Elizabeth Warren Wants to Raise Taxes by $26 Trillion

What she and Bernie Sanders are proposing is nothing short of a wholesale transformation of the size and scope of government.

One of the challenges presented by the leftward turn in the Democratic presidential primary race is effectively capturing the scale of the tax and spending proposals the leading candidates have put forth. The numbers regularly stretch into the trillions, or even multiple tens of trillions. To put that in contrast, a decade ago, early drafts of the health law that became Obamacare were viewed as pushing the boundaries of political acceptability because they ran just over $1 trillion over a decade. A trillion dollars! Even for Washington, that was a lot of money, an expansion of the size of government large enough to give some Democrats pause.

Today, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) says his Medicare for All plan would cost $30 or $40 trillion over 10 years. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) has proposed $2.75 trillion worth of education policy reforms, and her notion that she could implement a single-payer health care system with just—"just"—$20 trillion in new federal spending is viewed by many as unrealistically low.

There is an element of unreality to these ideas, a sense in which they are meant as symbols and signifiers rather than practical, concrete agenda items. As Kate McKinnon's parody version of Elizabeth Warren said on Saturday Night Live this weekend, responding to a question about Medicare for All's enormous price tag, "When the numbers are this big, they're just pretend."

And yet—these are, in fact, real and nominally serious proposals from actual candidates who are actually running for president. So it is worth putting them in perspective, not only on their own, but in context with each other.