Blog

WASHINGTON— After repeated calls for Bernie Sanders to put pen to paper on the costs for his extraordinary campaign pledges, his magic math simply doesn’t add up.

Ahead of tonight’s Democratic Debate in Charleston, South Carolina, Sen. Bernie Sanders has published a new document where he claims to fully cover the costs of his gargantuan expansions of federal programs. But an independent review by the Progressive Policy Institute finds that these numbers can’t be taken at face value.

“Sanders wants voters to reward him for proposing a left-wing wishlist of spending increases and take him at his word that taxes on billionaires will pay for it, but the math just doesn’t add up,” said Ben Ritz, Director of PPI’s Center for Funding America’s Future. “Sanders has already embraced every tax increase on wealthy Americans imaginable and still comes up several trillions of dollars short.”

Key highlights from Ritz’s analysis include:

• Sanders has now proposed over $53 trillion of new spending over the next 10 years – an amount that would roughly double the size of the federal government.
• The document Sanders published last night, along with others released earlier in his campaign, claim to collectively raise less than $43 trillion in new revenue – meaning that he’s at least $10 trillion short. But these revenue projections are well outside the mainstream of what independent analysts estimate.
• More realistically, if Congress were to adopt every single revenue option Sanders has offered for consideration, it would fall nearly $25 trillion short of his proposed spending increases over the next decade – leaving a gap nearly equal to the total value of all goods and services produced by the U.S. economy in one year.

“At a time when President Trump has plunged the nation into trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, the worst thing Democrats could do is let him off the hook by nominating a candidate who is promising them the same kind of voodoo economics on a far greater scale,” Ritz said.

As Democrats debate tonight in South Carolina, will the moderators finally press Senator Sanders on whether middle-class and young Americans will be willing to accept the burden of financing a revolution through dramatically higher taxes or a doubling of government debt?

For a complete analysis, read the full article on Forbes.