Price tag of Bernie Sanders’ proposals: $18 Trillion

[Averroës Nix]

It's more economically literate than J. Bush's tax proposal (and most coverage thereof), at least. Or, God forbid, any of Paul Ryan's budgets.

Obviously you're not going to get cogent, nuanced policy analysis from a visualization that fits on an index card.

[Averroës Nix]

I imagine the costs would go down if such preventative procedures as cholesterol checks, cancer screenings, jabs etc. were free, no?

Not likely. The cost savings potential of preventive medicine has been incredibly oversold over the past decade and (in general) optimistically assumes all kinds of resulting behavioral changes that, in reality, rarely take place. (And let's not even mention the over-treatment and over-diagnosis issues...)

[Averroës Nix]

It's more economically literate than J. Bush's tax proposal (and most coverage thereof), at least. Or, God forbid, any of Paul Ryan's budgets.

Obviously you're not going to get cogent, nuanced policy analysis from a visualization that fits on an index card.

Yes, but at least in those cases the worst one can claim is that the "numbers don't add up". Here, they're not even using the right numbers. They appear to be using the using the total amount of money spent on healthcare per year-- which is around $3.2 trillion per year-- rather than government spending on healthcare-- which is something around $1.1 trillion. They've grossly distorted the fiscal arithmetic here. The government cannot save money it was not spending in the first place.

And what exactly are the proposing to "calm markets" that's going to be bringing such revenues? A FTT? If so, the figures given are outlandish.

The tax-cuts-as-performance-art bit to which I'm referring doesn't bother to use plausible numbers, either, but my point is that, whoever made it, pro-Sanders or anti-, the visualizations simply do not make sense. There's no point in even trying to engage with it as a serious series of policy ideas. "Calming markets" is literally nonsense and the number may as well be $3 quadrillion for all that it means.