An Analysis of Senator Sanders's Tax Proposals

In this brief, we estimate the revenue and distributional effects of Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign tax proposals. We show the revenue and distributional implications of tax proposals excluding those related to his Medicare for All plan. We also report the revenue estimates (but not the distributional effects) of the tax proposals dedicated to finance his Medicare for All plan. We plan to analyze the combined distributional and budgetary effects of Sanders’s Medicare for All package in a subsequent release. Sanders’s non–health related spending proposals also could have important distributional and economic effects. However, we have not estimated the costs or the distributional effects of those initiatives. Our modeling assumptions are based on information released by the Sanders campaign. We analyze the plan as proposed as of February 28, 2020.

Sanders would increase income and payroll taxes on high-income individuals and increase income taxes on corporations. His proposals (excluding those associated with Medicare for All) would increase federal revenues by $9.9 trillion over the next decade. These proposals most affect the highest-income households, who would see substantially larger tax increases than other income groups, both in dollar amounts and as a share of their income. The provisions dedicated to financing Medicare for All would increase federal revenues by an additional $13.4 trillion.