Sen. Kamala Harris has already distinguished herself as the most dishonest and cynical Democrat seeking the presidency in 2020, but she may have outdone herself with her latest claim that the $32 trillion healthcare plan that she supports would not require any middle-class tax increases.
In the past, I’ve detailed why she’s being disingenuous in denying that the Sen. Bernie Sanders plan she endorses would effectively get rid of private insurance. But the middle-class tax claim is just absurd.
Harris made the claim during an interview with CNN. After claiming she supported the Sanders bill that would put all Americans on a single free healthcare plan, she said, “I’m not in support of middle class families paying more taxes for it.”
She claimed that the plan would be financed by Wall Street and unspecified taxes on financial services, before stating, “The other part of it is to understand that this is about an investment, which will reap a great return on the investment. We can’t only look at this issue in terms of cost without thinking of benefit.”
Now, it’s worth saying, Sanders has made a similar point himself — but he has done so after admitting that his plan would require higher taxes on the middle class. He has argued that it would nonetheless be worth it because now middle-class Americans would no longer have to pay premiums or out-of-pocket expenses for healthcare.
But that is not the argument she is ultimately making. Instead, she said, “I’m not prepared to engage in a middle-class tax hike.”
Let’s do some math. The liberal Urban Institute found that the 2016 campaign version of the Sanders plan would have cost $32 trillion over 10 years. This was about the same as the analysis from the libertarian Mercatus Center of the Sanders Senate bill that Harris endorsed.
Over the next decade, the federal government is expected to collect $23.34 trillion in individual income taxes and $3.76 trillion in corporate income taxes, according to Congressional Budget Office projections. If both individual income and corporate taxes were doubled, Harris would still need to come up with an additional $5 trillion. Taking middle-class tax cuts off of the table would make it impossible to finance what Harris is proposing: Putting 330 million people onto a single government plan that offers extensive medical, dental, vision, prescription drug, and long-term care coverage without premiums, co-pays, or deductibles.
You don’t need to just take it from me, either.
The liberal Economic Policy Institute recently released a model tax and budget plan that included many items on the liberal wish list. It noted, “Almost all other spending in our budget could be accommodated with revenue raised strictly from the top 2-3%. But a spending commitment as large as single-payer healthcare requires more broad-based tax changes on top of these explicitly progressive taxes.”
Even a white paper on financing options that Sanders released accompanying the bill that Harris sponsored proposes a new 4% payroll tax on income above $29,000 for a family of four; and a 7.5% payroll tax on employers, which will inevitably be passed on to workers.
As I’ve written in the past, it’s possible that Harris’ serial dishonesty will work for her, as it has for many other politicians before her. But if she ends up as the front-runner, she is also opening herself up to a damaging moment in a future debate akin to Hillary Clinton’s drivers’ licenses for illegal immigrants implosion, which came when several opponents had enough with her calculating answers.
