Democratic presidential candidate [crscore]Bernie Sanders[/crscore] made a host of spending pledges worth a staggering $1 trillion during Tuesday’s Democratic debate.
Analysis conducted by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation (NTUF) found the self-declared socialist senator spoke for a little over 28 minutes and managed to average $41.7 billion of giveaways per minute.
Among Bernie’s salad of promises is paid family leave, universal healthcare funded by taxpayers and making every public college and university tuition free.
Sanders’s plan for a government-run health care system alone comes with a price tag of $824 billion per year while the cost to taxpayers for college is $109.9 billion in the first year.
National Taxpayers Union Foundation
The cost of other promises such as raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour are classified by the NTUF as “indeterminate.” But according to American Action Forum and the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, the $15 minimum wage will cost 6.6 million jobs.
The study also showed that only 7 percent of the gains from the minimum wage will go to those living in poverty.
Another of Sander’s ideas for boosting the economy is putting Americans to work through government programs fixing the country’s infrastructure. He is a strong supporter of the “Rebuild America Act” of 2015 authorizing $730 billion of infrastructure over the next five years.
Sanders claims his spending pledges can be met by imposing massive taxes on the rich and the financial industry. He has called for a financial transaction tax to pay for college.
But these proposals are met with fierce criticism from economists who say the tax won’t raise the necessary amounts and will harm economic growth.
Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley is the next biggest spender with promises racking up $77.5 billion. Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton comes in third with seven policy pledges that will cost $51.6 billion per year. Candidate Lincoln Chafee, the former governor of Rhode Island, is the only Democratic candidate that didn’t make any promises that could be quantified.
The NTUF points out there were a few policies mentioned during the debate that will cut spending:
Clinton and Sanders proposed the only two policies that would have cut spending, calling for sentencing reform in the criminal justice system.
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