until it drives private insurance out of business. Hillary is also calling for reducing the age for Medicare eligibility to 55. So far she has been too busy playing Santa Claus to put a price tag on this proposal. But it’s hard to imagine that adding more people to Medicare will help that program’s expected $55.6 trillion shortfall. What these proposals do mean in the aggregate, however, is the slow, painful death of private health insurance in this country.
Just a few days earlier, Hillary had bought into another of Bernie’s truly bad ideas: free college tuition. Under her plan, public colleges would be free for all families earning less than $85,000 per year as of now, an income threshold that would rise to $125,000 in 2021. That would eventually make roughly 83 percent of U.S. college students eligible for “free” college at a cost to taxpayers of some $450 billion over ten years. And just to sweeten the deal, she also plans to offer every student, regardless of family income, a three-month moratorium on student-loan payments.
This, despite the fact that nearly everyone agrees that such subsidies simply inflate the cost of a college education. Moreover, her plan would encourage students to spend more time studying subjects that are not going to help them find employment once they get out of college. This would move us further down the road toward the sort of institutions filled with perpetual students that we see in some European countries, which in turn would have serious consequences both for the students themselves and for the economy at large.
