BERNIE SANDERS’S TAX INCREASES

“The tax increases that would be entailed by [Bernie] Sanders’s programs, including his Medicare-for-all plan, have recently been shown to be enormous, requiring, according to some estimates, a top marginal tax rate of as much as 84 percent. Sanders argues that the trade-offs he proposes for expanded Medicare—taxes but no deductibles or copayments, not even for dental care and optometry—would save people thousands of dollars a year. In some cases they surely would. But as the health care expert Harold Pollack has pointed out, Sanders’s plan would in effect require a doubling of federal income tax collections.*4 The attack ads would doubtless say something like: ‘Bernie Sanders wants to double your taxes, limit your choice of doctor, and turn America into Cuba.’ Times may have changed this country, but have they changed enough that 51 percent of voters will vote against such claims?”

FOOTNOTE: See Harold Pollack, “Here’s Why Creating Single-Payer Health Care in America Is So Hard,” Vox, January 16, 2016

Michael Tomasky, “The Dangerous Election,” in the New York Review, March 24, 2016, pp: 4-6.