Sen. Elizabeth Warren finally released a plan that she says will pay for her $34 trillion Medicare for All plan without raising taxes on the middle class. The only problem is that she's more than $13 trillion short — and features a host of tax hikes that will indeed fall on middle-class American taxpayers. Warren's abject failure to come up with enough money to fund her plan despite reaching into middle-class Americans' pockets is a stark reminder that these kinds of government takeovers represent an enormous threat to American taxpayers everywhere.
Warren's plan to fund Medicare for All, which she estimates to cost just $20.5 trillion (credible studies that suggest it will be more like $34 trillion), includes policies that only the most credulous of analysts would score as “not raising taxes on the middle class.” One such policy is what's called an “employee head tax” that, while technically paid by employers, would essentially add a flat fee on the cost to employ every single worker, no matter their salary. This means that the cost to employ low-wage workers would increase far more relative to their salary than high-wage executives. It wouldn't increase middle-class Americans' tax bill on April 15, but it would certainly be felt throughout the year.
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