The tax and spend agenda of toptier Democratic candidates
It can be hard to keep up with the latest round of tax hikes and spending sprees proposed by the Democratic candidates for president. But it’s clear from looking at the agenda of top tier candidates that further bloating of the federal government is a top priority. All three of the toptier contenders now have, or are considering, big tax hike proposals. All should be rejected. No sooner did Joe Biden draw news for casting Warren as a taxhiker than stories are breaking about a likely about-face.
Biden doesn’t support the straight-up “wealth tax” pitched by Sens. Elizabeth Warren, DMassachusetts, and Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, but he’s feeling the heat as he slips in the polls. Now advisors are pushing out word he might favor slapping a levy on things as simple as selling stocks or bonds.
Sanders rolled out his bigticket plan in reaction to Warren’s increasing traction. His is bigger and bolder. He’d start with a 1 percent cut from earners over $32 million per year, with the take topping out at 8 percent for Americans making over $10 billion. That’s steeper and broader than Warren’s plan to take 2 percent at $50 million or above, until the $1 billion mark, where the tax would rise to 3 percent.
The big question of course is why. And while there’s some comfort in the idea that, for none of the Democrats, the answer is to punish people for having “too much” money, there’s more than a whiff of that feeling in the air even given the policy justifications Warren and Sanders advance.
Specifically, they both want to add sweeping new expenditures to the federal budget, trillions of dollars in costs that would have to be made up at least in part. The point of soaking the rich is to soften the economic cost of their social policies. Warren and Sanders are effective in pitching these policies because their base believes wealth on that level is fundamentally unjust — much like capitalism itself.
There is a small portion of voters and officials who think, like candidate Andrew Yang, that social spending will have to rise massively as technology destroys ever more jobs. But Warren’s and Sanders’ focus is on writing off private debt and subsidizing health care.
It’s nice they want to pay for these schemes, but they’re wrong to propose them in the first place.
— Los Angeles Daily News, MediaNews Group