Nathan Newman wrote:
>Really, it's the same people putting resources into the single payer
>campaigns who would be the supply of funds from the incremental reforms.
>And there's just not that much.
-SEIU alone spent $36 million on John Kerry and the Dems; labor spent -$61 million all together, and they've already spent $21 million on -the 2006 election cycle. America Coming Together spent $76 million in -2004. There's money there - it's just a matter of what to spend it on.
ACT money included a ton of multi-billionaire money-- maybe Soros should be funding single payer but don't count his contributions agains the unions.
And the $100 million plus you are talking about on national elections is chump change when divided into fifty states.
Last year, the unions had to spend $23 million on just defeating the anti-union Prop 75 initiative. A full-scale single payer initiative in California, which would bring out far more opposition money, would probably take as much money as the unions spent in the whole country on the 2004 Presidential election. And there's no guarantee of victory given the 1994 massive defeat. Money can get you over certain humps, but a 50% percentage loss is a big hump to overcome.
Right now, the biggest hurdle to single payer is that it is essentially impossible to finance it through state legislation, since the GOP one-third of the legislature can veto any tax increase.
And we had a discussion about TABOR in Colorado-- if that bill spreads to other states, it will literally make single payer constitutionally IMPOSSIBLE in every state, since every legislature will be barred from raising taxes or spending above current levels.
So should the unions divert money from fighting TABOR across the country -- a hard but winnable fight -- to fighting for single payer? Cause every state that TABOR passes makes any single payer campaign that much more impossible.
Seriously, I haven't been pumping the report I wrote for PLAN hard on this list, but people should understand the full-scale war that's going on in state governments: http://www.progressivestates.org/content/71/governing-the-nation-from-the-statehouses
There are a whole slew of battles that the unions and others are fighting in the states. Many are defensive but some are offensive, including fair share campaigns and minimum wage drives. But slicing off the massive funds that would be necessary to mount a full-scale single payer ballot initiative in any number of states would cripple the rest of those efforts.
Part of the logic of incremental reforms is that you cut down on the number of enemies you fight in each battle, which lowers the resources progressives have to deploy to win. It's not a choice of spending $50 million on fair share or single payer-- it's really a choice in most decent sized states of spending $5 million -- if that -- on a potentially successful fair share campaign versus spending the $50 million needed to mount a single payer campaign that might still be buried by the hundreds of millions that the health care industry would spend to defeat it.
So if you want to convince people that there is so much money for single payer, rewrite the union budgets, subtract all the money from other campaigns, and write out a budget for a single payer one. And remember that all that national spending on politics involves get-out-the-vote drives that help candidates all the way down ticket, so you have to factor in running the single payer campaign with more GOP-run state legislatures, so increase the needed spending on the single payer campaign accordingly.
-- Nathan Newman