'Reaganmaxxing': Voters bewildered by new Dem tax proposal

Democrat critics have long been accusing the party of being “tax and spend” advocates.

So it’s got to be a shock to some that two Democrat legislators appear to be devising a massive tax break for a huge number of Americans. A headline in The Bulwark refers to the ideas as “Reaganmaxxing,” a play on our 40th president’s tax slashing agenda and the protein-heavy diet that bodybuilders advocate.

Senators Chris Van Hollen (D-Md) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) both have a tax reform plan, albeit with differing points. They both advocate increasing taxes on the ultra-rich in order to help the little guys.

Booker has put his goal at a $75,000 standard deduction, more than double the current allocation of $31,500 for married couples filing jointly and far above the deduction of $15,750 for singles and married people filing separately.

Not everyone in the Democratic party is pleased. Some pols are looking to make up the spending ground lost to the current Republican administration if they triumph in the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election.

One policy analyst summed up the Dem worries.

“I think just taking the proposals at face value is important at this point,” Will Raderman, a senior policy advisor at the Searchlight Institute, told The Bulwark. “And knowing that there’s only so much spending that you can do on new kinds of reforms, I think the attention and effort would be much better suited on other proposals.”

Raderman said Booker’s plan to significantly expand the child tax credit is fine. But he claimed there’s room for more if the proposed weighty standard deduction is trimmed

“Could you expand health care and improve health care in a lot of key ways? Could you fix the unemployment system? Could you improve job training pathways?” Raderman asked. “I think what’s important to keep in mind is, if part of the proposal costs trillions and trillions of dollars, the ability to actually focus on and do a whole bunch of really important agenda items gets that much harder, and probably means we can’t do those.”

Booker pushed back in a later conversation with the website about his proposal. He claimed his plan means “the median earner is gonna see an 85% cut on their taxes, which is significant.”

He chided those who don’t dream as big as he does.

“The Democratic party has got to get its act together and stop thinking that when a bold idea comes forward, it means that all the other important things don’t get done,” Booker said. “This is the biggest unrigging of our tax system that there is.”

The Booker and Van Hollen proposals are not expected to go anywhere while Republicans control the House and Senate.

But the story points out that prior tax slashing movements on the Republican side also seemed preposterous at one time.

In 2016, Republican presidential hopeful and former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal proposed the elimination of the standard deduction and a two percent tax rate for the lowest earners.

Then-candidate Donald Trump wanted to cut the Head of Household filing status. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) went theatrical, slashing copies of the U.S. tax code with a chainsaw and woodchipper.

But eventually, the Republican proposals were merged into a single plan. That became the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which changed the IRS standard deductions and cut corporate tax rates.

That gives hope to the Booker and Van Hollen camps that today’s “impossible” becomes tomorrow’s law.

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