I'd love to see more engagement with the notion that W. European countries are "poorer". Per capita GDP is not a super informative indicator for lots of obvious reasons, and given inequalities in the U.S., mean statistics are going to be skewed.
Note that even for countries that score "poorer" on this metric, the differences with the U.S. would be obliterated by things like college tuition and child care. Also, I'm not sure that the major differences here are even driven by taxes.
Finally, a thought experiment. Sure, maybe you (and I) would prefer to live in NYC over Vienna or Amsterdam. But would you rather live in a second-tier American city, or one randomly selected on the European continent? Oklahoma City vs. Stuttgart?
Child poverty rates typically use income as the only household revenue stream. US child pverty rates drop precipitously when benefits/transfers are counted. In that regard, they are propaganda.
Just to state it shows we won’t do it: “ The most straightforward way to do that is by broad taxation so people buy fewer goods and services, and then giving them these other social assistance services for free.”.
Part of the American lack of appetite for taxes is that, for the taxes we do pay, we provide very little in the way of public services to people who pay them, and have barely established that as something that actually can be done. We spend a ton of money blowing up the Middle East, and a ton of money on transfers to seniors, or to the poor. We spend very little, relatively speaking, on universal programs that provide immediate visible benefits to everyone, to the point where taxes are something that everyone feels are a net loss for them.
"We spend a ton of money blowing up the Middle East"
It's a tiny amount in the social program world. Redirecting the entire US defense budget yearly won't pay the extra cost of a universal health care program.
Absolutely. But it’s ~$2000 that provides zero “my life got better because of services paid for by taxes I paid”.
If the average American’s experience with taxes was “I paid $10,000 and received benefits I value at $12000”, it’s a lot easier to convince them that more taxes results in a positive exchange for them.
Didn't I just link you this yesterday? :) Again, the US spends more just on healthcare for the elderly than the entire military budget now, today- without adding in universality
"Let those who can’t tolerate lower-double-digit profit margins pack up shop entirely"
No one's going to carry water for the political fallout that will follow. People don't like it when they can't find a doctor and their local hospital closes. Especially if they think they like their health insurance.
People who are selling Medicare for All don't appreciate the giant, chaotic s***show that would ensue among providers as things worked themselves out, or not. It would be owned by the proponents of Medicare for All. That might be okay for the safe progressive districts, but moderates might get slaughtered.
"Lots of countries nationalized their health care systems before costs started exploding when it was cheap to do so. We didn’t, and we can’t go back in time and undo that."
If you want Americans to pay higher taxes, the first step is to stop making them fill out and file their own, redundant tax returns every year. Everybody starts their 1040 daydreaming about what they'll buy with their refund, which is inevitably smaller than anticipated. The more money you have, the easier it is to find and manipulate loopholes to get you out of paying altogether. Streamline the income and corporate tax codes to prevent corporations and billionaires from avoiding their obligations. So many parties are playing games; I don't feel like we have a real picture of what we should expect our tax revenue to be vs. what it really is.
This gets back to the REAL debate and trade-off on this. Rising above the populism at the bottom and looking at from what economists debate, the real trade-off here is: What should America of the future be? Should it move to the already stagnant model of Europe - overall closed borders, with broad generous safety nets, or stay the course with a dynamic generally open immigrant (especially poor immigrant) economy with stingy safety nets? After all, open immigration is antithetical to generous safety nets. I choose the latter. History has clearly shown its more dynamic and on net a stronger alleviator of global poverty, even if relative inequality increases. Great post Matty!
The US spends more just on healthcare for the elderly than the entire military budget. Add Medicare & Medicaid together, that's 70% more than the military budget. Add in Social Security and you get 3-3.5x what we spend on the military.... The government does transparently post its spending online you know :)
Many of these stats ignore the fact that the United States is mostly unique in the amount of LOW INCOME immigration that is let in. Most other industrialized countries either strongly limit immigration (Japan, Scandinavia, etc) or prefer highly educated immigrants (think Canada). The USA mostly stands alone in being a really rich country that lets in a large percentage of low income, low education immigrants (my ancestors). This is going to grossly skew those stats. It's not apples to apples.
I think what Poncho is arguing is that the US is unique compared to Australia and Canada in that we allow far more lower income immigrants (or "unskilled" immigrants). The trade-off that allows us to do that is that we offer a far weaker social safety net, so voters don't feel like immigration will become as much of a burden.*
But if you consider some place like Australia or Canada, which has a stronger social safety net, there's a political incentive to only allow in immigrants who are perceived to not use that social safety net, which means favoring skilled immigration over unskilled immigration.
*this of course doesn't prevent Fox News from making it seem like all immigrants are living off Welfare
Read my post more carefully. I'm actually arguing for MORE immigration. My argument from the first post is that the United States should stick with a more dynamic more immigration and low safety net model. I'm just able to think nuanced on this and able to see various trade offs. A difficult thing to do for many in today's politicized climate.
Conjecture (thinking out loud... ) after living through the last 6 years in the US, I think the best we are going to do is have decent welfare states at the state level, most commonly in economically productive blue states where the median blue voter also tends to vote in a manner that is beyond "what does this do for me"
Washington State, Vermont, maybe Colorado, and perhaps a few others fall into this model. CA, IL, others like it where much of the blue base seems to vote pretty much on pocketbook feel like more of a challenge - as here (CA) you get a lot of blue voters on cultural issues who go reactionary on economic ones.
Pritzger's approval rating continues to drop. It's probably below 40% right now. He spent $170M last time so his trust fund will keep him competitive but I wouldn't be surprised if IL flips back to R for governor.
During my time living in IL, 50% of governors spent time in prison after office (95-15) for corruption things. IL has... what we might call a special relationship with the state governor.
Example - General contractors in the city still budget a cash line item for building approvals. Was talking to a guy last month. The inspector didn't even meet him at the building. Just a coffee shop around the corner.
If we buy into an MMT view of inflation ("increasing consumption of real stuff causes inflation", more or less), it has a sort of weird set of consequences.
- Regressive tax cuts for the very, very rich _aren't_ as inflationary, even if they make deficits store, because those rich people won't increase their consumption in response to having more money.
- Taxing the very, very rich and using it to fund social programs (that solve social problems by directly helping poor people get goods and services that were out of reach before) is inflationary if there isn't surplus capacity in those sectors. (And today's economy doesn't exactly scream "surplus capacity.")
This is all super sad for progressives who would like to increase the social safety network, as it implies that _only_ tax cuts that reduce broad based consumption "pay for" the social programs from an inflationary perspective.
Which means...if the goal is to manage inflation (as opposed to manage the size of the debt) progressives are significantly more restricted than conservatives.
(To be clear, I consider the Trump tax cuts to be bad. They're not terribly inflationary, but they are a wealth transfer from all of our kids to a bunch of rich people, which seems somewhere between pointless and unnecessary and morally wrong.)
I need to dive a little deeper on the Trump tax cuts. My knee jerk was to dismiss them because ... Trump. MY seems to have come around to running the economy hot. It seems like the tax rate cut broke the employment trend line - in a positive way for labor. I know our restaurant services business really began to struggle hiring technicians around then and we've be ratcheting up hourly wages and benefits each year. I feel like I need to revisit with more openness.
I've always thought MY's point was about the fed keeping interest rates low is what caused the economy to run hotter. The tax cuts were peripheral to hotness.
Back in 2014, 2015, and 2016, my view was that there was plenty of slack left in the American labor market and it was a mistake to be talking about tighter fiscal and monetary policy. Donald Trump got elected, and then starting right away he implemented the following policy framework:
Taxes went down thanks to TCJA.
He boosted military spending, and in order to get that done in Congress, he also agreed to Democratic calls for higher domestic spending.
Spending on Social Security and Medicare kept rising due to population aging.
He spent a lot of time leaning on the Fed for low interest rates.
There are only three things that could possibly have resulted from that combination of policies.
I was right all along and more stimulus would lead to higher incomes.
The people who thought we were at full employment in 2016 were right and more stimulus would lead to inflation.
Trump’s policies made the economy more efficient in a way that allowed for non-inflationary growth.
Two is simply refuted by the facts. Three seems absurd to me, but that hypothesis is contrary to the immigration answer. The obviously correct answer is one: wage growth accelerated under Trump because he took office with the labor market still depressed, and he delivered massive and welcome fiscal stimulus while minimizing the monetary policy offset.
While option 3 sounds silly to me too, I think the real issue is that we don't have a proper base case. We have no empirical way to know what kind of growth and/or inflation we would have had without the tax cuts.
There have been two kind of strange macro-economic trends this century (at least, strange if you're used to the macro-economics of the 20th century):
- We've borrowed a ton of money, and yet interest rates remain low. My pet theory is there's a lot of capital that rich people have accumulated (globally) so the price of capital remains low due to oversupply.
- The economy has been under-performing/has surplus capacity/slack demand for a relatively long time.
I think this second thing has finally changed - we're clearly becoming supply constrained (not in terms of capital, but in terms of production). But the first thing seems to still be true.
Bottom line, voters want a lot of government services, but don't want to pay for them.
IMHO, deficits should only be used for, infrastructure (roads, bridges etc, things with a long life span) war (actual declared war by congress) and counter cyclical spending that is then paid back when the economy is good.
Aside from that, set your tax level and spending to match.
In our current polarized and balanced partisan system, it's amazing how the Hotelling/Downs model of political competition has failed to explain party behavior. The Republican party deserted the center of the political spectrum with wild abandon, promoting the crazies, making Trumpian ethno-nationalism and grievance politics their shibboleths. In a rational Downs world, the Democrat party would have jumped at the chance to fill the now-empty center and turn that into monstrous underpants profits. Instead, the mutating craziness of the Republicans gave the Democrats license to run as far to their extreme as they could, be that wokeism or Sanders/Warren fever dreams about building an ever more perfect welfare state.
So with a perfectly balanced Congress, we got Bernie Sanders' $6 trillion plan, any decrement from which was a "compromise."
It will be interesting to see what finally happens with the BBB (assuming a version reaches Biden's desk). Will it reflect somewhat chastened ambitions by settling on doing fewer things, but doing them well? Or will it maintain the fantasy by spreading the chips across the table by putting thin slices of everything in the bill on the assumption that the American people will never allow them to expire, but only to be increased?
Obviously, I'm in favor of the former. That said, if my preferred priority -- funding on climate change -- didn't make the final cut I would be deeply demoralized.
"The annual consumption expenditures of a Musk or a Bill Gates are dramatically higher than those of an average person, so taxing consumption across the board and using it to finance social services is highly progressive in its distributional consequences. "
On a percentage of income basis? I'd not be so sure about that, it sure would seems like someone who spends most of their income would end up paying a higher effective consumption tax rate than Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos.
"using it to finance social services is highly progressive"
Is that what progressive taxation means? If I spend relatively more of my income on consumption taxes than a wealthy person, that seems regressive, no matter what the total dollar amounts are doing.
"While the tax _itself_ may be regressive, using it to finance social services is _progressive_ (since the rich don't need those services much as a percentage of income"
"it’s bad to do politics from the premise that you are when you actually won’t."
I don't think this is true. Progressive politicians will keep getting elected from now to eternity promising M4A at every level of government, even if they know full well they cannot deliver.
IDK. I guess you'd need to attribute the Sanders / Warren M4A push vs. Biden's more moderate approach to his ultimate win. I think it was a major factor - if this 358 summary is correct.
The middle class pays for almost everything. But it clearly evident that the middle class does not want to pay for universal programs that cover the poorest. We have watched this play out many many times. Universal health care is a case in point. There isn't a union out there in the US that isn't in favor, ostensibly, of universal health care. They just add a few caveats. Which are that preferential access as dictated in their contracts must be preserved. Levels of services must be preserved. (as in extensive coverage for things like drugs and dental etc). And, of course, it can't cost their members more for equivalent health care coverage through taxation needed to make coverage universal. And you can't get there from here.
"The middle class pays for almost everything"? I think that's a tough argument to make. At the very least, what are you defining as "middle class"?
Most of income tax is paid by filers over $100k. Then there's the payroll and corporate taxes, but I would not say those target the middle class in particular. So I'm skeptical of this claim, unless you use a very broad definition of middle class...
I'd love to see more engagement with the notion that W. European countries are "poorer". Per capita GDP is not a super informative indicator for lots of obvious reasons, and given inequalities in the U.S., mean statistics are going to be skewed.
OECD median real disposable income: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/45ae3dae-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/45ae3dae-en
Note that even for countries that score "poorer" on this metric, the differences with the U.S. would be obliterated by things like college tuition and child care. Also, I'm not sure that the major differences here are even driven by taxes.
Finally, a thought experiment. Sure, maybe you (and I) would prefer to live in NYC over Vienna or Amsterdam. But would you rather live in a second-tier American city, or one randomly selected on the European continent? Oklahoma City vs. Stuttgart?
Weren't _you_ one of the ones saying that deficits didn't matter and we should just throw a big ice-cream party?
Child poverty rates typically use income as the only household revenue stream. US child pverty rates drop precipitously when benefits/transfers are counted. In that regard, they are propaganda.
Just to state it shows we won’t do it: “ The most straightforward way to do that is by broad taxation so people buy fewer goods and services, and then giving them these other social assistance services for free.”.
Part of the American lack of appetite for taxes is that, for the taxes we do pay, we provide very little in the way of public services to people who pay them, and have barely established that as something that actually can be done. We spend a ton of money blowing up the Middle East, and a ton of money on transfers to seniors, or to the poor. We spend very little, relatively speaking, on universal programs that provide immediate visible benefits to everyone, to the point where taxes are something that everyone feels are a net loss for them.
"We spend a ton of money blowing up the Middle East"
It's a tiny amount in the social program world. Redirecting the entire US defense budget yearly won't pay the extra cost of a universal health care program.
Absolutely. But it’s ~$2000 that provides zero “my life got better because of services paid for by taxes I paid”.
If the average American’s experience with taxes was “I paid $10,000 and received benefits I value at $12000”, it’s a lot easier to convince them that more taxes results in a positive exchange for them.
Didn't I just link you this yesterday? :) Again, the US spends more just on healthcare for the elderly than the entire military budget now, today- without adding in universality
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57170
"Let those who can’t tolerate lower-double-digit profit margins pack up shop entirely"
No one's going to carry water for the political fallout that will follow. People don't like it when they can't find a doctor and their local hospital closes. Especially if they think they like their health insurance.
Sanders' Medicare for all would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.75T/yr (apparently his own campaign estimate: https://www.bbc.com/news/51662741) to $3.2T/yr (https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/399715-new-study-ignites-debate-over-cost-of-medicare-for-all).
The defense budget for FY22 will be on the order of $0.75T/yr (https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/2638711/the-department-of-defense-releases-the-presidents-fiscal-year-2022-defense-budg/)
No, those are the additional costs. At least read the links after you ask people to google things for you? :(
People who are selling Medicare for All don't appreciate the giant, chaotic s***show that would ensue among providers as things worked themselves out, or not. It would be owned by the proponents of Medicare for All. That might be okay for the safe progressive districts, but moderates might get slaughtered.
"Lots of countries nationalized their health care systems before costs started exploding when it was cheap to do so. We didn’t, and we can’t go back in time and undo that."
If you want Americans to pay higher taxes, the first step is to stop making them fill out and file their own, redundant tax returns every year. Everybody starts their 1040 daydreaming about what they'll buy with their refund, which is inevitably smaller than anticipated. The more money you have, the easier it is to find and manipulate loopholes to get you out of paying altogether. Streamline the income and corporate tax codes to prevent corporations and billionaires from avoiding their obligations. So many parties are playing games; I don't feel like we have a real picture of what we should expect our tax revenue to be vs. what it really is.
I'm only sort of joking when I say that our tax code should be called the Intuit full employment policy.
This gets back to the REAL debate and trade-off on this. Rising above the populism at the bottom and looking at from what economists debate, the real trade-off here is: What should America of the future be? Should it move to the already stagnant model of Europe - overall closed borders, with broad generous safety nets, or stay the course with a dynamic generally open immigrant (especially poor immigrant) economy with stingy safety nets? After all, open immigration is antithetical to generous safety nets. I choose the latter. History has clearly shown its more dynamic and on net a stronger alleviator of global poverty, even if relative inequality increases. Great post Matty!
The US spends more just on healthcare for the elderly than the entire military budget. Add Medicare & Medicaid together, that's 70% more than the military budget. Add in Social Security and you get 3-3.5x what we spend on the military.... The government does transparently post its spending online you know :)
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57170
Many of these stats ignore the fact that the United States is mostly unique in the amount of LOW INCOME immigration that is let in. Most other industrialized countries either strongly limit immigration (Japan, Scandinavia, etc) or prefer highly educated immigrants (think Canada). The USA mostly stands alone in being a really rich country that lets in a large percentage of low income, low education immigrants (my ancestors). This is going to grossly skew those stats. It's not apples to apples.
I think what Poncho is arguing is that the US is unique compared to Australia and Canada in that we allow far more lower income immigrants (or "unskilled" immigrants). The trade-off that allows us to do that is that we offer a far weaker social safety net, so voters don't feel like immigration will become as much of a burden.*
But if you consider some place like Australia or Canada, which has a stronger social safety net, there's a political incentive to only allow in immigrants who are perceived to not use that social safety net, which means favoring skilled immigration over unskilled immigration.
*this of course doesn't prevent Fox News from making it seem like all immigrants are living off Welfare
Read my post more carefully. I'm actually arguing for MORE immigration. My argument from the first post is that the United States should stick with a more dynamic more immigration and low safety net model. I'm just able to think nuanced on this and able to see various trade offs. A difficult thing to do for many in today's politicized climate.
Conjecture (thinking out loud... ) after living through the last 6 years in the US, I think the best we are going to do is have decent welfare states at the state level, most commonly in economically productive blue states where the median blue voter also tends to vote in a manner that is beyond "what does this do for me"
Washington State, Vermont, maybe Colorado, and perhaps a few others fall into this model. CA, IL, others like it where much of the blue base seems to vote pretty much on pocketbook feel like more of a challenge - as here (CA) you get a lot of blue voters on cultural issues who go reactionary on economic ones.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/opinion/democrats-blue-states-legislation.html
Pritzger's approval rating continues to drop. It's probably below 40% right now. He spent $170M last time so his trust fund will keep him competitive but I wouldn't be surprised if IL flips back to R for governor.
During my time living in IL, 50% of governors spent time in prison after office (95-15) for corruption things. IL has... what we might call a special relationship with the state governor.
We are exceptional when it comes to corruption...
Example - General contractors in the city still budget a cash line item for building approvals. Was talking to a guy last month. The inspector didn't even meet him at the building. Just a coffee shop around the corner.
I remember some polls in July but with similar ~ 40% approval rates. But I’m more going off the exasperation of nearly everyone I know with him.
If we buy into an MMT view of inflation ("increasing consumption of real stuff causes inflation", more or less), it has a sort of weird set of consequences.
- Regressive tax cuts for the very, very rich _aren't_ as inflationary, even if they make deficits store, because those rich people won't increase their consumption in response to having more money.
- Taxing the very, very rich and using it to fund social programs (that solve social problems by directly helping poor people get goods and services that were out of reach before) is inflationary if there isn't surplus capacity in those sectors. (And today's economy doesn't exactly scream "surplus capacity.")
This is all super sad for progressives who would like to increase the social safety network, as it implies that _only_ tax cuts that reduce broad based consumption "pay for" the social programs from an inflationary perspective.
Which means...if the goal is to manage inflation (as opposed to manage the size of the debt) progressives are significantly more restricted than conservatives.
(To be clear, I consider the Trump tax cuts to be bad. They're not terribly inflationary, but they are a wealth transfer from all of our kids to a bunch of rich people, which seems somewhere between pointless and unnecessary and morally wrong.)
I need to dive a little deeper on the Trump tax cuts. My knee jerk was to dismiss them because ... Trump. MY seems to have come around to running the economy hot. It seems like the tax rate cut broke the employment trend line - in a positive way for labor. I know our restaurant services business really began to struggle hiring technicians around then and we've be ratcheting up hourly wages and benefits each year. I feel like I need to revisit with more openness.
I've always thought MY's point was about the fed keeping interest rates low is what caused the economy to run hotter. The tax cuts were peripheral to hotness.
I read the "run hot" as both fiscal stimulus and monetary policy.
Here's the post I was thinking about: https://www.slowboring.com/p/immigration-and-wages
Back in 2014, 2015, and 2016, my view was that there was plenty of slack left in the American labor market and it was a mistake to be talking about tighter fiscal and monetary policy. Donald Trump got elected, and then starting right away he implemented the following policy framework:
Taxes went down thanks to TCJA.
He boosted military spending, and in order to get that done in Congress, he also agreed to Democratic calls for higher domestic spending.
Spending on Social Security and Medicare kept rising due to population aging.
He spent a lot of time leaning on the Fed for low interest rates.
There are only three things that could possibly have resulted from that combination of policies.
I was right all along and more stimulus would lead to higher incomes.
The people who thought we were at full employment in 2016 were right and more stimulus would lead to inflation.
Trump’s policies made the economy more efficient in a way that allowed for non-inflationary growth.
Two is simply refuted by the facts. Three seems absurd to me, but that hypothesis is contrary to the immigration answer. The obviously correct answer is one: wage growth accelerated under Trump because he took office with the labor market still depressed, and he delivered massive and welcome fiscal stimulus while minimizing the monetary policy offset.
While option 3 sounds silly to me too, I think the real issue is that we don't have a proper base case. We have no empirical way to know what kind of growth and/or inflation we would have had without the tax cuts.
There have been two kind of strange macro-economic trends this century (at least, strange if you're used to the macro-economics of the 20th century):
- We've borrowed a ton of money, and yet interest rates remain low. My pet theory is there's a lot of capital that rich people have accumulated (globally) so the price of capital remains low due to oversupply.
- The economy has been under-performing/has surplus capacity/slack demand for a relatively long time.
I think this second thing has finally changed - we're clearly becoming supply constrained (not in terms of capital, but in terms of production). But the first thing seems to still be true.
Bottom line, voters want a lot of government services, but don't want to pay for them.
IMHO, deficits should only be used for, infrastructure (roads, bridges etc, things with a long life span) war (actual declared war by congress) and counter cyclical spending that is then paid back when the economy is good.
Aside from that, set your tax level and spending to match.
In our current polarized and balanced partisan system, it's amazing how the Hotelling/Downs model of political competition has failed to explain party behavior. The Republican party deserted the center of the political spectrum with wild abandon, promoting the crazies, making Trumpian ethno-nationalism and grievance politics their shibboleths. In a rational Downs world, the Democrat party would have jumped at the chance to fill the now-empty center and turn that into monstrous underpants profits. Instead, the mutating craziness of the Republicans gave the Democrats license to run as far to their extreme as they could, be that wokeism or Sanders/Warren fever dreams about building an ever more perfect welfare state.
So with a perfectly balanced Congress, we got Bernie Sanders' $6 trillion plan, any decrement from which was a "compromise."
It will be interesting to see what finally happens with the BBB (assuming a version reaches Biden's desk). Will it reflect somewhat chastened ambitions by settling on doing fewer things, but doing them well? Or will it maintain the fantasy by spreading the chips across the table by putting thin slices of everything in the bill on the assumption that the American people will never allow them to expire, but only to be increased?
Obviously, I'm in favor of the former. That said, if my preferred priority -- funding on climate change -- didn't make the final cut I would be deeply demoralized.
There’s an obvious, incremental, relatively cheap version of M4A: medicare for all under 18.
Arguably, this is even necessary for any complete child poverty program.
I agree. This is the most important change we need. Healthcare for children.
"The annual consumption expenditures of a Musk or a Bill Gates are dramatically higher than those of an average person, so taxing consumption across the board and using it to finance social services is highly progressive in its distributional consequences. "
On a percentage of income basis? I'd not be so sure about that, it sure would seems like someone who spends most of their income would end up paying a higher effective consumption tax rate than Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos.
Expenditures. On a dollar basis.
"using it to finance social services is highly progressive"
Is that what progressive taxation means? If I spend relatively more of my income on consumption taxes than a wealthy person, that seems regressive, no matter what the total dollar amounts are doing.
I was just answering your question: "On a percentage basis?"
Rich people spend more dollars. Generally they spend less on a percentage basis.
I interpreted this as:
"While the tax _itself_ may be regressive, using it to finance social services is _progressive_ (since the rich don't need those services much as a percentage of income"
But maybe I'm trying too hard to read into it.
"it’s bad to do politics from the premise that you are when you actually won’t."
I don't think this is true. Progressive politicians will keep getting elected from now to eternity promising M4A at every level of government, even if they know full well they cannot deliver.
IDK. I guess you'd need to attribute the Sanders / Warren M4A push vs. Biden's more moderate approach to his ultimate win. I think it was a major factor - if this 358 summary is correct.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/medicare-for-all-isnt-that-popular-even-among-democrats/
The middle class pays for almost everything. But it clearly evident that the middle class does not want to pay for universal programs that cover the poorest. We have watched this play out many many times. Universal health care is a case in point. There isn't a union out there in the US that isn't in favor, ostensibly, of universal health care. They just add a few caveats. Which are that preferential access as dictated in their contracts must be preserved. Levels of services must be preserved. (as in extensive coverage for things like drugs and dental etc). And, of course, it can't cost their members more for equivalent health care coverage through taxation needed to make coverage universal. And you can't get there from here.
"The middle class pays for almost everything"? I think that's a tough argument to make. At the very least, what are you defining as "middle class"?
Most of income tax is paid by filers over $100k. Then there's the payroll and corporate taxes, but I would not say those target the middle class in particular. So I'm skeptical of this claim, unless you use a very broad definition of middle class...
https://www.pgpf.org/sites/default/files/Understanding-the-budget-revenue-chart-1.jpg