No, Bernie Sanders isn't proposing to spend $18 trillion

On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal had a pretty jaw-dropping analysis tallying the costs of Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) proposals should he win the Democratic nomination then the White House. But is he really proposing $18 trillion in new spending over 10 years? It may surprise you that The Wall Street Journal isn't exactly playing it straight with a self-avowed democratic socialist candidate, but the price tag is, at the very least, misleading.

"While Sanders does want to spend significant amounts of money, almost all of it is on things we're already paying for," explains Paul Waldman at The Washington Post. "He just wants to change how we pay for them." A lot of that involves new taxes to replace costs borne by some smaller population — free college tuition, for example — which may or may not suit your policy preferences, Waldman notes, but "we shouldn't treat his proposals as though they're going to cost us $18 trillion on top of what we're already paying."

As a prime example, he looks at the biggest expense in The Journal's ledger: $15 trillion for a single-payer national health care system — a number that doesn't come from Sanders but a separate bill in Congress. To begin with, according to the federal government, the U.S. is already projected to spend $42 trillion on health care over the next 10 years. Waldman continues: "Would that be $15 trillion in new money we'd be spending? No, it would be money that we're already spending on health care, but now it would go through government."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

You can read the rest of Waldman's analysis at The Washington Post, but he ends with a good general note of caution: "As a general matter, when you see a headline with an unimaginably large number, chances are it's going to confuse you more than it will enlighten you."