Elizabeth Warren spent the first six months of her presidential campaign avoiding the big question at the heart of her Medicare-for-All proposal: Namely, how would she pay for it? While offering some lip-service about the middle class and some nonsense about “costs,” the Massachusetts Democrat refused to come clean about the big, central question: Will she raise taxes on working Americans to pay for this healthcare boondoggle or not?
Finally, last week, she released her plan. It is an enormous, $52 trillion behemoth that includes $20 trillion in brand new federal spending. In the plan, Warren outlines her blueprint for funding the plan, which includes a mixture of corporate taxes, taxes on the wealthy, and taxes on even small-time employers. But releasing this plan has forced Warren out of her previous, dodgy posture on middle class taxes and into the unenviable position of simply, flat-out lying about them.
“It doesn’t raise taxes on anybody but billionaires,” Warren said in Iowa this weekend. “And you know what, the billionaires can afford it, and I don’t call them middle class.”
“No one with under a billion dollars in net worth will get a tax hike?” asked a reporter.
“That’s right—not paying a penny more,” she said. “Understand this. This is no increase in taxes for anyone except billionaires. Period. Done.”
This is a bald-faced lie.
First of all, Warren has already promised to repeal the Trump tax cuts, which amounts to a middle class tax hike in and of itself.
Secondly, her own plan includes a middle class tax hike, even if it is cleverly hidden.
“Her plan would create a new tax on employers of almost $9 trillion that would come out of workers’ pockets, a new financial transaction tax that would impact investments held by middle class Americans, and a new capital gains tax that would affect far more people than she stated tonight,” a Biden campaign spokesman said in a statement.
Biden obviously has his own reasons for balking at Warren’s MFA plan, but in this case, he’s 100% correct. That $9 trillion payroll tax increase will almost certainly be passed along to middle class workers in the form of reduced wages. You can stand on a stage and say, well, that’s not the same as a tax on the middle class, but for Warren – who’s all about “costs” – that is an extremely deceptive stance to take.
Of course, for Cherokee Princess Elizabeth Warren, deception is just part of the package.
