Posted on 03/29/2016 10:20:33 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
I spent some time Monday playing around with the excellent tax calculator that Alvin Chang and the Tax Policy Center built. The tool lets you estimate what the tax plans released by Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and Ted Cruz would mean for your tax bill — but, more than that, it offers a window into the fundamental ways in which the four candidates are very, very different from one another.
Let's take a family making $100,000 — a hefty income, to be sure, but a useful one for illustration. Trump would give you a $6,040 tax cut. Cruz would give you a $3,290 tax cut. Clinton would raise your taxes by $70. Sanders would raise your taxes by $14,130. But that's the beginning, not the end, of the story.
The calculator: How much does each candidate's tax plan affect you?
What you see here is that Clinton is the candidate of something close to the status quo — she raises taxes on the rich by a bit, and cuts taxes on the poor by a bit, but the change is modest in both directions. The federal government under a Clinton administration would look much like it does under the Obama administration. The other candidates, however, are not candidates of the status quo.
Cruz and Trump are offering tax cuts of extraordinary size — and they haven't said a word about how they'll pay for them. The Tax Policy Center estimates Cruz's tax cut at more than $8 trillion and Trump's at more than $9 trillion. Trump's tax cut, amazingly, is equal to 45 percent of projected income tax revenue in the United States.
In a sense, both GOP candidates are gaming the calculator: They've proposed tremendous cuts, but without knowing who will pay for those cuts, it's hard to know who will truly be helped and who will be badly hurt. But if you assume those cuts would be paid for, then you have to assume fundamental change to the structure of the American state. (And if you assume they won't be paid for, then you have to assume everything Republicans have said about the dangers of deficits in recent years was a lie.)
To pay for his tax cut, Cruz would have to do something on the order of eliminating Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program, all federal education spending (including Pell Grants, K-12 subsidies, Head Start, etc.), all federal spending on justice (including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the federal court system, etc.), all international spending (close all embassies, zero out aid to Israel), all federal transportation systems, and all veterans spending. To pay for his tax cut, Trump would have to do everything Cruz did and then find another trillion dollars in savings.
So the three options, when evaluating Crux and Trump, is to believe they are lying about their tax plans, lying about their commitment to fiscal responsibility, or planning changes to the federal government that dwarf anything we've seen in memory. This is why the calculator is so useful — the radicalism of their agendas is obscured by the absence of details but revealed by the size of their tax cuts.
Sanders, meanwhile, proposes to raise taxes by more than Trump proposes to cut them. But it's wrong, I think, to view Sanders's plan as primarily a change to America's tax code. The huge tax increases are a byproduct of Sanders's plans to nationalize major sectors of American life.
In that way, Sanders is doing what Cruz and Trump are doing in reverse. Their tax plans reveal that they are dissolving massive swaths of the state into tax cuts; Sanders's plans speak to the fact that he's absorbing massive swaths of the private sector into the state. Unlike Cruz and Trump, of course, Sanders has been specific about his ideas — the biggest driver here by far is Sanders's single-payer health care plan, which would cost more than $10 trillion but which would be replacing an equal (and, if the plan succeeded in saving money, greater) amount being spent on private health care.
Sanders would also make huge investments in subsidizing public college tuition, upgrading America's infrastructure, expanding Social Security, and more. (Head here for a helpful list of Sanders's proposed programs and their pay-fors.)
As a rule, government spending is more progressive than the tax code that funds it. And so Cruz and Trump's tax and spending cuts would end up a regressive redistribution of money and services, while Sanders's tax and spending increases would be a sharply progressive redistribution of money.
But the price tags here clarify the reality of this election. The Republicans are down to two candidates who have a radically different vision of what the government should do; the Democrats are down to two candidates, one of whom has a radically different of vision of what the government should do, and another of whom offers broad continuity with what the government is doing now.
Sanders would raise your taxes by $14,130...
on 100k?!
in lots of cities that’s not a hefty income.
unless dems want to lose control of congress for a thousand years, he wouldn’t come close to getting this.
what a jerk!!
for a guy who’s never held a real job.
As a former government employee, and I don’t mean the military, that is solely dependent on the government for everything you have and eat. It is not hard to understand why you are afraid of change. But I assure you, it is going to be okay.
The concept of "paying for tax cuts" is profoundly illogical. Allowing taxpayers to keep more of their money requires no expenditure. What libs really mean to ask is this: how will the lost revenue be recovered? Essentially, they're frightened to death of the gov't cutting entitlement programs for the welfare leech class. Aka, the Democrat base.
Are you referring to me?
The article is somewhat lacking in the understanding of economics and Trump’s proposals. Healthcare for instance-——http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=231191
Do you realize that the site owner is also a disabled veteran? And many others here, as well? But feel free to attack us in the interest of your demigod.
It’s NEVER ok when the government controls every aspect of your life, or even a good part of it. For society in general, it’s also a motivation destroyer which in a short period of time devastates a nation. History shows that, and so does current experience of those who are totally dependant upon the government for their survival.
“Cruz and Trump are offering tax cuts of extraordinary size — and they haven’t said a word about how they’ll pay for them.”
What a bizzarro statement very telling of the world we live in. It would seem more appropriate if the author would have said something like “Bernie is going to raise taxes on citizens by $14,130 without saying a word about how those people can afford to have that much money comfiscated from them”.
I don’t receive a dime that isn’t a result of my military service. So what the **** are you talking about?
What’s additionally funny about Sander’s healthcare proposal is that the people of Vermont passed in 2012 a single-payer plan for the state that Sanders readily endorsed. Vermont scrapped the plan late last year as the cost was deemed excessively outrageous. In order for it to work they need monies from taxpayers of other states........sharing the pain.
From a related thread …
$765,645,000,000: FY2016 Taxes Set Record Through December; $5,107 Per Worker; Feds Still Run…
Four times the amount shown in thread title indicates an over $3 trillion annual federal budget. And we will probably never hear misguided Hillary Clinton mention the following major constitutional problem with an annual federal government budget that big.
Note that a previous generation of state sovereignty-respecting justices had clarified that Congress is prohibited from appropriating taxes in the name of state power issues, essentially any issue that Congress cannot justify under its constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers. This is evidenced by the excerpt below.
"Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
In fact, based on the Court’s statement above, here is a rough estimate of how much taxpayers should be paying Congress annually to perform its Section 8-limited power duties.
Given that the plurality of clauses in Section 8 deal with defense, and given that the Department of Defense budget for 2015 was $500+ billion, I will generously round up the $500+ billion figure to $1 trillion (but probably much less) as the annual price tag of the federal government to the taxpayers.
In other words, the corrupt media, including Obama guard dog Fx Noise, should not be reporting multi-trillion dollar annual federal budgets without mentioning the Supreme Court’s clarification of Congress’s limited power to appropriate taxes in budget discussions.
Remember in November!
When patriots elect Trump, or whatever conservative they elect, they need to also elect a new, state sovereignty-respecting Congress that will work within its Section 8-limited powers to support the new president, including putting a stop to unconstitutional federal taxes.
Also consider that such a Congress would probably be willing to fire state sovereignty-ignoring activist justices.
My “pension” was a sad joke that I still wouldn’t be receiving until I hit 65. I took the money that I contributed back with no interest or anything else. Not all “government employees” make big money.
Tax cuts do not have to be ‘paid for’ taxes are not the property of the government. Taxes are organized legal theft.
Lord, I hope a lot of people go to this Vox calculator during the generals. Ezra might have to take it down!
Clinton just wants the power and has made a deal with the elites to get it.
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