Why Bernie Sanders' Plans for College and Healthcare Can And Will Work

The year 2016 is an election year in The United States of America, we are currently in the process of choosing nominees from both the Democratic and Republican parties. In the Democratic race Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders run a close race, despite what Clinton and her supporters would have the voters believe, after Super Tuesday she only leads by less than 10% with still 80% of the country still to vote. A major issue in this campaign has been the topic of Sander’s “free” healthcare and college plans, the quotations around free are because it is in reality funded by a very reasonable increase in taxes for the upper classes that we will explore in detail for this article.

Many people cite Bernie Sanders plans as unrealistic, even when they haven’t looked directly at how he plans to pull off these ideas. If they had, they would realize that Bernie's plans would actually pull in more revenue than it would cost and his medical plan would save the average american between 500 and 5000 dollars annually. Specific examples of revenue increasing plans include a tax on wall street speculation that would generate an estimated 300 billion dollars a year, increasing income taxes on the rich (see chart to the right), and removing a tax cap on incomes above 250,000 dollars a year all of these would mainly affect those already living well enough that a small increase in taxes would not cause a devastating financial loss.

A common argument against Bernie's plans is the question of “why tax rich people more? They worked hard to get their money without any help.” However, In a recent study only 35% of the Forbes 400 actually came from poor to middle class circumstances, 22% of them inherited more than a million dollars, 7% inherited over 50 million dollars, and nearly a quarter of the top 400 inherited enough to automatically put them on the list. Even if we were to simply focus on the 35% who earned their way in, not a single person on that list did it on their own, they all had help from employees, business partners, investors, and even tax funded government programs, so to say that they “pulled themselves up on their own” would be highly inaccurate. The bottom line when it comes to taxing the rich is that the real question should be "Why tax rich people less? They got their money on the backs of others, why shouldn't they contribute to other's success and well being?"

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