Here’s Gene Sperling, Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s economic advisor, on Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s tax proposal.

If you look at how [Trump’s] tax code has been judged, almost 90% went to the top 1%. What he has doubled down on is this ‘15% solution’. That means that not only will the biggest companies pay 15%, but everybody who has any type of pass-through income. More than half of the 400 richest people in the U.S. have pass-through income[.]

And

Anybody who has any kind of business income, whether you’re a consultant, a lobbyist, a hedge fund manager, investment banker, or corporate lawyer, you would now pay 15%, lower than most middle-income families. The largest multi-national companies that people think have paid too little would pay 15%.

Never mind that Warren Buffet already, proudly, pays only a bit more than those 15% (and while he demands that everyone like him should pay more, he refuses to make a donation to the Treasury—insisting that his views be imposed on those who disagree).  Never mind, either, that with our current gerrymandered tax code, folks like those 400 are driven to the breaks and deductions that lower the investment income portion of their tax bill.

Leaving aside Sperling’s politically motivated exaggeration about those 90%, here are some actual facts.

The top 1% of Americans in income pay nearly 47% of US income taxes—even after adjusting for capital gains and other investment-related income.

The top 20% pay roughly 84%% of US income taxes.

The bottom 50% pay roughly 4% of US income taxes.

It’s obvious to anyone with a 3^rd grade lesson in arithmetic that any across-the-board cut in taxes—or even any cut that merely lowers tax rates without materially affecting the tax brackets—is going to yield a bigger dollar cut for the better off.  Sperling surely has at least that level of training in arithmetic.

The Left always demands that the rich should pay their fair share, but the Left always refuses to say what that fair share is.  Except per Sperling the Left insists, tacitly, that 47% or even 84% isn’t it.

Recall that President Barack Obama (D) touts his Stimulus Bill, with its explosion in national debt (which is still growing these 7+ years later), as good for our economy.  That it’s an economy still mired, these 7+ years later, in a pseudo-recovery that’s the slowest since WWII and that has a smaller per centage of Americans in the labor force than at any time since the Jimmie Carter (D) years is lost on, or ignored by, him.

Now he’s making the same claim about our nation’s exploding student debt, a pile of markers reaching $1.3 trillion, a pile that has doubled in total size, and a pile that has seen a doubling of per-graduated student debt, all over these same 7+ years of Obama and his administration.  This growing pile is good for our economy, he says.

Maybe not.  That growing debt represents a number of drags on our economy beyond the broader national debt.

It drives up the cost of borrowing for the rest of us by competing for the supply of loanable funds, whether from government or from banks.

That’s fairly minor.  More importantly, money spent on debt repayment is money not spent on

• consumption or on saving for the borrower’s emergency money needs (at least one such emergency is virtually inevitable over the course of a lifetime)
• future retirement (which results in an increased reliance on a bankrupt, or nearly so, Social Security and Medicare public retirement system)
• big ticket items like housing and cars (certainly these are routinely borrowed for, but added debt?)

And there’s this: money not spent on student debt repayment because the student (now adult) borrower has defaulted on his debt represents two more drags on our economy: increased general borrowing costs in order to cover the lenders’ costs of absorbing those bad loans, and increased taxes (which, among other drags, is money withdrawn from the private economy) to cover government-guaranteed privately extended student loans.

All of those drags represent reduced overall private demand and so lower business prosperity and so fewer jobs.  All those drags also represent higher taxes tomorrow or increased (yet again) borrowing tomorrow—and so higher taxes the day after tomorrow.

This is the level of understanding of basic economics held by Obama and the Democratic Party.