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Economist: With Sanders, Income and Jobs Would Soar

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Screen Shot 2016-02-09 at 9.43.58 AMCNN reports in “Under Sanders, Income and Jobs Would Soar, Economist Says” that: “Median income would soar by more than $22,000. Nearly 26 million jobs would be created. The unemployment rate would fall to 3.8 percent.

“Those are just a few of the things that would happen if Bernie Sanders became president and his ambitious economic program were put into effect, according to an analysis given exclusively to CNNMoney. The first comprehensive look at the impact of all of Sanders’ spending and tax proposals on the economy was done by Gerald Friedman, a University of Massachusetts Amherst economics professor.”

GERALD FRIEDMAN,  gfriedma at econs.umass.edu, @gfriedma
Professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Friedman’s work was the basis for attacks on Sanders in the Wall Street Journal, which the Clinton campaign seems to have be drawn from and which Friedman has previously debunked.

In the Feb. 4 Democratic debate with Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton cited a study by Kenneth Thorpe at Emory University to attack Sanders’ health insurance reform proposal — Medicare-for-All. In “Friedman Responds to Thorpe on Single-Payer,” written for Dollars & Sense magazine, Friedman writes: “Unfortunately, Kenneth Thorpe does not provide enough documentation to make an explicit comparison between his estimates and those provided in detail by the Sanders campaign. He lists his projected Federal spending per year, he fails to explain how he calculated these numbers. While this failure makes it impossible to consider his claims on a point by point basis, it is possible to extract enough from his statement to conclude that his analysis is so deeply flawed that it implies some clearly unrealistic assumptions.”

Friedman also recently wrote the piece “What Would Sanders Do?” for Dollars & Sense: “Taxes on the wealthy would pay for widely shared benefits. See Figure 3. Sanders would finance expanded infrastructure, universal free pre-K education, free public higher education, universal health insurance, and other programs with progressive taxation and through the elimination of tax deductions for rich individuals and large corporations. While the benefits of the increased spending would be widely shared, increases in income taxes and other targeted tax changes would be borne mostly by the richest Americans; almost half of the tax changes would be paid by the richest 5 percent and nearly 30 percent by the richest 1 percent. In addition, measures like a financial transactions tax and elimination of favored tax treatment for fossil fuels would promote greater economic efficiency by discouraging economically and environmentally harmful activities.”