Sanders’ Proposals Are The Largest Middle Class Tax-Cuts in US History

Bernie’s ticket to beating Joe Biden may lie in a very slight change in messaging

By Adrian Shipp

Sanders greets exuberant crowd in California

Bernie Sanders is a presidential candidate perhaps best known for his willingness to spend eye-popping sums of money on working and middle class people. Naturally, this has reaped scorn from many of his democratic rivals as well as from some in the media.

After all, it does not sound cheap to abolish student loan and medical debt while providing universal college and healthcare to all Americans within one administration. Indeed Sanders has been consistently, and sometimes unfairly, dogged by questions as to how he will pay for his most impressive ideas, and is often derided by more conservative democrats as being a candidate who’s economic agenda could never reach across the aisle in a general election. The consensus among more moderate democrats, at times lacking ideas of their own, is to dismiss Sanders’ proposals outright as “overly ambitious” and “too extreme.”

Despite this, Sanders seems to fundamentally reject these criticisms with the core of his being. He has argued for decades, mostly at the top of his lungs, that it is appalling, in his view, that the wealthiest nation on earth can always find a way to give another few billion dollars in tax cuts to the nation’s top income earners, spend trillions on unnecessary wars in foreign lands, and grant hundreds of billions of dollars every couple of years to an already bloated military. He has torn his hair out asking anyone who would listen as to why we can’t simply direct that money towards investing in average Americans.

The dearth of legitimate answers to his questions caused Sanders to run for office in 2016 and again this 2020 election cycle. Nowadays though, Americans across the nation are in tune with the Senator’s message.

Stating the Case

If it is true that the sum of Bernie’s proposals amount to the largest working and middle class tax cuts in US history, republican pundits on Fox News and conservative media will have to work overtime convincing their audiences that Bernie’s tax cuts are bad economics, when they have been telling those same viewers for decades that tax cuts are the silver bullet for economic prosperity. It is a well known political fact, especially among moderate democrats, that republicans are inclined to vote for a head of iceberg lettuce if they believe that it will cut taxes.

Perhaps this could be Bernie’s most formidable selling point in convincing moderate primary voters that he has a winning message to beat Donald Trump in a general election. But he will have to equate his platform with tax cuts for primary voters as they don’t seem to be making that connection themselves.

Having said that, allow me to flesh out the argument as to why his proposals amount to the largest working and middle class tax cuts in American history.

The American public owns 74% of its own national debt, and 30% of public debt is composed of medical and student loan debt.

It is often mentioned that Sanders’ policies cannot be taken seriously given the enormity of the national debt, which is currently sitting at $23 Trillion dollars. But what is unfortunately missing alongside this perspective is that 10% of the debt is composed of student loans. Further, another $3 Trillion is composed of crushing medical debt that upwards of 70 million Americans are struggling to pay. And this type of debt, it turns out, is one of the leading causes of both housing foreclosures and bankruptcies throughout the US.

That last statistic is the key to the ignition of Sanders’ debt forgiveness initiative. He understands that by forgiving Americans who are in medical and student loan debt, it will immediately decrease the national debt, which is itself somewhat of an issue, at the same time it will act as a tax cut to the millions of Americans now unable to afford a home, a car, or who lack discretionary income needed to spur the economy. Moody’s Analytics, one of the go-to economic analysts in the country, gives Bernie’s debt forgiveness program the green light.

Now although it’s true that debt forgiveness itself has been rated by top economic analysts as akin to a tax cut, Bernie’s largest working and middle class tax cut arrives as the 2nd stage of the saga — and that is making public colleges, universities, and trade schools tuition free. Further, he plans on abolishing healthcare deductibles, co-pays, and premiums to make way for his Medicare for All proposal. Sanders estimates this will allow Americans to pay just 10% of what they’re paying now for their health insurance.

Quite simply, Medicare for All can be phrased as a tax cut that saves the average American family at least $10,000 a year. Not to mention the compound gains that families will enjoy if they no longer need to assist their children with college tuition. And for those of you wondering whether these tax cuts will be completely offset by the tax hikes needed to pay for the programs themselves, fear not. Free college tuition costs less than half a percent of US GDP, that’s a mere $80 Billion a year and is paid for in its entirety by taxing Wall Street day trading and speculation. The working and middle class will pay zero in taxes for making public college tuition free.

For the 63 million Americans who are making less than $15 an hour, Sanders has a tax cut intended especially for them too. In this case, it will come in the form of raising the minimum wage to a living wage for the first time in approximately 40 years. To be fair, $15 an hour is still very hard for one person to live on, but for a couple working full time this will result in a substantial increase in their standard of living.

Quantitatively, 63 million people will see roughly a $2,000–16,000 dollar a year pay raise; increasing their purchasing power, or in other words, they’ll have gotten a tax cut. Of course wages will increase steadily and not all at once, allowing businesses time to adjust to the new environment. But let’s also be mindful of the fact that if a business cannot survive without paying its workers a living wage, that business frankly doesn’t deserve to exist. Bernie Sanders understands this more than any other candidate in that his policies are designed to prioritize regular people for a change instead of fixating on those who’d exploit them. This is in part why he plans to forgive the medical debts of those who are being exploited by the outrageous actions of the health insurance industry.

It is why he’s intent on forgiving the student loan debt from universities who’ve sold Americans on the financial benefits of going to college while at the same time increasing tuition costs by more than double over the last 30 years.

It has been a conscious choice by both businesses and the US government to deny giving workers their hard earned raises these last few decades. Instead corporations have pocketed those earnings for themselves. Bernie Sanders is running to end the culture of working and middle class exploitation in the US, and that is why instead of proposing the largest upper class tax cut in US history — he has devised a means to give average Americans that tax cut instead. You can call these #BerniesTaxCuts.

—

I am a political writer, activist, and physics student at Valencia University. Follow my Twitter @Doodelay where I also create social critiques and activist video essays.