Democrats don’t want to raise taxes to match spending. They don’t because they can’t. Between free college and free healthcare, you’re talking about closing the gap between what our welfare state provides and what say Germany provides. What does it cost Germany to provide its welfare state compared to our’s? About 10% more of GDP in taxes. That’s $2 trillion a year for the US.

You can’t raise an additional $2 trillion a year with a 70% tax rate on millionaires or eliminating the inheritance tax or treating capital gains like income or cutting the military budget. None of that even gets you close. $2 trillion is the entire income of the top 1%, or all the profits earned by US corporations. (Because of dividends and whatnot, a lot of corporate profits are income to the top 1% so there is a huge overlap between those. And you’re already taxing those two groups almost $800 billion a year. You’d have to raise it to $2.8 trillion a year.) The total income of people making above $1 million (much less the $10 million mark AOC has cited) is $700 billion.

You couldn't even raise that money with an "all of the above" approach. Say you doubled the income tax on the top 1% (+500 billion), eliminated the preferential tax treatment for capital gains (+$130 billion), doubled corporate taxes (+$200 billion), and slashed the defense budget to the NATO target of 2% of GDP (+200 billion). You're still only at $1 trillion (barely enough to close the deficit). You've also pushed the U.S. income and corporate tax burden far above the level in our competitor countries like the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, and Spain: https://data.oecd.org/tax/tax-on-personal-income.htm#indicat... https://data.oecd.org/tax/tax-on-corporate-profits.htm#indic....

There are a few ways to get $2 trillion. You could raise income taxes from 10% of GDP, about the OECD average, to 20% of GDP. That would blow past Sweden levels of income taxes (13% of GDP) into Denmark territory. Like Denmark, you’d have to make the income tax extremely broad based. The top tax rate of 56% (combined municipal, national, and labor contribution) kicks in at under $80,000. The tax rate below that is essentially flat, at 40%, with some deductions. (Fun fact: Denmark’s corporate tax rate is just 25%, lower than the US average after accounting for state corporate taxes.)

Or, you could create a 20% VAT to get our consumption taxes up from 4.3% to the OECD average of about 10%: https://data.oecd.org/tax/tax-on-goods-and-services.htm#indi.... And you could increase FICA taxes to 25% or so (from 15%) to get our 6.3% social insurance tax rate up to the OECD average of 9%. That, plus a millionaire's tax, if you're so inclined, will get you to $2 trillion.

All of these would impose a large tax increase in the middle class. That’s politically untenable even for Democrats. That’s why you see things like the Sanders health plan, that has like a half-page bullet point list of possible revenue sources (none of which comes close to raising 10% of GDP in tax revenue). There is only a single way to increase U.S. taxes to European levels without rendering ourselves economically noncompetitive by taxing high earners and corporations more than Europe. And that is massive tax increases on the middle class. Democrats are willfully blind to that reality.