Steven Rattner Blasts Elizabeth Warren's Socialist Policies

Elizabeth Warren

Steven Rattner is nowhere close to being a supporter of free markets.

During the Obama administration, he was counselor to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithber.

He also served, in 2009, as lead adviser to the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry. He was the one responsible for the crony bailout of General Motors and Chrysler with a total government (i.e., taxpayer) funding of $82 billion.

But even Rattner, a friend of government involved private-public sector deals, can't stomach how extreme Elizabeth Warren says she would take things in the direction of government control if she becomes president.

Rattner writes in a New York Times op-ed, titled: The Warren Way Is the Wrong Way:

Senator Elizabeth Warren has unveiled her vision for how to pay for “Medicare for all” — a daunting mountain of new taxes and fees.

Thanks for providing us, Ms. Warren, with yet more evidence that a Warren presidency is a terrifying prospect, one brought closer by your surge in the polls.

Left to her own devices, she would extend the reach and weight of the federal government far further into the economy than anything even President Franklin Roosevelt imagined, effectively abandoning the limited-government model that has mostly served us well.

Ms. Warren may call herself a capitalist, but her panoply of minutely detailed plans suggests otherwise...

To date, public attention has understandably focused on Ms. Warren’s support for Medicare for all as well as her long list of other new social programs like the Green New Deal, free college tuition, universal child care, student debt forgiveness and on and on.

Her armada of changes would be highly disruptive (for example, to the 156 million Americans who have private health insurance) and expensive (at least $23 trillion over the next decade). To her credit, she proposes to pay for all that spending — but with a mountain of new taxes that would increase federal revenues by more than 50 percent. Talk about expansionary government.

Less discussed is her intention to impose vast new regulatory burdens and to revamp the way business functions, which could have an even more negative effect on our economy...

Then there’s her Department of Economic Development, charged with “creating and defending good American jobs.” That may sound O.K., but in reality it’s an unsavory stew of failed notions of industrial policy (the government trying to pick winners) and protectionism (almost certainly in flagrant violation of World Trade Organization rules).

She even proposes new committees to allow consumers, rural areas and specific regions of the country to delay trade deals that worry them. Hard to imagine any trade pact that wouldn’t worry some interest group...

And to add to a trade war, Ms. Warren wants to start a currency war by trying to push the value of our currency down, which would inevitably lead to similar, zero-sum actions by other countries..

Government has plenty to do without mucking up the essence of our free enterprise system. 

This Rattner rant is a good sign. It is an indication that the establishment is not backing Warren and her extreme socialist thinking.

All of the Democratic presidential candidates are bad news, but none as bad as Warren. I don't mind the establishment working to take Warren out as a contender.

-RW