Jim Geraghty of National Review highlights Democratic presidential contender Elizabeth Warren’s obfuscation about the tax impacts of her policy proposals.
If you want a Scandinavian-style welfare state, you’ll need a Scandinavian-style tax code to pay for it. Bernie Sanders is willing to admit as much. …
… Elizabeth Warren was not as forthcoming. Pressed on the subject multiple times by the moderators and other candidates, Warren refused to affirm that her Medicare for All plan — which will cost approximately $32 trillion over ten years, per an Urban Institute study — would necessarily raise taxes on middle-income earners. …
… [S]he certainly implied that she would raise middle-class taxes — she says she’s committed to cutting overall costs for middle-class families, mirroring Sanders’s higher-taxes-lower-costs rationale — but she refused to state, for the record, that she would.
This is a lie. It’s a lie by omission, but it’s a lie nonetheless. To implement her plan, Warren would have no choice but to raise taxes on the middle class. Moving to a single-payer health-care system would require the imposition of a significant tax increase on millions of middle-income earners. …
… Does Warren’s equivocation on a matter so central to her domestic agenda reflect poorly on her? No, say pundits, who have since insisted that the fault for Warren’s evasion lies not with the candidate but instead with those who would deign to ask her such a question in the first place.
