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WASHINGTON — Two new plans from potential Democratic presidential candidates to exempt lower-income people from paying taxes are being met with intense derision from the party’s policy experts, arguing the ideas from Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) are poorly structured and will work against progressive goals in the long term.
Booker’s proposal, unveiled Monday, would exempt from taxation the $37,500 a single person earns yearly, or $75,000 for a married couple filing jointly. Van Hollen rolled out a plan last week to eliminate income taxes for individuals making less than $46,000 or married couples making less than $92,000.
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Both proposals come at the start of intra-party jockeying over what Democrats’ agenda should be if they manage to take power in 2028, with the party trying to balance the desires of an increasingly cynical electorate, its long-standing commitments to protecting and expanding the social safety net, recovering from the damage President Donald Trump has done to the country’s long-term fiscal health and the hope its policies will actually work long term.
“The Democratic Party is confused about what it wants,” Bobby Kogan, director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, told HuffPost.
Will Raderman, a senior policy adviser at the Searchlight Institute, a liberal think tank dedicated to outside-the-box policy thinking, questioned whether the anti-tax messaging at the center of Booker and Van Hollen’s proposals is the best way for Democrats to show solidarity with working people.
“We’ve got a lot of problems that we’d like to solve in the country, and it doesn’t feel appropriate to treat taxes as one of those major problems,” Raderman said. “We actually want to maintain a robust tax base and then use any revenue to actually address the problems head-on that we see.”
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The Booker proposal, in particular, also seemed likely to benefit wealthier voters as much as it would the poor. “This is not a progressive tax plan,” Corey Husak, a tax policy expert with the Center for American Progress, told HuffPost in an interview.
Since people with lower incomes already pay lower income taxes, higher earners would get a bigger benefit from Booker’s proposal to dramatically boost the “standard deduction” most tax filers use to reduce the amount of their income subject to tax.
Husak said a married couple earning $32,000 a year — an amount equal to the current value of the standard deduction — would get nothing, while a couple earning $800,000 would get a tax cut of nearly $15,000.
It’s unlikely, however, that Booker and Van Hollen will be the last Democrats to propose cutting taxes on lower- and middle-income earners. The party saw Trump win the 2024 election after promising to cut taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security, and its last plan to put more money in working people’s pockets — a $300 per-child monthly benefit for parents — was met with shrugs politically and died because of opposition from then-Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
Stefanie Feldman, who served in President Joe Biden’s administration, said tax cuts are a good idea. And even if the Booker and Van Hollen proposals are flawed, at least they’re sticking their necks out. “Needed a first mover to start the debate,” Feldman said on social media.
In an interview with The Washington Post last week, Van Hollen described his plan as a direct response to Trump.
“This bill, in addition to being the right policy, sends a very strong message that we stand for working people who are sweating every day to make ends meet. That’s a group of Americans that Donald Trump somehow appealed to,” Van Hollen said, noting his barber told him how much Trump’s “no tax on tips” policy had saved him.
Raderman suggested Democrats could propose undoing Trump’s unpopular cuts to Medicaid, the federal program that pays for health care for the poor, while promising to modernize technology systems for Medicaid and other programs that Republicans have accused of making too many fraudulent payments.
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Booker and Van Hollen have said their proposals, which have not been finalized, would also include new taxes on higher earners and new benefits for parents. But they’ve chiefly advertised the proposals as tax cuts.
The fact that people pay dedicated taxes for Social Security and Medicare, Kogan said, makes those programs politically untouchable. Promoting the idea that only the super-rich should pay taxes will make it harder for Democrats to promote an agenda that materially benefits the American people.
“The point of taxes is to help fund a society, to fund things that make the country better and less unfair,” Kogan said.
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