The pile of spending programs proposed by 2020 presidential contender Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) would set a “peacetime record” for government spending, a CNN analysis released Tuesday shows.
Sanders’s proposed spending thus far would cost roughly $60 trillion, the analysis found. That would represent an “expansion of government’s cost and size unprecedented since World War II,” according to an estimate provided to CNN by former secretary of the treasury Larry Summers.
“This is far more radical than all previous presidencies, on either the right or the left,” Summers told CNN. “The Sanders spending increase is roughly 2.5 times the size of the New Deal and the estimated fiscal impact of George McGovern’s campaign proposals. This is six times as large of a growth of government than any of the Ronald Reagan dismemberments. We are in a kind of new era of radical proposal.”
Summers estimated that Sanders would raise federal spending by 20 percent of GDP over 10 years, an increase only paralleled by a 33 percentage point increase over the course of World War II. To do so, Sanders would more than double federal spending, which is currently projected to total roughly $52 trillion over the next 10 years. – READ MORE