Robert Reich talking:
I’ve been talking about the increasing concentration of income and wealth, and the political power that comes with increasingly concentrated income and wealth, for many, many years. And the problem is that it’s not getting better, it’s getting worse, unless we have a mobilization, a real movement, to get big money out of politics and to cure up—to kind of deal with this, this imbalance in our economy. It’s not going to be remedied on its own. And that’s why I support Bernie Sanders. He’s leading a movement to reverse what we have seen in terms of income and wealth at the top, and also leading the same kind of movement—and it really is the same thing—to get big money out of politics.
Bernie Sanders is claiming—and Gerald Friedman, professor Gerald Friedman, an economist, backing him up, is claiming—that he could, because of his proposals, such as a single-payer plan, get economic growth up to 5.3 percent—that’s not out of the historic dimension of what’s possible; in fact, in the early 1980s, we had 5.3, almost 5.4, percent economic growth—and also get unemployment down to 3.9 percent or 3.8 percent—again, not out of historic possibility. In fact, that’s what was the approximate rate in the late 1990s.
And the reason that Bernie Sanders is claiming this, and the reason this is credible, is because a single-payer plan would have extraordinarily positive effects on the economy. We are now paying—well, healthcare is about 18 percent of the entire economy. If we actually did move to the single-payer plan, that would generate huge productivity increases that would free up resources in our economy and generate the possibilities for economic growth and also low unemployment of a sort that we see in that plan’s projections.
Professor James Galbraith of the University of Texas, who was the executive director of the Joint Economic Committee in Congress—and that is the corresponding unit to the Council of Economic Advisers—agrees with Gerald Friedman and me that these projections are within the range of possibility, for exactly the reasons I gave you, that when you’re talking about a very large and ambitious program—in this case, a single-payer plan—you can get those kinds of very, very large and positively ambitious results.
I’ve heard Governor Kunin and others say that this kind of radical change, a revolutionary change in our politics that Bernie Sanders is calling for, is not possible, or it is wishful thinking. I’ll tell you my response. And if you look at the civil rights movement, you look at way back in our history, the movement of women to get the vote, look at any major change in the power structure of America, or even the movement to end the Vietnam War, they were all movements. They were all mass mobilizations. People in the United States decided that they had had enough and they were going to change the structure of power in the United States. Bernie Sanders is leading exactly that kind of movement to get big money out of politics.
And, Amy, I don’t know how else to do it. I mean, I was there. I was in the Clinton administration; I have been in a Cabinet. I can tell you that unless good people outside the United States—rather, good people outside Washington are mobilized and organized and energized to make change happen, it doesn’t matter how good the people are in Washington, nothing is going to change, because the special interests are going to dominate. You need that kind of mobilization in order to get change. And Bernie Sanders is doing exactly that.
there are states like, for example, Vermont, that are and have considered putting a single-payer plan on the exchanges that people use under the Affordable Care Act—that is, using the Affordable Care Act as a launching pad for a single-payer plan.
Many health economists, many of us who do policy, think that a single-payer plan is almost inevitable in this country, because it is so much more efficient, because it reduces costs and also provides very high-quality care. Most other advanced nations have it. We are paying so much in this country for a healthcare system based on private, for-profit insurance, where so much of that money goes to advertising and promotion and administration and billing and CEO pay. This is absurd.
And as baby boomers get older and need more medical assistance, we’re not going to be able to afford the kind of healthcare system we have right now. And that’s why a single-payer plan is critical. That’s why Bernie Sanders wants to move to it. And it’s not going to jeopardize the Affordable Care Act. There can be just—you can make, as Barack Obama almost did, a kind of Medicare-for-all or a single-payer option.
the same pathway of getting big money out of politics. It is mobilization of people outside Washington. It’s getting the public to focus on what is important, and it is exercising that kind of leadership—also, aiming high. What worries me about other candidates, particularly Hillary Clinton, is that the message seems to be we cannot aim high, or we must not be ambitious, we must not try to be bold, because we can’t get there. That, to me, is exactly the wrong message. The message should be—in terms of mobilizing Americans and organizing and getting the kind of response we need from Americans to push Congress, to change Congress, to get a government that is responsible for us, the message should be we must and can aim high. We can do it.
And we’ve done it before in this country. We’ve had some very, very ambitious—and vicious—changes. You know, I lived through the civil rights era. I saw what activists like Martin Luther King Jr. and presidents like Lyndon Johnson were able to do. And we have to—you know, the urgency right now with regard to everything we consider important, from Black Lives Matter and the kind of discrimination, structural discrimination, we’re seeing, all the way through climate change, nothing can change unless we get big money out of politics, unless we return the United States from being almost an oligarchy to a true democracy once again. That’s what Bernie Sanders is talking about. I can’t understand why anybody would find that difficult or objectionable.
Hillary Clinton was Clinton’s chief adviser. I think that Hillary Clinton was as powerful, if not more powerful, than any first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt. And Hillary was continuously helping Bill Clinton make very, very fundamental decisions.
Bernie Sanders said last night that he is going to continue to take this all the way to the convention. And I believe that he sees himself as a vehicle for this movement. In other words, this campaign is less about Bernie Sanders, for Bernie Sanders—and he would be the first to admit this—than it is about a movement against American oligarchy and against big money in politics. And he, therefore, by saying that he’s going to take it all the way to the convention, I think he means he’s going to take this movement all the way to the convention. And hopefully it’s going to be, regardless of what happens, regardless of whether he has enough convention delegates, it is going to be a very vocal and very important movement in the future.
Let me just say, the superdelegate problem is a huge kind of symbol of what we are up against in this country. The Democratic Party has all these insider superdelegates. You’re right, they could change their mind at any time. But merely having superdelegates, who are insiders, who will play such a significant role at the convention, is testament to the fact that the Democratic Party still doesn’t quite get it, in terms of this antiestablishment era we are now entering in America, where most Americans are saying the political establishment has not worked for us.
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Robert Reich
former labor secretary under President Clinton and professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
— source http://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/1/we_must_can_aim_high_former