Mayor Pete and the Value of Big Ideas
By: Alexis Romero
Tags: Philosophy, Politics, Bernie Sanders, Education, Democracy

Mayor Pete Buttigieg

The most significant line of the last Democratic debate came from Pete Buttigieg. The discussion was focused on Elizabeth Warren’s ambitious Wealth Tax when the Mayor from Indiana chimed in.

“Right now I think we’re being offered a false choice. You either have to go all the way to the extreme, or its business as usual…I’ve proposed that we make college free for 80% of Americans. But it doesn’t have to be free for the top. If you’re in that top 10%, how about you pay your own tuition, and you save those dollars for something else. That we could spend [those dollars in areas] that would make a big difference, whether it’s infrastructure, child care, housing, health. On issue after issue, we gotta break out of the Washington mindset, that measures the bigness of an idea by how many trillions of dollars it adds to the budget, or the boldness of an idea by how many fellow Americans it can antagonized.”

What Buttigieg is highlighting is the true difference between the candidates in this Democratic debate. Democrats agree that there should be greater access to affordable education, to health care, and that climate change must be fought. But the question is how. How do we go about making change, and how do we explain that change to Americans?

I think there’s a lot to worry about with Buttigieg’s approach.

The Politics & Policy

There are two potential problems with Buttigieg’s approach to political challenges, and both these problems can be addressed by looking at the education plan he mentioned at the debate.

I’ve proposed that we make college free for 80% of Americans. But it doesn’t have to be free for the top. If you’re in that top 10%, how about you pay your own tuition, and you [taxpayers] save those dollars for something else.

Right off the bat, remember that later in this same quote Buttigieg criticizes the notion that we measure “the boldness of an idea by how many fellow Americans it can antagonize.” And yet, his 80/20 plan splits the country in two groups by design. The plan then says to the wealthier 20%, ‘even though you pay taxes like the rest of the country, your children are not going to be eligible.’

It’s worth reminding ourselves that throughout American history the most popular programs have been close to universally universal. Medicare, Social Security, and even national security decisions have all received tremendous support, in part, because there was this idea that the government was doing something for everyone–as opposed to taking money or opportunity from one group of people and giving it to another group.

By making a program universal, rather than trying to tinker at the margins of some financial cutoff like Buttigieg, you are able to make one of the most powerful political messages of all: this is for everyone.

The High Administrative Costs of Reasonable Plans

Let’s go back to another one of Buttigieg’s argument for his 80/20 education plan. That is, if you don’t spend the extra money on that last 20% of American’s tuition, then you will have more money for “infrastructure, child care, housing, health” or some other priority. But there is reason to believe that an 80/20 plan would be just as expensive or even more expensive than universal plans.

Think of it this way. If the government is going to say that people in the bottom 80% of Americans do get free tuition, but that those in the 81st percentile don’t get free tuition–whose job is it to determine whether a student is on one side of the fence or the other?

By creating this 80/20 split, you’re requiring there to be a new fleet of government workers whose job it is to police this split. Their job would probably require the handling of tax returns and financial records, making sure families right on the edge between these two figures aren’t underreporting their income and assets. There would also need to be manpower handling situations in which a student whose family was above the threshold one semester suddenly drops well below the threshold the next. We could go on, but the point is that administrative costs in these types of programs sky rocket because you need additional workers to take the effort of sorting Americans across financial groups.

Sadly, in an attempt to make a program seemingly more practical or moderate, you’re creating a scenario where the government has to go through the costly process of nickel and diming Americans.

Now look at this policy from the perspective of the schools themselves. By saying universally that public tuition at colleges is paid for, you’re able to drastically downsize the size and cost of Financial Aid offices inside universities across the country. But, if you say that for a whole 20% chunk of students, tuition still needs to be processed and paid for, then these Financial Aid departments have to remain mostly intact. This is a wasted opportunity for a trimming down of public university administration, which could allow for the hiring of more teachers.

U.S. Healthcare is split up into an expensive, messy pile from roughly 24 sources. Image Source.

Next, ask yourself what happens when a Republican administration returns into power after a President Buttigieg. Much like the recent efforts to bring work-requirements into Medicaid eligibility, it is easy to imagine a Republican-led government working to make it increasingly difficult for students and universities to qualify for their free tuition. This problem doesn’t exist under a universal system because everyone is eligible for higher education, and nothing other than a very unpopular congressional legislation would be able to change that.

This administrative cost issue isn’t just a problem with higher education. One of the reasons conservative estimates for healthcare suggest Medicare-for-all could cover more Americans at the same total cost is that administrative costs would go down substantially. Currently, America’s healthcare system is a clunky compilation of employer-based plans, Medicare, Medicaid, Affordable Care Act plans, uninsured people going to the hospital, and so on. But if everyone is on the same healthcare plan, hospitals don’t have to waste precious time wading through a mess of paperworks, insurance contacts, and non-paying patients. Under a universal health care system, things aren’t perfect, but they are a lot simpler and cheaper.

[Note: it was worth taking that brief digression into healthcare because, as Buttigieg mentioned in the debate, he believes in his strategy “on issue after issue.”]