We were startled but not surprised when an email from the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget hit our inbox.
Turns out that even with the soak-the-rich tax hikes that presidential candidate Bernie Sanders envisions, his health proposal still would, over a decade, fall short by $3 trillion to $14 trillion. Projections depend on variables that would only terrify taxpayers — the same taxpayers whose federal debt just topped $19 trillion. CRFB says Sanders’ health, Social Security and family leave tax plans would goose the top federal tax rate to about 77 percent. And, “When state and local taxes are included, the top rate rises to an average of about 85 percent (nationwide).”
Sanders at least acknowledges that his “Medicare for All” would force huge tax increases. Even though, as CRFB gently says in projecting those multitrillion-dollar shortfalls, “the numbers at the moment don’t appear to add up.”
Nor do the numbers add up for most of the candidates’ plans. To borrow an apt headline from a Des Moines Register editorial on Iowa Caucuses Eve: “Candidates offer deficit of ideas on debt.” This even though, half a year earlier, 94 percent of likely Republican caucus-goers, and 74 percent of Democrats, had told Register pollsters they wanted candidates to “spend a lot of time talking about” America’s crushing debt.
Republicans Chris Christie and Jeb Bush merit modest praise for their plans to curb the growth of Social Security and Medicare spending. Yet many of the GOP candidates’ plans would inflate federal deficits — none more egregiously than Donald Trump’s. And Democrat Hillary Clinton repeatedly told the Register’s editorial board that the threat of a Social Security crisis is exaggerated. From September: “I am not going to concede that we have this big emergency.”
Clinton sets a high bar for conceding emergencies. Social Security’s trustees project exhaustion of their disability insurance fund late this year. They predict “depletion of total trust fund reserves” — the fund that pays retirement benefits — in 2034. Last … dollar … out. Paying seniors solely out of payroll taxes would slash their benefits by one-fourth.
At least Barack Obama, when he won the presidency, gave lip service to reforming and rescuing the big entitlement programs, a prime way to slow runaway debt. Then, of course, his first annual deficits each topped $1 trillion; only with chutzpah do his partisans now boast that his once astronomical deficits have since declined to the merely astonishing.
But Join us in this quest. We can elect officials who honestly admit that all the benefits they promise do create costs, and honestly tell you how we will pay.