Whenever Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or any of the other progressive Democrats in the spotlight these days floats one of their mega-expensive, bloated programs meant to turn the United States into a socialist utopia, they always follow up by promising that middle class taxpayers won’t get stuck with the bill. No, no, these schemes – The Green New Deal, universal healthcare, free college, etc. – will either be paid for by tax hikes on the so-called 1% or they will pay for themselves in such a way that any tax hikes you and your family DO incur will be balanced out by what you save in other areas.
Unfortunately, the realities of economics say that this isn’t so.
In a new report, David Burton of the Heritage Foundation goes through the trouble of putting the claims of Warren and Sanders to the test. He runs the numbers, in other words. He found that it would be “arithmetically impossible” for these politicians to pay for these exorbitantly expensive programs by only raising taxes on those who make more than $200,000 a year. To come to this conclusion, Burton took three of the most popular progressive policies – the GND, Medicare-for-all, and government-funded college tuition – and came up with a total price tag of $48 to $92 trillion over a ten-year period.
What he found was that even if the federal government took every dime Americans made over $200,000 (and every dime of profit from every corporation in the country), it would raise approximately $34.6 trillion.
“Even using lower cost estimates, confiscating every dollar earned by every taxpayer with incomes of $200,000 or more would only pay for about half of the progressive agenda,” Burton noted in his report. “And that figure is based on the false assumption that people would continue to work, save, and invest when subject to a 100 percent flat tax. The reality is that progressive promises can only be funded by increasing taxes on the middle class from three to 10 times their current level or, for a limited time, by dramatic and unsustainable increases in federal borrowing.”
The fact is, Sanders, Warren, Ocasio-Cortez, and any other Democrat running on a class-warfare type of platform, is playing the American people for suckers. By fudging the numbers and making frequent scornful remarks about the “millionaires and billionaires” who are supposedly flying around on their private jets while the rest of us struggle to put food on the table, they create a sense of “us vs. them” that is supposed to shield the truth: That they are lying through their teeth. The middle class and the working class WILL see enormous tax hikes if these Democrats ever get their way.
And once those socialist programs are in place, it will take a miracle to ever get rid of them.
