I found two very good articles about the Republican and Democrat plans for taxing and spending. On the one hand, there’s an article about the effects of the Trump tax cuts, posted at the Washington Times. On the other hand, there’s an article posted at the radically leftist Vox, about the cost of Democrat party spending plans. I wonder which one is better for you and your family?

First, let’s look at the effects of the Trump tax cuts:

Almost immediately, numerous employers — including Boeing, AT&T, FedEx, CVS, and others — began offering bonuses to their employees. Nearly 200 companies, including Walmart, announced wage hikes due to the 2017 tax cut. Still others enjoyed higher contributions to their retirement plans.

The benefits soon went beyond that, however. The tax cut contributed to the strong economy we’ve been enjoying, leading many businesses to hire more and more workers. The United States added more than 2.6 million new jobs in the year following the passage of the tax cut — nearly a 25 percent increase from the previous year.

Unemployment is way down, with jobless claims at their lowest since 1969, thanks in large part to the tax cut.

[…]The Heritage Foundation used IRS data to produce a special report last year that shows how widespread the tax benefits truly are.

They found that in 2018 taxpayers would save an average of $1,400. Even better, married couples with two children would save more than twice that: $2,917.

So, that sounds pretty good if you’re a taxpayer. You got to keep more of the money you earned, and spend it on the things you wanted for yourself and your loved ones. If that money had gone to government, then government employees would have taken half for their own salaries and benefits, and then the rest might have been spent in a wasteful way by someone who never earned it.

By the way, you might think that taking less money from the people who earn it would cause tax revenues to go down. But that’s not the case. Whenever you allow job creators and workers to keep more of what they earn, they work harder and take more risks developing better products and services. This naturally results in more revenue to the government from increased economic activity. In Feburary of 2018, after the tax cuts were in effect a whole year, federal revenues were $1.4 billion HIGHER than the previous year.

But let’s see what the Democrats can do for the taxpayer, by looking at this article in the far-left Vox.

It says:

Sanders has proposed a Social Security expansion, including higher cost-of-living adjustments and higher minimum benefit levels, that the liberal Tax Policy Center estimates will cost $188 billion over the next decade.

The Tax Policy Center also scores the Sanders “free college” proposal at $807 billion over the next decade. (Note that free college benefits students from wealthy families and those whose tuition is currently affordable.)

Next, the center estimates that Sanders’s proposal of up to 12 weeks of paid family leave for new parents and for people with serious health conditions would cost another $270 billion.

Those costs, however, pale beside the cost of replacing private insurance, including copayments, with a Medicare-for-all plan. The liberal Urban Institute estimates that Sanders’s single-payer health plan would add $32 trillion in federal costs over the decade.

[…]Ocasio-Cortez and Senate Democrats also want to guarantee a job for anyone who wants one, at $15 per hour plus benefits. The liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, commissioned a report by outside scholars Darrick Hamilton, William Darity, and Mark Paul that estimates the cost of a more modest proposal along these lines (with a lower wage, for example). It suggested the cost would be $56,000 apiece for 9.7 million enrollees, for a total of $6.8 trillion over the next decade.

[…]Finally, Senate Democrats have promised $1 trillion for new infrastructure, and House Democrats are rallying around legislation to pay off all $1.4 trillion in student loan debt — both of which the far left generally supports. I will exclude vague promises such as universal pre-K and expanded special education funding.

Total cost: $42.5 trillion in new proposals over the next decade, on top of the $12.4 trillion baseline deficit.

OK, that does sound like a lot of money, but the rich are just sitting on trillions and trillions of dollars that they aren’t even using, right? So the total cost of all this spending is only $42.5 trillion of new spending and $12.4 trillion of existing spending, for  a total of about $55 trillion dollars over the next 10 years. I’m sure that if we just raised taxes by 5% on the rich, we could easily raise 10 times that amount, right?

Not quite.

In 2011, the Tax Foundation explained that even if you taxed ALL THE INCOME from all the people who make $200,000 or more, you would only raise $1.53 trillion dollars:

So taking half of the yearly income from every person making between one and ten million dollars would only decrease the nation’s debt by 1%. Even taking every last penny from every individual making more than $10 million per year would only reduce the nation’s deficit by 12 percent and the debt by 2 percent. There’s simply not enough wealth in the community of the rich to erase this country’s problems by waving some magic tax wand.

Finally, to put everything in perspective, think about what would need to be done to erase the federal deficit this year: After everyone making more than $200,000/year has paid taxes, the IRS would need to take every single penny of disposable income they have left. Such an act would raise approximately $1.53 trillion. It may be economically ruinous, but at least this proposal would actually solve the problem.

Now, if I were a rich person making over $200,000 a year, and someone came along and told me they would take all of it, I would not continue to work. And I doubt they would either. But taking all this money from “the rich” would just barely cover the BASELINE deficit of $12.4 trillion over the next 10 years. It would not cover the new $42.5 trillion of Democrat spending plans.

Think about that. What that means is that can’t pay for their spending even if they take every penny from “the rich”. Do you know what that means? It means they’re going to have to take money from YOU, the ordinary middle class American taxpayer. Something to keep in mind.