Hillary Clinton’s quiet revolution
Sweet:
Hillary Clinton’s quiet revolution
Nobody's noticed, but she's running on an ambitious plan to remake the American social compact.
Updated by Dylan Matthews@[email protected] Nov 3, 2016, 1:20pm EDT
Vox / Javier Zarracina
Hillary Clinton often gets described as an incrementalist, with a relatively modest agenda. This makes sense, given that she spent the past two years or so running against a literal democratic socialist and Donald Trump.
But this depiction misleads more than it informs. ..........................
Eleven million undocumented immigrants would gain a pathway to citizenship. Medicare would be expanded to people as young as 55, and allowed to negotiate down drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, and every state would have a robust public option. All states would expand Medicaid coverage to anyone living underneath the poverty line, and subsidies for health care on the exchanges would be more generous. The government would cover out-of-pocket health costs through the tax code. Federal money would be able to pay for abortions for people with government-paid insurance. Social Security benefits would increase. The minimum wage would be at least $12, maybe $15 an hour, and firms could unionize through card check rather than having to go through elections.
There would be an injection of $500 billion —.................
And to pay for it all, .......................
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“I think a lot of Clinton’s proposals are very much a step in the direction of a Nordic-style or social democratic welfare state,” Lane Kenworthy, a sociologist at the University of Arizona and author of Social Democratic America, says.
The result would leave the United States’ safety net far less generous than that of, say, Sweden. Hospitals aren’t nationalized. Parental leave is 12 weeks, not 480 days per couple. There isn’t a child allowance paid to all families, no strings attached.
But a world in which Clinton’s agenda passed is one in which it would be the stated responsibility of government to ensure everyone can afford health care, child care, and college. It would radically expand the boundaries of the American welfare state, probably for good.
This is not incrementalism.
On every dimension that counts, Clinton would make America more social democratic
Stockholm: An Alternative View Sunny Stockholm. Photo by Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images
There are a lot of structural differences between the US and Nordic social democracies. They tend to ..............................
But when it comes to what government actually does, there are four principal ways in which the US falls short of Nordic-style comprehensiveness:
The US does not have universal health coverage.
The US does not have universal pre-K or child care.
The US does not have paid family and medical leave.
The US does not provide adequate support to poor families.
Clinton does not get the US up to European standards on any of these four points. But on each one, she moves the ball forward in a meaningful way.........................
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