The Democrats’ Tax Lies Have Caught Up with Them

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, March 18, 2026

 

It is nice, for once, to see the Democratic Party well and truly hoisted by its own petard. With the gleeful help of the American press, the Democrats have spent four decades convincing their voters that the poor and lower-middle class are overtaxed, while the rich pay next to nothing. And, would you believe it, those voters now believe this to be true.

 

In reality, the American income-tax system is extremely progressive. Per the IRS’s latest records, the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 40 percent of all the federal income taxes collected, while the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers paid just 3 percent. And yet, thanks to the tireless work of the Democrats and their friends in the media, this inconvenient fact has been carefully buried beneath a pile of indignant propaganda. Politically, one can grasp the case for this ploy. Practically, though, it has proven costly. False accounts are all fun and games until it comes time to present a plan of one’s own — at which point mathematics is liable to reenter the chat and wreak its bloody revenge.

 

How sweet that revenge has been. All that rhetoric, all that class warfare, all that bolshie bombast, and the result was the creation of a cadre of left-leaning anti-tax radicals who believe that “fairness” demands that taxes be abolished for everyone other than the “super-rich.” Superficially, this stance can resemble a pro-tax position. But it’s not really. As my former colleague Dominic Pino likes to point out, there are, in fact, two anti-tax parties now in the United States, with the main difference between them being that one of them (the Republicans) wants to cut taxes on 100 percent of the electorate and the other one (the Democrats) wants to cut taxes on 98 percent of the electorate. From my own unashamedly free market perspective, this is a good thing — not to mention a stunning repudiation of the claim that conservatives never win any political battles. For the Democrats, however, it is a disaster. And boy, do they deserve it.

 

Why a “disaster”? Well, because, outside of tax policy, the Democrats have all manner of other grand ambitions — and because those ambitions invariably require massive wads of cash. Certainly, there are disagreements within the Democratic Party on the scope and details of the plan. But almost everyone within its confines is agreed that Washington, D.C., ought to spend more money on social programs; that the existing welfare system ought not only to be protected, but expanded; and that the cost of these changes will necessitate far more revenue than can be raised by merely increasing taxes on the people at the top of the income scale. Over in Europe, where the government does far more than ours, the average citizen is taxed up the wazoo — not only via steep income taxes, but via a continent-wide 20 percent value-added tax that touches almost all parts of the economy. In France, Britain, Germany, and elsewhere, the base is broad, the rates are high, and the high brackets kick in devastatingly early. Yes, Europeans pay a lot in, the argument goes. But, in theory at least, they get a lot out. Quid, meet quo.

 

The Democrats purport to admire this arrangement. But, actually, they don’t. Granted, they envy the spending part. But not the taxing part — which, inter alia, is why they lie so brazenly about the status quo whenever they are given half a chance. Last week, Senator Cory Booker and Senator Chris Van Hollen, two Democrats with presidential aspirations, released their tax plans. And, hilariously, not only did neither plan come close to reorienting our system in a more European direction; neither raised any new money, either. If adopted, Cory Booker’s plan would reduce federal revenues by nearly 7 billion dollars over a decade, while Chris Van Hollen’s scheme would cost the Treasury $86 billion over the same period. Funnier still, both plans would disproportionately redound to the benefit of the upper-middle class. Cory Booker’s plan, which would exempt the first $75,000 of income from federal taxes for married couples, would be most useful to households who make more than $500,000 per year. Chris Van Hollen’s plan, which would exempt the first $92,000 of income from federal taxes for married couples, would be most useful to households in the middle quintile, while providing “little change” to those at the bottom. Why? Yep, you’ve guessed it: Because, under our very progressive system, the people from the middle up to the top already pay almost all of the federal income taxes, and they therefore have far more of a liability to cut than those whose bills are small, nonexistent, or even negative. Per the Tax Foundation, both proposals would also have a “slightly negative” effect on the economy.

 

So what’s the point? The most obvious answer to that question, alas, is that the contemporary Democratic Party sees new taxes less as a means by which to pay for new spending, and more as a punishment to be imposed upon those whom they disdain. As the socialists over at Prospect have correctly observed, “If America wants a world-class welfare state . . . taxes will need to rise steeply across the whole society to fund it.” Evidently, Senators Booker and Van Hollen do not want “a world-class welfare state” — or, if they do, they do not want it as much as they want to continue advancing the lie that the rich in this country do not pay their “fair share.” And so it goes. A Democratic Party that was serious about achieving its ambitions would be a Democratic Party that had the courage to tell its voters that their conception of how our politics works in 2026 is completely and utterly wrong. Call me a cynic, but I won’t hold my breath for that one.