The Sixty Trillion Dollar Man

[highplainsdem]

From Ron Brownstein at The Atlantic:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/02/sanderss-pricey-tax-and-spending-plans/607105/

Bernie Sanders faced more pointed attacks last night over his potential vulnerabilities than he ever has at a debate. But the blustery and disorderly session once again failed to fully explore what could be the Vermont senator’s greatest general-election weakness: the massive size and scope of his spending and tax proposals, which, depending on the estimate, would cost $50 trillion to $60 trillion over the next 10 years. That would roughly double the size of the federal government, an unprecedented increase outside of wartime.

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“You would need even more revenue than he is proposing to fully offset those costs,” says Jared Bernstein, an economist and senior fellow at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who is generally sympathetic to Sanders’s agenda. “It is not realistic to believe you can get all those revenues from the top 1, 5, or 10 percent [of households]. You would have to go down further than that. The rest of it has to come from a broader base of taxpayers or it has to go on the deficit.”

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At either number, the Sanders agenda would roughly double the $52 trillion that the Congressional Budget Office projects the federal government will spend over the next decade on all existing programs, from defense to Social Security. Even at a lower, $50 trillion estimate, the Sanders plan would increase federal spending as a share of the economy by about 20 percentage points, according to calculations that Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and former chief economist at the World Bank, shared with me earlier this winter. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the largest 20th-century peacetime spending program, increased federal expenditures as a share of GDP by eight percentage points, according to Summers’s calculations.

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If Sanders’s tax plans were to raise as much money as he claims, they would increase federal taxes as a share of GDP by as much as 11 percentage points. “I think it is fair to say that the tax increase—assuming it is as big as Senator Sanders projects—is about as large as the [13-point] tax increases enacted to finance World War II,” as measured as a share of GDP, says Leonard Burman, a former senior Treasury Department tax official under Clinton and an institute fellow at the Tax Policy Center, which is operated by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. “It is more than five times as large as any tax increase enacted since. And even if it falls short of the campaign’s projections, it would be the largest peacetime tax increase in American history.”

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The piece goes on to point out that Sanders' plan for how to raise money to pay for his proposals falls $25 trillion short, and since it already taxes the rich so much, he'll be left with only two options -- borrowing the money or taxing the midddle class.

And it goes over, again, the suggestion that this is an "aspirational" plan, meant more to show the direction Sanders wants society to go than to actually be enacted.

But good luck convincing voters they won't have to worry about drastically higher taxes if they vote for Sanders, since his incredibly high-priced plans are only aspirational.

As Buttigieg said, what Sanders' plans and costs and revenue estimates "really add up to" is "four more years of Donald Trump."

[highplainsdem]

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