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More lib brilliance in governance.
Posted on: January 11, 2019 at 15:59:13 CT
GA Tiger MU
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Reality Check: AOC's 'Tax the Rich' Scheme Would Pay For...One Percent of the Left's Proposed Spending
When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez floated her idea (quasi-embraced by Sen. Kamala Harris) to raise the top marginal income tax rate to 70 percent on the richest Americans in order to pay for her "Green New Deal," I wrote that governmental confiscation of 70 cents on any dollar earned in a free society is unfair and immoral. But would such a scheme at least make significant headway toward boosting federal revenues, commensurate with the orgy of new spending the Democratic Left is advocating? Budget analyst Brian Riedl crunches the numbers for the Daily Beast and details the predictable answer to that question:
When confronted with how to pay for their extraordinarily expensive policy agenda, the answer of liberal lawmakers, analysts, and advocates is nearly always the same: tax the rich. How to close the $12 trillion baseline budget deficit over the next decade (a figure that already assumes the 2017 tax cuts expire)? Tax the rich. How to pay for the $42 trillion Democratic socialist agenda that includes single-payer health care ($32 trillion), a federal jobs guarantee ($6.8 trillion), student loan forgiveness ($1.4 trillion), free public college ($800 billion), and infrastructure ($1 trillion)? Easy. Tax the rich. How to offset Sen. Kamala Harris’ proposed $3 trillion tax cut for middle- and lower-income families? Tax the rich. For those keeping score, that is $57 trillion to be financed mainly through tax hikes on the rich, even after ending the 2017 tax cuts...The “just tax the rich” rhetoric remains empty because the numbers simply do not add up. Wealthy families and corporations are not a bottomless ATM available to finance a socialist utopia.
He notes that the US already has one of the most progressive tax systems in the industrialized world, with wealthy Americans paying more than their "fair share," contra lefty conventional wisdom.
What sort of impact would that increased revenue make? "$50 billion a year would fund one percent of the Democratic Socialist agenda," Riedl told me on Benson & Harf last night. What would happen if AOC and her allies focused exclusively on single-payer healthcare? That massive and disruptive program would cost taxpayers at least $3.2 trillion, and almost certainly more, in new funding every single year. If they applied every cent of the $50 billion in (questionable) revenues from these hypothetical tax increases to the single-payer tab, it would cover less than two percent of the annual bill.
When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez floated her idea (quasi-embraced by Sen. Kamala Harris) to raise the top marginal income tax rate to 70 percent on the richest Americans in order to pay for her "Green New Deal," I wrote that governmental confiscation of 70 cents on any dollar earned in a free society is unfair and immoral. But would such a scheme at least make significant headway toward boosting federal revenues, commensurate with the orgy of new spending the Democratic Left is advocating? Budget analyst Brian Riedl crunches the numbers for the Daily Beast and details the predictable answer to that question:
When confronted with how to pay for their extraordinarily expensive policy agenda, the answer of liberal lawmakers, analysts, and advocates is nearly always the same: tax the rich. How to close the $12 trillion baseline budget deficit over the next decade (a figure that already assumes the 2017 tax cuts expire)? Tax the rich. How to pay for the $42 trillion Democratic socialist agenda that includes single-payer health care ($32 trillion), a federal jobs guarantee ($6.8 trillion), student loan forgiveness ($1.4 trillion), free public college ($800 billion), and infrastructure ($1 trillion)? Easy. Tax the rich. How to offset Sen. Kamala Harris’ proposed $3 trillion tax cut for middle- and lower-income families? Tax the rich. For those keeping score, that is $57 trillion to be financed mainly through tax hikes on the rich, even after ending the 2017 tax cuts...The “just tax the rich” rhetoric remains empty because the numbers simply do not add up. Wealthy families and corporations are not a bottomless ATM available to finance a socialist utopia.
He notes that the US already has one of the most progressive tax systems in the industrialized world, with wealthy Americans paying more than their "fair share," contra lefty conventional wisdom.
What sort of impact would that increased revenue make? "$50 billion a year would fund one percent of the Democratic Socialist agenda," Riedl told me on Benson & Harf last night. What would happen if AOC and her allies focused exclusively on single-payer healthcare? That massive and disruptive program would cost taxpayers at least $3.2 trillion, and almost certainly more, in new funding every single year. If they applied every cent of the $50 billion in (questionable) revenues from these hypothetical tax increases to the single-payer tab, it would cover less than two percent of the annual bill.
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More lib brilliance in governance. - GA Tiger MU - 1/11 15:59:13
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