The Democrats are about to make a trillion-dollar mistake

A bold new idea is taking the Democrats by storm: massive middle-class tax cuts. 

Last week, two of the party’s rumored 2028 candidates — Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Cory Booker — unveiled plans to fully exempt tens of millions of Americans from federal income taxes.

Under Van Hollen’s policy, individuals who earn less than $46,000 — and married couples who earn less than $92,000 — would owe nothing to Uncle Sam each year (outside of their payroll taxes, anyway). And millions of Americans who earn more than those sums would also receive a hefty tax break. Under Booker’s plan, meanwhile, Americans would pay no federal income tax on their first $75,000 in earnings. Both senators would finance their tax cuts by soaking the super rich.

The details of the two bills vary considerably. But each reflects the same general proposition: The Democratic Party needs its own “No Tax on Tips.”

In 2024, Donald Trump endeared himself to many service workers by arguing that their tipped income should be exempt from federal taxes. Kamala Harris quickly embraced the policy. But by then, Trump had already branded the GOP as the party of simple, sweeping tax cuts for the working class.

Many Democrats want to steal that mantle. And “no federal tax on any of your income” presumably beats “no tax on tips” (or, as Trump has also enacted, “no tax on overtime”).

But the two proposals also represent the culmination of a decades-long trend in Democratic politics. 

Call it the rise of 99 percentism: The belief that only the top 1 percent, or even the small coterie of billionaires within it, should be expected to finance government benefits.

For much of the 20th century, Democrats were comfortable asking the middle class to pay higher taxes in exchange for more services. By the 1990s, however, the party no longer had the stomach to raise taxes on anyone but the upper middle class and above. In 2008, Barack Obama promised not to raise taxes on any family earning less than $250,000; in 2020 and 2024, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris raised that cutoff to $400,000.

The party’s left flank, meanwhile, has also lost its enthusiasm for broad-based taxation. In her 2020 presidential run, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) proposed a wealth tax on fortunes of over $50 million. More recently, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), one of the last prominent voices on the left to champion higher middle-class taxes, unveiled his new “defining vision for our age” — a bevy of new social programs funded exclusively through wealth taxes on billionaires. 

This shift has a coherent political logic. Democrats have grown increasingly dependent on upper middle-class support — while Americans writ large have grown increasingly distrustful of their government (and thus, more reluctant to shoulder the costs of expanding it). 

As a substantive matter, however, 99 percentism is incoherent. Democrats can support a robust welfare state or ultra-low taxes on the middle class — but they can’t do both. 

“If what you end up with is a tax code that is nominally progressive but low, you will have a government that’s too poor to achieve the goals that the American people want to achieve,” Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me. “You’ll have a poor democracy, and it’s very hard to defend a poor democracy.”

The case for “no tax on incomes”

Before examining the problems with Booker and Van Hollen’s tax packages, it’s worth spelling out the case for them in a bit more detail.

Ever since the post-pandemic surge of inflation, America has been in an anti-tax mood. Between 2020 and 2025, the share of Americans who deem their federal tax burden “too high” jumped from 46 percent to 59 percent in Gallup’s polling. Over roughly the same period, the percentage of voters who think the government is “trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses” rose from 41 percent to 55 percent.

Recent trends in state-level fiscal policy appear to reflect these sentiments. In 2023 and 2024, states collectively cut taxes by $15.5 billion and $13.3 billion respectively — the two largest annual reductions on record.

In this context, calls for dramatically reducing ordinary Americans’ tax bills could plausibly resonate. 

Furthermore, middle-class tax cuts are a simple and fast-acting means of addressing voters’ affordability concerns. Every household has a unique set of burdensome expenses. The government can’t create a program or price control that directly addresses each and every one. But if you give families more cash, they can use it to defray whichever costs they find most burdensome. 

Of course, Uncle Sam needs tax revenue to function. But a proponent of the Booker-Van Hollen vision could insist that the richest 1 percent is fully capable of shouldering this burden. 

After all, that small segment of the public commands about 21 percent of the nation’s income and 32 percent of its wealth. And thanks to various loopholes, some billionaires pay a lower effective tax rate than middle-class families. By shaking down these pampered plutocrats, Democrats can drum up enough money to cut the middle class’s taxes — and increase their social benefits — simultaneously (at least, according to this line of thinking).

Trump has demonstrated the political potency of big, simple tax cuts for workers. But his party’s inveterate commitment to billionaires’ interests limits how much it can actually do for the middle class. Democrats therefore have an opportunity to beat Trump at his own game.

Booker and Van Hollen’s bad math

Booker and Van Hollen are probably right to see some political upside in middle-class tax cuts. But they haven’t been clear-eyed (or else, forthright) about the costs of their agendas.

Van Hollen’s middle-class tax cut would reduce federal revenue by $1.5 trillion, while Booker’s would slash it by more than $5.5 trillion. (For context, “No Tax on Tips” — the inspiration for these packages — will cost the Treasury just $83 billion over the next 10 years.)

And yet, both senators officially support drastically expanding America’s welfare state. They have each backed legislation that would subsidize child care costs, socialize the health insurance system, make public college tuition-free, give “bonds” to babies, establish universal prekindergarten, and provide working-class families with a child allowance, among other things.

Taken together, these initiatives would increase federal spending by more than $30 trillion over a 10-year period. 

Even if one stipulates that Booker and Van Hollen’s Medicare For All bill is a pipe dream — and that their real health care goals are to reverse Trump’s Medicaid cuts and expand Obamacare subsidies — their social agenda would still cost many trillions of dollars.

And, while nobody wants to hear about it much these days, merely financing our existing spending commitments to the elderly remains an unsolved problem. Both senators — like virtually all Democrats — oppose cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits. Yet the former program’s trust fund is poised to run out in 2033. At that point, sustaining existing Social Security payment levels will require upward of $4 trillion in new funding (over the standard 10-year budget window). Medicare is also paying out more than it takes in. And covering that gap will cost trillions over the coming decade.

All this makes it hard to reconcile the Democratic senators’ spending commitments with their tax plans. Nonetheless, both Booker and Van Hollen insist they don’t wish to increase America’s high and rising deficits.

A welfare state can’t subsist on the rich alone

In keeping with 99 percentism, Booker and Van Hollen ostensibly believe that Democrats don’t need to choose between building a Western European-style welfare state and slashing middle-class taxes so long as they also soak the rich.

But this is implausible for several reasons.

For one thing, taxes on the super rich don’t “pay for” new social programs in quite the same way that taxes on the middle class do.

This is because the point of offsetting welfare spending with taxes is, in part, to prevent inflation (a phenomenon Democrats have some unfortunate recent experience confronting). 

When you expand social benefits, you increase demand for goods and services throughout the economy. Give a working-class family a child allowance, and they’ll be able to afford more discretionary purchases, such as electronics or restaurant meals. Expand access to health insurance, and more people will visit doctors and undergo medical procedures. Subsidize child care and more parents will enroll their kids at daycare centers.

As Americans increase their consumption in this way, they will bid up the price of labor and other resources — unless tax hikes reduce consumer demand in other parts of the economy.

Unfortunately, billionaire taxes aren’t very effective at reducing demand. Shave $10 billion off Jeff Bezos’s $224 billion fortune, and he won’t have to change his lifestyle at all. His savings will fall. But his consumer spending will likely remain about the same as it was before. 

Separately, the amount of revenue one can squeeze from the super rich is inherently limited: If you raise their income tax rates past a certain threshold, they will respond by working less or shifting their capital overseas. If you expropriate their wealth at a high enough rate, meanwhile, they will eventually cease to be super rich. 

To be sure, the government can (and should) extract trillions of dollars in additional revenue from the super rich. But it almost certainly cannot collect enough cash from the 1 percent alone to finance both a robust welfare state and low middle-class tax rates.*

For these reasons, no large welfare state on Earth is funded overwhelmingly through taxes on the rich. To the contrary, by some estimates, Western European social democracies actually tax billionaires at a lower rate than the United States does. America isn’t a low-tax nation because we refuse to soak our wealthy, but rather because we lightly tax our working, middle, and upper-middle classes.

Senate Democrats aren’t Bolsheviks

Thus, Booker and Van Hollen’s fiscal agendas simply do not work, even if we assume that congressional Democrats’ appetite for taxing millionaires and billionaires is unlimited.

But of course, this is not actually the case.

As we saw during the Biden presidency, moderate Democrats are willing to tax the rich — but only so much. Even the House version of Biden’s Build Back Better Act — which proved too progressive to pass the Senate — would have raised taxes on the wealthy and corporations by only $1.5 trillion. The party’s ultimate spending bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, generated only about $457 billion in revenue.

If Democrats reclaim full control of government in 2029, their Senate majority is likely to be narrow. The party’s most moderate members will therefore have veto power over its fiscal policy. 

Even if these centrists support taxes on the rich 10 times larger than those endorsed by former Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in 2022, Democrats still wouldn’t be able to implement more than a fraction of their social agenda (at least, without running up the deficit in a potentially inflationary manner).

In practice then, every dollar that Democrats dedicate to middle-class tax cuts is one that they cannot spend on expanding the welfare state. 

“If you’re going to have a trillion dollars — or maybe a little more — from new taxes on the wealthy, you want to make sure that those funds are addressing America’s biggest problems,” Will Raderman, a senior policy adviser at the Searchlight Institute, told me. “Shrinking the tax base does not seem like it should be a top priority.”

Indeed, it is hard to argue that lowering middle-class tax rates is more important than reversing Trump’s Medicaid cuts, ending child poverty, fixing America’s unemployment insurance system, or stabilizing Social Security and Medicare’s finances. 

Americans might feel like their taxes have grown intolerably high. But federal rates for the bottom 80 percent of workers have actually fallen sharply in recent decades and sit near historic lows.

What’s more, Booker’s tax cut would deliver its largest benefits to the upper middle class. Those between the 80th and 90th percentile of the income distribution would see their after-tax earnings rise by $7,755 — while those in the bottom 20 percent would collect just $1,840, according to the Penn-Wharton Budget Model.

This does not seem like a progressive way to allocate a fixed pool of tax dollars. 

Maybe the substantive costs of giant tax cuts would be tolerable, if the electoral upside was truly immense. But there’s reason to doubt that. For all the hype around “No Tax on Tips,” presidents in both parties have showered tax cuts on voters throughout the last 25 years without any consistent boost to their electoral fortunes. 

“The political benefits of giving people cash — through tax cuts or rebates — don’t seem particularly large,” Brendan Duke, a senior director at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said. “Donald Trump did a large tax cut in 2017 and his party proceeded to lose the House in the midterm elections of 2018. He gave out rebate checks in 2020 and then ended up losing the presidential election.”

Perhaps this time is different and Democrats can win in 2028 by pledging to slash middle-class taxes. If they do, however, then the election’s loser won’t just be the Republican Party — but also, American liberalism’s core economic project. 

* It is conceivable that artificial intelligence will soon generate vast increases in productivity — and/or, in the concentration of wealth — thereby fundamentally changing what is and is not possible fiscally. So, if you think that the robots are about to bring about fully automated neo-feudalism, you can ignore most of this column’s arguments.