Bernie Sanders’ $25 trillion spending plan a peacetime record

The Democrat’s spending proposals would be surpassed in modern history only by the World War II military build-up.

Bernie Sanders, whose liberal call to action has propelled his long-shot presidential campaign, is proposing an array of programs that would amount to the largest peacetime expansion of government in modern US history.

In all, he backs at least $US18 trillion ($25.3 trillion) in new spending over a decade, ­according to a tally by The Wall Street Journal, a sum that even alarms Democrats. Senator Sanders sees the money as going to essential government services at a time of increasing strain on the middle class.

His agenda includes an estimated $US15 trillion for a government-run healthcare program that covers every American, plus large sums to rebuild roads and bridges, expand social security and make tuition free at public colleges.

To pay for it, Senator Sanders, a Vermont independent running for the Democratic nomination, has detailed tax increases that could bring in as much as $US6.5 trillion over 10 years,­ ­according to his staff.

A campaign aide said ­additional tax proposals would be offered to offset the cost of some, and possibly all, of his health program. A Democratic proposal for such a “single-payer” health plan, now in congress, would be funded in part through a new payroll tax on employers and workers, with the trade-off being that employers would no longer have to pay for or arrange workers’ insurance.

Campaign policy director Warren Gunnels said the programs would address an array of problems.

“Senator Sanders’s agenda does cost money,” he said. “If you look at the problems that are out there, it’s very reasonable.”

Calling himself a democratic socialist, Senator Sanders has long stood to the Left of the Democratic Party, and at first he was dismissed as little more than a liberal gadfly to the party’s frontrunner, Hillary Clinton. But he is ahead of, or tied with, the former secretary of state in the early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, and he has gained in national polling. He stands as her most serious challenger for the Democratic nomination. Senator Sanders has filled arenas with thousands of supporters, where he thunders an unabashedly liberal agenda to tackle economic inequality through more government services, higher taxes on the wealthy and new constraints on banks and corporations.

“One of the demands of my campaign is that we think big and not small,” he said in a recent speech to the Democratic Nat­ional Committee.

Enacting his program would be difficult, if not impossible, given that Republican control of the house appears secure for the foreseeable future. Some of his program would be too liberal for even some centrist Democrats. Still, his agenda articulates the goals of many liberals and is ­exerting a leftward pressure on the party’s 2016 field.

The Sanders program amounts to increasing total federal spending by about one-third — to a projected $US68 trillion or so over 10 years.

For years, government spending has equalled about 20 per cent of gross domestic product annually; his proposals would increase that to about 30 per cent in the first year. As a share of the economy, that would represent a bigger increase in government spending than the New Deal or Great Society and is surpassed in modern history only by the World War II military build-up.

The 2009 economic stimulus program was estimated at $US787 billion when it passed congress, and president George W. Bush’s 2001 tax cuts were estimated to cost the federal Treasury $1.35 trillion over 10 years.

Mrs Clinton has proposed programs that together would cost an estimated $US650bn over 10 years. Her college-affordability plan is estimated at $US350bn over 10 years, and an expected childcare proposal is estimated to cost at least $US200bn. Those are modest sums next to Senator Sanders’s agenda.

He proposes $US1 trillion to repair roads, bridges and airports. His college-affordability program would cost $US750bn over a decade. Smaller programs would provide youth jobs and prevent cuts to private pension plans. He would raise an additional $US1.2 trillion in social security taxes to increase benefits and pay those already promised for 50 years. That would bolster the program but fall short of the 75 years of solvency that is typically what policymakers aim to achieve.

Senator Sanders says he would propose an expansion of federal support for childcare and preschool, though he has not said how much those programs would cost, and they are not included in this total.

His most expensive proposal, by far, is his plan to extend Medicare, the federal health program for seniors, to all Americans.

Senator Sanders has yet to ­release a detailed plan, but a similar proposal in congress, sponsored by Democrat John Conyers, would require $US15 trillion in federal spending over 10 years, on top of existing federal health spending, according to an analysis by Gerald Friedman, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Mr Conyers’s office referred questions about the plan to Mr Friedman.

Mr Gunnels said the campaign had not worked out all details on his plan — for instance, his version might allow each state to run its own single-payer system. But he said the $US15 trillion figure was a fair estimate.

Single-payer healthcare has long been on the liberal wish list, but it has never had sufficient support in congress. Proponents say it is the best way to guarantee coverage to every American — something that the Affordable Care Act falls short of — and lower overall costs.

The Conyers plan, for instance, assumes significant savings by allowing the government to negotiate for prescription-drug prices, and it would rely on the new payroll taxes for funding.

Senator Sanders and some Democrats see the 2010 health law as a good first step, but they say more needs to be done. Many other Democrats, scarred from the fight over the ACA and seeing it as a major step forward, are ready to move on to other issues.

So far, the tax increases Senator Sanders has proposed are concentrated on Americans earning at least $US250,000 a year and on corporations. They include increases in the capital gains tax, the estate tax and personal income-tax rates for the wealthiest Americans. He also would impose a fee on financial transactions, with ­investment companies taxed on every stock they trade.

Taken together, these proposals are attractive to many Democrats, said Jared Bernstein, an economist at the liberal Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities, and would transform the US into an economy much more like those in Europe, with a significantly larger share of economic activity in government hands. “It’s not the model we employ (in the US), but it is a viable economic model,” he said. Still, he cautioned the revenue would have to come from the middle class as well as the wealthy.

Centrist Democrats think it is a bad idea. “We are not a country that has limitless resources. You need to tamp on the brakes somewhere, but he doesn’t,” said Jim Kessler, senior vice-president for policy at the Democratic think tank Third Way. “There’s no such thing as free college; somebody is going to be paying for it.”

Conservative economists say higher government spending would hurt long-term economic growth and that this much would stunt it altogether. “If we’re putting our resources into government, that’s a place where you’re not going to get productivity gains,” said Kevin Hassett, an American Enterprise Institute analyst who has advised many GOP presidential candidates but is unaffiliated this year. Mr Hassett said the tax hikes required to pay for the Sanders plan would be “massively catastrophic”.

Even many Democrats say such a plan would be politically infeasible. Austan Goolsbee, an economist at the University of Chicago and former adviser to President Barack Obama, recalled the difficulty winning congressional approval for the stimulus and health legislation at a time of large Democratic ­majorities in congress.

“Much, much more modest ­actions than those Bernie Sanders is describing were extremely heavy lifts, and many thought ­impossible,” he said. “Both of them came down to a single vote.”

The Wall Street Journal