Want a 10 percent pay cut? Well, you could ask your boss to cut your pay. If you’d rather not ask your boss, you have another option, reports the Tax Foundation. Bernie Sanders will get it done for you, and for us all!
The neutral Tax Foundation added its analysis of the Bernie Sanders tax plan to those it already has performed on the proposals of Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum and Donald Trump.
Key Findings:
- Senator Sanders (I-VT) would enact a number of policies that would raise payroll taxes and individual income taxes, especially on high-income households.
- Senator Sanders’s plan would raise tax revenue by $13.6 trillion over the next decade on a static basis. However, the plan would end up collecting $9.8 trillion over the next decade when accounting for decreased economic output in the long run.
- A majority of the revenue raised by the Sanders plan would come from a new 6.2 percent employer-side payroll tax, a new 2.2 percent broad-based income tax, and the elimination of tax expenditures relating to healthcare.
- According to the Tax Foundation’s Taxes and Growth Model, the plan would significantly increase marginal tax rates and the cost of capital, which would lead to 9.5 percent lower GDP over the long term.
- On a static basis, the plan would lead to 10.56 percent lower after-tax income for all taxpayers and 17.91 percent lower after-tax income for the top 1 percent. When accounting for reduced GDP, after-tax incomes of all taxpayers would fall by at least 12.84 percent.
Sen. Sanders, by promising a plan that will shrink the American economy (along with workers’ paychecks) by about 10 percent, has lived up to Sir Winston Churchill’s dictum in a speech in the House of Commons (October 22, 1945):
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
Feel the Bern?
Ralph Benko, internationally published weekly columnist, co-author of The 21st Century Gold Standard, lead co-editor of the Gerald Malsbary translation from Latin to English of Copernicus’s Essay on Money, is American Principles Project’s Senior Advisor, Economics.
