Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has spent the past several months promising to cancel student debt, provide Medicare for everyone, and stave off climate change. But pundits and fellow candidates have spent just as much time asking Sanders how he’s going to pay for all that. This week, the Sanders campaign outlined a budget to fund his policy plans.
Here’s a quick rundown of what Sanders wants to do, along with how he’ll pay for it.
Make college free and cancel student loans
The plan:
- Provide tuition-free trade, two-year, and four-year higher education through the College for All Act.
- Cancel $1.6 trillion in outstanding student debt.
- Cap student loan interest rates going forward at 1.88%.
What it would cost: $2.2 trillion
How he’ll pay for it: Impose a Wall Street speculation tax that will raise $2.4 trillion over 10 years. That tax would be 0.5% tax on stock trades, 0.1% on bond trades, and .005% fee on derivative trades.
Provide Medicare for All
The plan:
- Create a national health insurance program to give every American free healthcare, to include dental, hearing, vision, and long-term care.
- Cap individual prescription drug spending at $200 per year.
What it would cost: $47.5 trillion. The first $30 trillion would come from current federal, state and local government spending, and $17.5 trillion would come from new revenue.
How he’ll pay for it:
There are several options outlined for raising that revenue. Here are just a few of them:
- Creating a 4 percent income-based premium paid by employees, exempting the first $29,000 in income for a family of four.
- Imposing a 7.5 percent income-based premium paid by employers, exempting the first $1 million in payroll to protect small businesses.
- Raising the top marginal income tax rate to 52% on income over $10 million.
- Replacing the cap on the state and local tax deduction with an overall dollar cap of $50,000 for a married couple on all itemized deductions.
- Taxing capital gains at the same rates as income from wages
- Using $350 billion of the amount raised from the tax on extreme wealth
Expand Social Security
The plan:
- Make sure Social Security can pay benefits to eligible Americans for 52 years.
- Expand benefits, including a $1,300 per-year increase for seniors living on $16,000 or less.
What it would cost: At least $2.9 trillion (the current Social Security surplus)
How he’ll pay for it: Apply the social security tax to income over $250,000. (Right now, there’s an income cap of about $138,000. Under Sanders’ plan, earned income between that and $250,000 would be exempt.)
Implement the Green New Deal
The plan:
- Move the energy system away from fossil fuel toward renewable energy.
- Create 20 million energy jobs.
What it would cost: $16.3 trillion
How he’ll pay for it:
- $3.085 trillion: Eliminate subsidies for the fossil fuel industry.
- $6.4 trillion: Gain revenue from the wholesale of energy produced by the regional Power Marketing Administrations (basically, the government sells hydropower).
- $1.215 trillion: Reduce defense spending.
- $2.3 trillion: Collect income tax from those 20 million new jobs.
- $1.31 trillion: Save on federal and state government assistance spending because of all the new jobs.
- $2 trillion: Collect taxes from large corporations.
Impose a wealth tax
A lot of Sanders’ plans, including the Medicare for All plan mentioned above, hinge on instituting a tax on “extreme” wealth that would look like this:
- Impose a 1% tax on any net worth over $16 million for a single person ($32 million for married couples).
- Increase the tax rate from there based on net worth, with the highest bracket being 8% for net worth over $5 billion for a single person ($10 billion for a married couple).
The extreme wealth tax would raise $4.35 trillion over 10 years, according to the campaign. That wealth tax would go toward the following programs:
Affordable housing
The plan:
- Build nearly 10 million affordable housing units.
- Implement a national rent control standard.
- Eliminate waitlists for section-8 housing vouchers.
- Repair existing and build new public housing.
What it will cost: $2.5 trillion over 10 years
Medical debt
The plan:
- Cancel past-due medical debt.
- Eliminate means testing requirements to file for bankruptcy and make it easier to discharge medical debt in bankruptcy.
- Remove medical debt from credit reports.
What it will cost: $81 billion
Universal childcare
The plan:
- Provide childcare for kids through age 3 for at least 10 hours a day.
- Set minimum wages for childcare workers.
- Provide free full-day pre-kindergarten starting at age 3.
- Provide free meals to every child in child care or pre-k.
What it will cost: $1.5 trillion over 10 years