Kamala is just as much an economic quack as AOC

Here is part of an exchange that Kamala Harris recently had with John King during an interview on CNN:

King: Can we afford [the Green New Deal]?

Harris: Of course we can afford it.

King: Two and a half, three trillion dollars a year for Medicare for all, by some studies. Depending on which portions of the Green New Deal you choose to do first ... That’s money. You know what the Republicans are going to say, tax and spend liberals, pie in the sky ...

Harris: One of the things that I admire and respect is, the measurement that is captured in three letters: ROI. What's the return on investment? People in the private sector understand this really well. It's not about a cost. It's about an investment. And then the question should be, is it worth the cost in terms of the investment potential? Are we going to get back more than we put in?

What flippancy and glibness! What utter bombast! With all her talk about ROI and the private sector, you would think Ms Harris was some kind of venture capitalist from Sand Hill Road instead of a two-bit district attorney. Kamala Harris knows as little about calculating ROI as I do, even on minor investments, let alone on an investment of the magnitude of the Green New Deal! And we are supposed to be putting the execution of this enormous financial undertaking into her hands as President?

Investopedia defines the formula for ROI as follows:

ROI = (Current Value of Investment - Cost of Investment) / Cost of Investment

So, in spite of what Ms Harris says, ROI is partially a function of Cost of Investment. And it is agreed by all that the cost of implementing all the proposals in the Green New Deal will be staggeringly high. (The American Action Forum, which is run by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who directed the non-partisan CBO from from 2003 to 2005, estimates the Green New Deal may tally between $51 trillion and $93 trillion over 10-years.)

Given that the cost will be staggeringly high, the benefits produced by the investment (the Current Value of Investment in the above formula) will likewise need to be staggeringly high in order for ROI to end up being positive. But that is what Ms Harris, in her glib 30 second sound bite, is implying (why else would she even bring ROI up?), in exactly the same way that other California Democrats assured us that California would reap enormous benefits from "investing" tens of billions of dollars (or is the "investment" projected to be hundreds of billions now?) into a high speed rail system. And these California Democrats made these bold-faced assurances for years, right up until the newly elected Democratic governor of California, Gavin Newsom, pulled the plug on the project because the ROI was not materializing while the Cost of Investment was spiraling ever higher.

The simple fact is that, while she pompously touts the ROI of the Green New Deal, Ms Harris is not even willing to provide the numbers we need to calculate ROI, namely, a.) Cost of Investment, that is, some gross estimate of how much it will cost to implement all the proposals in the Green New Deal and b.) Current Value of Investment, that is, some gross estimate in monetary terms of the value of the benefits that will result from the investment. In other words, her entire statement is merely empty rhetoric.

This does not mean that I do not think that climate change is a serious problem that needs to be addressed with a great deal of urgency. Rather, it just means that we need to employ hard-headed solutions in approaching this problem instead of the political fantasies of economic quacks.

It was with this same quackery that Ms Harris suggested in a townhall meeting recently that we do away with the entire private health insurance industry in the United States:

It is inhumane to make people go through a system where they cannot literally receive the benefit of what medical science can offer because some insurance company has decided it doesn't meet their bottom line in terms of their profit motivation. That is inhumane ... Well, listen, the idea is that everyone gets access to medical care, and you don’t have to go through the process of going through an insurance company, having them give you approval, going through the paperwork, all of the delay that may require. Who of us has not had that situation where you’ve got to wait for approval, and the doctor says, well, I don’t know if your insurance company is going to cover this. Let’s eliminate all of that. Let’s move on.

So, according to Ms Harris, Medicare-for-all will automatically, without any kind of burdensome approval process, provide all people (including illegal immigrants?) with access to whatever health care treatment medical science can offer, no questions asked, without any delay. First of all, the claim that there will be no approval process in a single payor healthcare system is simply ludicrous. Just like with a private insurance company, your doctor will need to seek approval from the single payor for certain significant treatments. And, just like with a private insurance company, approval will be denied in some cases. If a single payor system did not have an approval process, we would be talking not about a financially solvent health care system, but about a patient-wish-fulfillment-machine. Just like private insurance companies, a single payor system must ration the scarce and expensive resources of medical care over a large population of patients (which will grow much larger if Medicare-for-all is passed) based on a variety of considerations, one of which most certainly is cost. Secondly, the idea that there will be no delay in providing treatment is also ludicrous. Ms Harris is obviously unaware of the delays that veterans have had to endure in receiving medical care under the government health care system run by the VA. Instead of providing an entirely new Medicare-for-all system (including Medicare-for-all-illegal-aliens?), how about if we fix the existing system for veterans?

One final comment. Following Burke, I am guided by the following principle: as soon as a person starts talking about tearing down the entire system (private health insurance) and replacing it from the ground up (with Medicare-for-all), I know s/he is a charlatan. For, as Burke correctly observed, when you tear down the entire system, what you end up with is not a wonderful new system, but a wasteland. This is because you have destroyed the old system and then you discover that replacing it with a new system from the ground up is frighteningly more complex and expensive -- and oftentimes bloody -- than you ever could have imagined. The French and Russian Revolutions taught us this lesson. And it is with the horrors of the French and Russian Revolutions in mind, that we ought to reject the crazy, utopian, abstract, socialist theorizing of the Kamala Harrises and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes of the world.