My Novice Thoughts on Bernie Sanders' Tax Plan #1: Free College & Debt Cancellation Plan
- David H. Kinder, RFC®, ChFC®, CLU®
- Feb 25, 2020
- 2 min read
Updated: Jan 20, 2023
How does Senator Sanders propose to pay for all this college & pay off the debt?
Tax Wall Street Gambling to Cancel All Student Debt and Pay for College for All
We can guarantee higher education as a right for all and cancel all student debt for an estimated $2.2 trillion. To pay for this, we will impose a tax of a fraction of a percent on Wall Street speculators who nearly destroyed the economy a decade ago. This Wall Street speculation tax will raise $2.4 trillion over the next ten years. It works by placing a 0.5 percent tax on stock trades – 50 cents on every $100 of stock – a 0.1 percent fee on bond trades, and a 0.005 percent fee on derivative trades.
If Wall Street can be bailed out for several trillion dollars, 45 million Americans can and will be bailed out of the $1.6 trillion burden of student loan debt and we can provide free college for all. Some 40 countries throughout the world have imposed a similar tax, including Britain, South Korea, Hong Kong, Brazil, Germany, France, Switzerland and China.
Are YOU an investor? Do you like investing in stocks and bonds? YOU are the ones being targeted. While I'm not necessarily a fan of it, I don't like this tax being imposed on successful people who simply want their money to continue to grow and work for them.
While I certainly wasn't in favor of the Wall Street and Big Bank bailouts in the 2008-2010 period, at least they paid it all back + interest! That was a FINITE "bail-out" and it had an end date. Why would this tax ever stop? This is simply a tax on people who are successful at any level who desired to invest. This plan ASSUMES that you will CONTINUE to invest. But the more you tax something, the more the Government is trying to impose a certain behaviors that are 'acceptable' to the United States legislative powers.
You might think "that's not such a high amount"... but we haven't looked at every aspect.
What about the Capital Gains when you SELL your stocks and bonds? I wonder what THAT will look like?
Again, just notice the major theme: it ASSUMES that successful people will CONTINUE to do the things they have always done - produce and invest. Could they go "on strike" per Ayn Rand's fictional book "Atlas Shrugged"? Tax something enough and they WILL.
I help my clients to challenge any political administration's right to tax everything you do successfully so that YOU are the primary beneficiary of your life's work, not the banks, financial institutions, Wall Street, and the Internal Revenue Service.
