> Negotiating drug prices is bad?
No, that's fine. It's the 3.5 Trillion in pork and expansion of government powers that's the problem.
> Asking corporations (that are making record profits) pay their fair share of taxes is radical?
This is a weird soundbyte. Please stop it with "pay their fair share". Increasing IRS snooping powers on all bank accounts of private citizens is bad and does nothing to promote corporations "paying their fair share". There are lot of orwellian aspects to this reform. A simple VAT tax and elimination of corporate taxes would be more fair and also less intrusive. That would also bring us more inline with a european style tax system and eliminate corporate tax avoidance. It's also a proven system that works well in Europe.
One thing the left needs to understand is that corporate taxes are basically sales taxes. So if you are going to be applying a national sales tax, do a VAT. That will immediately solve your foreign tax shelter problems because you are taxing sales and not "profits", which are subject to all sorts of accounting gimmicks. Sales are clear and they happen in a specific geographic area. Just tax sales net of domestic input costs. This is actually one of the policies floated in the Trump administration but was of course never adopted seeing as how corporations opposed it (for obvious reasons).
> Two years of free community college is divisive?
It's terrible policy. We need to cut government subsidies of higher education in half and finally open up a system of trade schools for the majority that shouldn't attend college. Trade schools, and not two years of community college, is what we need.
The problem with US education spending, like with US healthcare spending, is that we are spending twice as much as the OECD (as a share of GDP) and still the private sector is left with huge bills. And we have bad outcomes, graduating students without marketable skills and that do not match the needs of our economy. Again, here we should follow the European model rather than giving more subsidies to our system.
That means free higher education and free trade school, and this can be funded by slashing university budgets by 2/3 and diverting funds towards the establishment of trade schools, banning schools from charging anything to students if they accept government vouchers. Each voucher should be for 11K/year. Students must complete their degree in three years, and standards should be raised so only qualified students attend university rather than teaching remedial subjects in our expensive university system. Non-academic staff should be reduced from the current levels of 3 non-academic staff per academic staff to 3 academic staff per non-academic staff. That reduction in non-academic staff and reduction in required courses would allow for a massive slashing of university budgets, bringing them inline with what is spent in Europe. And we'd get smaller class sizes and free universal education to boot. None of that requires a dollar of extra spending beyond current levels.
But merely subsidizing a bad system now entrenches it and makes it harder to reform in the future. You have the same problem with healthcare.
> And please don't say the amount is too high. 3.5T is over 10 years,
It's not the amount, it's that it's all deficit spending and the actual programs are mostly harmful rather than helpful.
One problem with the left is they think it's always 1933. The only economic model in their mind is one where there is deflation and millions of unemployed with nothing to do, so they always call for a "New Deal". Well, we are in a tight labor market and an inflationary economy, so now is not the time to run expansionary fiscal policy. You would think this would be obvious, but alas it doesn't stop anyone from calling for projects that create "more jobs". Now if you want to reduce defense spending and increase spending on something else, we can discuss that. I'd like to reduce defense spending as well, but another 3.5 Trillion in stimulus is a terrible policy in the current economy, and the objects of this spending are the corrupt bureaucracies that need to be cut, not increased.
So yeah, it's really a terrible bill that takes us in the wrong direction. I'm OK with negotiating for cheaper drugs, and few other things, but the actual spending of money and most of the policies are just awful.
Now I understand that a lot of my proposals are also radical. But we need radical reform. And I also understand you can't get a radical bill passed when you have only a three seat majority in the house and a 50-50 Senate. It's insane to think you can. You won't be able to. So in this current stalement it's much better to pass no bill than to pass a bad stimulus bill in an overheated economy. At least passing no bill would avoid making things worse, which is what this bill does. The reason we do not have education or healthcare reform is because there are too many people employed in these industries who wield too much political power and are able to block reform. Therefore I oppose anything that increases employment in already bloated fields, as it makes the reform problem that much harder.