(Bloomberg)
Thirty trillion dollars, even in U.S. budget terms, is a lot of money.
That’s the rough estimate from some analysts of the 10-year cost of Senator Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for All” plan, just one of many expensive social programs that some of the 21 Democrats seeking to replace President Donald Trump have proposed.
To pay for those programs, the candidates have focused on taxing the rich. But many of the plans they’ve put on the table would require across-the-board tax increases that would hit middle-earners as well as the wealthy, public policy analysts say. None more than Medicare For All.
Raising the more than $30 trillion needed to fund Sanders’s health plan over a decade would require doubling all personal and corporate income taxes or tripling payroll taxes, which are split between employees and employers, said Marc Goldwein, a senior vice president at the non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Read more