Campaign Proposals and Policy Implementation
The 2020 presidential election is off to an historically early start, with two dozen Democrats running for president. Combined with the Democrats’ 2018 retaking of the House of Representatives, it has led to a dizzying array of policy proposals, resolutions, and bills. Some are more fleshed out, some less. Most are quite radical; many are economically, scientifically, or numerically illiterate (by the way, some Republicans are not immune either).
If the Democrats retain the House and retake the White House and Senate next year, variants of these proposals likely will become law, even if their candidate does not come from the far left side of the party (witness the hostile reception to the few candidates questioning Socialism or Medicare for All and the serial moves left on many issues by moderate Joe Biden).1 And they will remake virtually every aspect of our lives, including health care, technology, defense, education, foreign policy, treaties, environmental regulation, social security, monetary policy, taxes, spending, deficits, and debt—even the structure of government and our legal rights and liberties.
The policy community and media have too often not taken these Democrats’ proposals seriously enough. Almost all the Democrat presidential candidates immediately jumped on board with the most extreme proposals, including Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. That made Nancy Pelosi’s demand to vote on Obamacare— “We have to pass it to see what’s in it”—seem innocuous by comparison. And the mainstream media, environmentalists, and left-leaning think tanks and academics laud the proposals for being wonderfully aspirational, if maybe a bit too difficult to achieve fully so quickly.2 Opponents are mostly content to mock them as socialist and highlight the most extreme implications, such as eliminating cows or airplanes. The policies and their proposers deserve more than such a shallow analysis. From taxes, spending, and debt to climate risks, from lifting up the less fortunate to strengthening our constitutional republic, they legitimately raise vital national issues.