By BOSTON HERALD EDITORIAL STAFF | PUBLISHED: January
2, 2020 | UPDATED: January 2, 2020
Elizabeth
Warren, the occasional senator from Massachusetts, is watching her presidential
campaign hit the skids. She’s down in the polls, and her fourth-quarter
fundraising trailed previous cash inflows.
Naturally,
Warren’s doing what she can to reverse her fortunes and spur momentum, such as
Tuesday’s rally at the Old South Meeting House in Boston.
The
problem is, you can’t gain momentum when you have to keep backpedaling.
And
that is what the senator faces as her free-everything platform wears out its
welcome with skeptical voters.
First,
Warren’s Medicare for All plan was revealed to come with an enormous price tag
— $32 trillion in tax hikes to be specific, though the senator isn’t specific
on where that loot will come from. Taxing the rich down to their last crumb
won’t cover the bill. Details, details.
And
most recently, Warren, like fellow Medicare for All proponent and Democratic
candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, had to admit that the program would cost jobs.
Lots of them.
Research
from University of Massachusetts economists estimated that 1.8 million health
care jobs nationwide would no longer be needed if Medicare for All became law.
Sanders
has made vague statements about retraining and job relocation for these
displaced workers. One has only to look back at the period following passage of
the North American Free Trade Agreement to see how massive job retraining
fared, or failed. Even if a decent percentage of health care
administrative workers who lose their jobs under Medicare for All would relocate
into new ones within the industry, who can say if their salaries would be the
same? That was a common problem with the lucky retrained workers who were
foisted out of their pre-NAFTA manufacturing jobs.
But
Elizabeth Warren doesn’t even mention retraining or job relocation. She just
refers to the impending job loss under Medicare for All as ”part of the cost
issue, and should be part of a cost plan.”
Is
that a fancy way of saying economic collateral damage?
It’s
easy to be dispassionate about social engineering when you’re not facing
foreclosure after a layoff, but for the vast majority of Americans, those who
don’t earn the same as Harvard professors or U.S. senators, the words “job
losses” are chilling.
And
it is this tone-deafness to the realities of life for ordinary people that’s
part of the reason Warren, and other far-left Democrats, will lose to President
Trump in November.
No
one wants to be a pawn in a master plan cooked up by a Beltway insider — the
elitists Trump’s supporters railed against in 2016, and today. The “flyover
states” and their residents are often dismissed by the Coastal cognoscenti as
NASCAR-loving rubes. They know this.
U.S.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley defended Warren’s performance at Monday’s rally.
As
the Boston Herald’s Lisa Kashinsky reported, Pressley said she was down by 13
points in polls days before she upset U.S. Rep. Mark Capuano in 2018 by “a
decisive 17.”
“That’s
because, you know, one, the polls weren’t capturing the electorate we were
expanding and two, because you can’t poll transformation,” she said.
True.
But you can poll disenchantment and disillusionment with candidates and a party
that kicked you out of the car as they made a wide left turn. And the numbers
don’t lie.
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