Sanders made the comments during his campaign rally in New Brunswick in the state of New Jersey on Sunday. The main expense: Sanders’ health care plan.
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“It’s exciting”, said Assemblyman John Wisniewski, the New Jersey chairman of Sanders’ campaign. Sanders touched on each of his hallmark campaign points: campaign finance reform, wall street taxes and making public colleges and universities free.
Sanders’ will face a hard battle in New Jersey, where Clinton is said to be favorite, a factor which has not stopped the senator from Vermont from delivering surprising blows in other state primaries and reducing the former secretary of state’s lead over him.
One likely effect of the plan, not modeled by the analysis, would be that a President Sanders could be forced to raise taxes even more to pay for considerably richer social benefits.
The Sanders campaign has estimated that his proposed healthcare system would save more than $6 trillion over the next 10 years, compared with the current system. On average, people in the top 5 percent would pay $130,275 more in taxes and receive $19,281 more in benefits. His new “single-payer” government-run health care system would incorporated all private insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, and President Barack Obama’s health coverage expansion into a new program. Even for the next richest 20th of the population, the new benefits would exceed their increased taxes by about $1,700 on average, or 0.9 percent of their average income. Everyone would be covered. That’s because the estimated costs of the spending proposals (an additional $33.3 trillion in federal outlays) would far outpace the new revenue his tax plan would bring in.
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Economists would generally view Sanders’s proposals “as basically hurting the economy, potentially significantly”, Leonard Burman, director of the Tax Policy Center, told reporters.
