How Bernie Sanders Plans to Pay for Everything
Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has spent the past several months pledging to write off student debt, provide health care for all, and prevent climate change. But the pundits and fellow candidate candidates spent the same amount of time asking Sanders how he was going to pay for all this. This week, Sanders’ campaign outlined a budget to fund his political plans .
Here’s a rundown of what Sanders wants to do and how he’ll pay for it.
Make College Free & Cancel Student Loans
Plan:
- Provide free trade, two- and four-year higher education through the Colleges Act for All.
- Writing off $ 1.6 trillion in outstanding student debt.
- The marginal interest rate on student loans in the future will be 1.88%.
How much it will cost: $ 2.2 trillion
How he pays for it: Introduce a speculation tax on Wall Street that will raise $ 2.4 trillion over 10 years. This tax will be 0.5% tax on transactions in stocks, 0.1% on transactions in bonds and 0.005% commission on transactions in derivatives.
Provide Medicare for Everyone
Plan:
- Create a National Health Insurance Program to provide every American with free health care, including dental, hearing, vision, and long-term care.
- Limit individual spending on prescription drugs to $ 200 per year.
What it will cost: $ 47.5 trillion. The first $ 30 trillion will come from recurring federal, state and local government spending, while $ 17.5 trillion will come from new revenues.
How will he pay for it:
There are several options for increasing this income. Here are just a few of them:
- Create a 4 percent premium based on employee income, excluding the first $ 29,000 of income for a family of four.
- Introduce 7.5% insurance premiums paid by employers, tax exemption for the first million dollars in payroll to protect small businesses.
- Raising the maximum income tax rate to 52% for income over $ 10 million.
- Replacing the cap on state and local tax deductions with a total cap of $ 50,000 per married couple for all detailed deductions.
- Taxation of capital gains at the same rates as payroll income
- Utilizing $ 350 billion of extraordinary wealth tax money.
Expand Social Security
Plan:
- Make sure Social Security can pay benefits to eligible Americans for 52 years.
- Expand benefits to include a $ 1,300 per year increase for seniors living on $ 16,000 or less.
How Much It Will Cost: $ 2.9 Trillion Min. (Current Social Security Surplus)
How he pays for it : Apply Social Security tax on income over $ 250,000. (Right now, there is an income cap of about $ 138,000. Sanders’ plan is that earnings from that up to $ 250,000 will not be taxed.)
Implement a New Green Deal
Plan:
- Move the energy system away from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.
- Create 20 million energy jobs.
How much it will cost: $ 16.3 trillion
How will he pay for it:
- $ 3.085 trillion: Removal of subsidies for the fossil fuel industry.
- $ 6.4 trillion: Generating income from wholesale energy sales from regional electricity sales offices (mainly the state sells hydroelectricity).
- $ 1.215 trillion: Defense spending cuts.
- $ 2.3 trillion: Income taxes collected on these 20 million new jobs.
- $ 1.31 Trillion: Savings in federal and state government spending through all new jobs.
- $ 2 trillion: Tax collection from large corporations.
Introduce wealth tax
Many of Sanders’ plans, including the Medicare for All plan mentioned above, are dependent on the imposition of an “extraordinary” wealth tax, which would look like this:
- Set a tax of 1% on any clean property in excess of $ 16 million for a single person ($ 32 million for married couples).
- Increase the tax rate from there based on net worth, with a maximum of 8% for a net worth of over $ 5 billion for a single person ($ 10 billion for a married couple).
According to the election campaign, the introduction of an emergency wealth tax will raise $ 4.35 trillion over 10 years. This wealth tax will go towards the following programs:
Affordable Housing
Plan:
- Build nearly 10 million affordable housing units.
- Introduce a national rental control standard.
- Exclude waiting lists for Section 8 Accommodation Vouchers.
- Renovation of existing and construction of new public housing.
How much it will cost: $ 2.5 trillion over 10 years
Medical debt
Plan:
- Cancel overdue medical debt.
- Eliminate the fundraising requirements for filing a bankruptcy filing and make it easier to pay off medical debt in the event of bankruptcy.
- Remove medical debt from credit reports.
How much it will cost: $ 81 billion
Universal babysitting
Plan:
- Supervise children under 3 years of age for at least 10 hours a day.
- Establish a minimum wage for kindergarten workers.
- Provide free full-day preparatory kindergarten attendance starting at age 3.
- Provide free meals for every child in preschool or preschool.
How much it will cost: $ 1.5 trillion over 10 years