Republican math never seems to add up. Well, that’s not quite true—it adds up plenty when we’re talking about the 1 percent and above.
Marco Rubio’s tax and spending plans are a case in point. My colleague Kerry Eleveld poked a hole in one of Rubio’s proposals last week. The liberal think tank Citizens for Tax Justice also took a look at Rubio’s tax plans last week, noting that he is proposing a cut for everybody. But the top 1 percent of the population would collect 34 percent of the total benefits, a handsome average of $223,783 each.
The cost of these cuts? $11.8 trillion in reduced federal revenue over the next decade. Jonathan Chait points out that this is three times the $3.4 trillion revenue cut generated by the Bush tax cuts. He also notes:
How would Rubio’s plan fit into the overall federal budget? One way to consider the scale of this plan is to look at the overall federal budget. Over the next decade, Washington is projected to collect $41.6 trillion in revenue under current policies. Rubio would reduce that to about $30 trillion. Rubio proposes to increase the defense budget — but, for the sake of generosity, let us assume he merely keeps the budget at the current levels he decries as “setting ourselves up for danger.” He likewise promises not to touch benefits for current or near-retirees, leaving those programs unavailable for cuts over that time. According to figures from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, expenditures on defense, Medicare, Social Security, and mandatory interest payments on the national debt will total $30.7 trillion over that period — and that’s without accounting for any other functions of the federal government at all. So Medicaid, veterans’ health insurance, transportation, border security, and education, not to mention the entire federal anti-poverty budget other than Medicare and Social Security, would have to go. Oh, and Rubio has also called for an amendment to the Constitution requiring a balanced budget every year.
George H.W. Bush had a term for the reckless and ridiculous approach Ronald Reagan’s advisers spurred him to support during the 1980 campaign: He called it “voodoo economics.” That would be far too generous a description for Marco Rubio’s proposal.