Just for entertainment value, here’s Karl Rove commenting on the debate:
The NY Times just published an article on how much money you can get by taxing the top 1%:
It’s interesting how you can make bad look good with an enthusiastic tone. “If we can raise taxes on the rich to 40%, we can pay for Sanders’ college plan!” Sure you can, if you don’t care about the deficit or the coming entitlement crunch or any other part of Sanders’ agenda.
So, it’s your contention that the Americans who make half the money in the country won’t actually have enough money to increase government revenues by an amount less than 25% of GDP? Really?
Or we might have to tax the top 5% or even the top 10% instead of the top 1%? And you think this is a deal-killer?
Here’s a quick question: Do you think GDP goes up or goes down when the government raises taxes and spending by the same amount?
Um, OK, and what are the GOP plans again? Something about giving tax breaks to “job creators” that don’t require them to actually, y’know, create jobs?
We know what GOP tax policies have done to revenues. We can see what they’ve done to the economy. Anyone advocating for the GOP’s laissez-faire nonsense after 2009 is ridiculous.
That’s a pretty good article, by the way.
Look at that. If the top 0.1% own 20% of household wealth, what do you suppose the top 1% hold?
That’s easy - 200%
…or maybe the top 20% or even the top 40%?
The only way to pay for a large welfare state of the type Sanders envisions is to pretty much double the overall tax burden on everyone.
If by “everyone” you mean “everyone who has the money to begin with”. Or you could, you know, actually bring the super-rich up to the same tax burden as the middle class.
So that piece is already done. This Pew article references a Treasury Department analysis with showing the average tax rate. Those tax rates show the total federal tax burden is actually progressive all the way from -8.7% for the lowest decile up to 37.9% for the top tenth of a percent.
So now who do we tax to raise federal revenues by around 80%?
If that was possible why haven’t the Danes or Swedes or French done it? No one has this generous welfare state where the middle class enjoy America-level tax burdens while the rich pay 40% or more.
Everyone pays about 50-60% in these countries. There is no other way the math works out.
Democrats by and large are failing to “feel the Bern”: Clinton Has Strong Support Among Democrats
Where is that supposed 37.9% coming from? That’s slightly below the highest income tax bracket, but most people at the top end have little or no earned income. Capital gains taxes cap out at 20%, payroll taxes are negligible at the high end, and what else is left?
Isn’t interest income taxed as regular income? But we probably do need a “Buffett Rule” tax, or just call it AMT reform, where if you make over a certain amount gross(say, $500K) from all sources, that you pay 30% of gross. But since most rich politicians don’t even pay close to that amount it will probably never pass.
Even though the details of his plans are shaky he still says alot of things democrats and even some others really like. So he just might win.
I also like that he actually got to Clinton’s right on bipartisanship. Clinton said she’s proud to have made enemies of Republicans, Sanders said he wouldn’t call fellow Americans enemies.
How is that to the ‘right’?
It’s not really, but the perception is that the more ideological you are, the more partisan you are too, which isn’t really true of course, but from a positioning standpoint it will make Sanders seem a little more moderate than Clinton in a key way.
Treasury included all federal revenue including corporate taxes and estate taxes (which is wealth based pushing things up compared to income) in their analysis. Treasury’s average tax rates are higher than CBO analysis here for slightly different time frames. CBO still shows distinctly progressive average tax rates all the way up. The rich really are paying more to the Federal government both as a total and by rate than those making less.
States and local burdens rely heavily on regressive taxes Maybe that’s what drove the ideas behind your initial claim. That does have some affect on the total tax burdens people facce. Here’s a far more partisan source making a case for the rich not being taxed enough from Citizens for Tax Justice(.pdf). The total tax burden is still generally progressive although flatter. It really flattens out for the top 20%. A slight dip does show up in the top decile. The top 1% pay just touch less than the 2-10 percentile folks and the same rate as the second decile. That’s hard to define as middle class though. Pew uses a definition of 67-200% of median income in a look by state here. US median income rounding up is $52k. The top end of that falls at at just over the average of the second decile from the top. That group has the same total tax burden as the top 1%. Most of that range falls in the part of the distribution where average tax rates are less than the top 1%. The richest pay a little less than the rest of the upper class. Most of the middle class pays less. That doesn’t make for good talking points though. “Think of the suffering lower upper class” doesn’t evoke populist anger for the 90% without that problem.
You can try to define the middle class more broadly to push up into the bottom half of the top decile. That makes the claim about the middle class paying more than the top 1% partially true. Even then it’s a weak claim since it’s only a small minority of the so called middle class that it applies to. Mostly the claim is still false. The other problem with that broader definition is that to make the numbers work for Sanders’ proposed new spending that chunk of the “middle class” is likely seeing a hefty tax hike. In which case the new taxes aren’t only on the rich. They can’t be both middle class and rich/upper class depending on which makes his talking points more convenient. Well it’s politics so candidates of every ideology try silliness like that all the time. It’s still silliness.
Well, that dip in the effective tax rate paid for the top percentile is a loophole to be closed, hyperbole aside.
I agree as a Republican. I generally support progressive rates if not wildly different rates. The “Fucking Norquist Pledge” aside, I don’t see a route to keeping current federal deficit under control without some solid tax raises. Hitting those with money to fix it probably corrects the small issue I see in the overall tax burdern.
I do have a strong preference for fixing the top 20% almost flat tax burden by addressing the regressive state taxes. Since not even every Democratically controlled state manages to avoid soaking the poor… I’m not holding my breath on that.