There is some bad news for proponents of Hillary Clinton's borrowed-from-Bernie-Sanders free college plan: even after taxing the rich, it will be billions short.
Clinton's plan is to grant full tuition to state colleges to any families making under $85,000 to start and gradually raise the cap to $125,000 by 2021. In addition, there is to be a three-month moratorium on student loan payments for all federal loans, as well as restoring year-round Pell Grant funding.
According to Bloomberg's Megan McArdle, that's going to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of at least $450 billion and perhaps upwards of $520 billion. One way Clinton plans on paying for this is through closing high income tax loopholes for single people making over $190,000 per year and married couples making over $215,000. Yet, "this math comes up a bit short," McArdle notes.
"But what’s $50 billion or $100 billion among friends?" she quips.
And this is just what Clinton wants to spend on higher education. She also has a plan to improve K-12 education, but both will never solve the problems they're promised to. Worse yet, what about all the other spending measures promised to voters on the campaign trail? Where is that money going to come from?
Politicians seem to think that's none of our concern. They just pull out their fuzzy-math calculators and proceed with spending other people's money. As long as they sound convincing enough, people will bite the bait. Besides, by the time the average voter figures out the plan they believed in did nothing, their favored politician as moved on. McArdle explains,
The evidence for early childhood education isn’t very good, and neither is the evidence for making college free. And this matters, because in fact we do have other problems, and spending a lot of money on things that aren’t necessary will make it harder for us to fix those problems...
The government’s spending capacity is, in the end, limited, and every dollar that you spend on one thing is a dollar that cannot be spent on something else. Virtually all of Clinton’s "pay fors" are concentrated on a relatively small number of affluent-to-rich people, and because of that, they represent a large cut of those incomes; if she managed to enact all of her plans, her top bracket would be inching close to a marginal tax rate of 50 percent before you factor in state and local taxes that can easily add another 10 percentage points to that figure…
After enacting Clinton’s agenda, America will still need to fix Medicare, Social Security, state and local pensions, the disability insurance program, and so forth. And given that Democrats have proven as unwilling as Republicans to raise taxes on the middle class, where are we going to get the money?
What America needs, much more than free college tuition, is a comprehensive plan to bring our outflows roughly in line with our inflows over the long term. A sensible agenda would first figure out how to pay for the things we’ve already promised to do, and then see if we have the stomach for even higher taxes to cover new spending. Instead we keep piling on the new spending while ignoring the old promises. When the bill comes due, it will be a humdinger. And the politicians who ran up the total will be long gone.
The Freedom Center is a 501c3 non-profit organization. Therefore we do not endorse political candidates either in primary or general elections. However, as defenders of America’s social contract, we insist that the rules laid down by both parties at the outset of campaigns be respected, and that the results be decided by free elections. We will oppose any attempt to rig the system and deny voters of either party their constitutional right to elect candidates of their choice.
