Bernie Sanders Wants $15 Trillion In Tax Increases

Knowing that Americans will be outraged at such an unprecedented tax increase, the Sanders campaign is desperately trying to assuage the public that the extra revenue generated from these tax hikes will offset the cost of them. But try as they might, they cannot minimize the fact that what their candidate is proposing is a $15 trillion tax increase across the board:

‘Bernie Sanders is very open about raising taxes on everybody, with the argument that people at all income levels are going to be benefiting from the new spending programs that he’s proposing,’ Burman said.

The group, which has issued a string of independent assessments of the presidential contenders’ tax plans, said yesterday that Clinton’s plan would raise taxes by $1 trillion. The Clinton campaign told the group she plans a tax cut for middle- and low-income families later in the campaign, though TPC said it didn’t have details.

Sanders wants tax hikes to pay for a raft of new government benefits, including health care for everyone, free college tuition, paid family and medical leave, and increased infrastructure spending.

There is a risk that Sanders’s tax increases won’t be enough to cover all the additional spending, worsening the government’s already dire long-term budget outlook, the TPC said, though it didn’t examine that question in detail.

Nor did it examine whether, for some taxpayers, the value of Sanders’s new government benefits would outstrip the cost of his tax increases.

‘We do not account for the effects of the new government programs on income,’ said Burman. ‘We focused on the tax side, and we’re not really experts on the spending component.’

It is unfair and misleading to exclude those benefits, said Warren Gunnels, Sanders’s policy director.

‘Bernie’s tax plan is the mechanism for achieving universal health care, creating jobs and a secure retirement,’ said Gunnels. ‘Without estimating the benefits the American people would gain under these initiatives, the Tax Policy Center’s report is inaccurate and one-sided.’

The report underscores how Sanders is a rare presidential candidate in either party who is willing to spell out in detail how he’d finance his legislative agenda. By contrast, the Republican candidates have proposed tax-reform plans that would cost trillions, saying they would be financed by thus-far unspecified spending cuts and economic growth.

In all, Sanders has proposed more than two dozen separate tax increases, the report shows, and in every major class of taxes.

He’s called for multiple increases in the income taxes paid by individual Americans that would push the top rate to 54 percent, from the current 39.6 percent.”

Source: Politico