With a growing number of Americans appearing willing to jump on the socialism-by-any-other-name bandwagon, JPMorgan CIO Michael Cembalest digs into the details of Bernie Sanders' tax proposals. As the following chart sums up so extremely, his plan would certainly represent a unique and unprecedented event in the history of US taxation, if it were enacted.

There is no official Congressional Budget Office scoring of his plan at this stage, but the Tax Foundation assessed his proposed taxes on individuals and corporations and came up with a figure of $13.5 trillion of additional tax revenue over ten years. Large numbers are inherently large, so how big is that? Amortizing the amount over 10 years, these proposals are estimated to raise incremental revenue of around 7% of GDP per year.

The chart puts this number into context by looking at major tax legislation of the last 75 years. The revenue raised by each bill is shown on the Y axis, alongside prevailing Federal tax receipts (individual taxes, corporate taxes and excise taxes) before passage of each bill on the X axis. Even if Tax Foundation estimates are too high, Sanders’ proposals are in a league of their own . The only bill that comes close was passed in 1942, except there were two big differences: the US was in the middle of WWII, and at the time, total Federal tax receipts were much lower. Even tax increases in the 1.5%-2.0% of GDP range have not been seen since the Korean War, when tax receipts were also lower than they are today.

All the debates around prior post-war tax legislation seem rather small now, don’t they?

Democratic Socialism has a high cost, and in all likelihood, it would probably not just be borne by billionaires and millionaires, campaign rhetoric notwithstanding.

Perhaps this is why 4 prior Chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers for Presidents Obama and Clinton wrote an open letter to Sanders just this morning citing “extreme claims” by the Sanders campaign about the Senator’s economic plan, which “cannot be supported by the economic evidence” and which “runs against our party’s best traditions of evidence-based policy making and undermines our reputation as the party of responsible arithmetic.”