It’s Not Progressive To Fund Medicare for All by Agreeing to a Bloated Military
NPP Pressroom
In These Times
Sarah Lazare
05/15/2019
Progressives are eager to find funding for bold, popular programs like a Green New Deal and Medicare for All, and are chafing at the constraints of the Budget Control Act of 2011, a compromise by the Obama administration: Republicans agreed to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for limits on discretionary defense and non-defense spending (which, in practice, has led to far more constraints on the latter). Lindsay Koshgarian, program director for the Institute for Policy Studies’ National Priorities Project, a budget-focused nonprofit, puts it this way, “Every couple of years [the act has] meant a deal with more Pentagon funding and a little more funding for everything else.”