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Senator Bernie Moreno has given voters more whiplash this week than a car crash on the Ohio Turnpike. In the same week that the Buckeye State Republican warned of a “socialist uprising sweeping the Democrat Party” in New York, he teamed up with leftist Senator Elizabeth Warren to propose one of the largest tax increases in American history.

As we wrote last week, the Social Security system is in trouble. A new report from the program’s trustees revealed that by 2032, it will be insolvent. Typically, the way the debate has worked in Washington is that conservatives have advocated changes on the spending side, such as raising the retirement age and/or slowing the growth of benefits over time, while the left has called for raising taxes. Bipartisan proposals usually involve some combination of benefit reforms and tax hikes. But for some inexplicable reason, Moreno decided to adopt the far-left position that relies exclusively on tax increases and try to sell it as a “bipartisan” solution.

Right now, the Social Security payroll tax is 12.4 percent. While this is technically split between employers and employees, economists agree that ultimately the burden is passed onto workers, mostly in the form of lower wages. Unlike income taxes, which are offset by various exemptions and deductions and completely wiped out for a significant number of people, nearly all American workers pay Social Security taxes, which kick in from the first dollar earned. The payroll tax is subject to a cap that goes up each year and is currently $184,500.

Moreno is proposing eliminating the cap so that the federal government can confiscate more than one out of ten additional dollars earned above it. That would represent a $3.4 trillion tax hike over a decade. As a share of gross domestic product, it would be the largest tax hike in over 40 years — eclipsing Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax increase, according to the Tax Foundation.

Not only would it represent a stunning betrayal of his own voters, as Moreno signed the Americans for Tax Reform’s pledge against any tax increases — it would even violate the $400,000-a-year Joe Biden threshold for tax increases.

Such a massive tax increase would also have crushing economic effects. Employers who don’t want to absorb the increase in payroll taxes will have to hire fewer workers or keep wages lower. It would place a significant burden on small business owners who operate as sole proprietors and pay self-employment taxes. And at a time when affordability has become a major issue, these costs would fall entirely on working-age Americans.

Moreno, in a joint New York Times op-ed with Warren, adopts her line of class warfare rhetoric. “Why should a middle-class nurse pay a larger share of her paycheck than a wealthy corporate lawyer?” they write.

In practice, Social Security has always been more of a welfare program than its most ardent supporters have been willing to admit. That is, younger workers in most cases transfer more wealth to retirees than the retirees ever paid when working. Yet since its founding, it has been advertised as a social insurance system. Warren and Moreno describe it as “a covenant between the federal government and Americans who pay into it throughout their working years so they can retire with dignity.” In reality, by making those earning above the cap pay more in taxes without any corresponding increase in their benefits, their plan would do more to break that covenant than any change to the program since its inception.

For all of these negative effects, the crushing tax increase wouldn’t resolve the problem with Social Security. While it would close much of the Social Security financing gap, the program would only run surpluses for three years before running deficits again, according to a model developed by the trustees.

It will also make it difficult to extract any more money from the upper middle class to finance other government shortfalls. As the Tax Foundation notes, “A business owner in New York City, for instance, could face a top marginal rate as high as 60 percent — well above the approximately 52 percent revenue-maximizing rate recently estimated by Treasury and Joint Committee on Taxation economists.” That is, at a certain point, increasing taxes reduces economic activity enough that further tax increases actually reduce revenue. Reaching this threshold to finance ever-higher Social Security benefits would leave policymakers hamstrung in attacking the trillions of dollars in debt being accumulated by other parts of the federal budget, especially Medicare and Medicaid.

We hope that other Republicans won’t follow Moreno’s lead in embracing destructive tax policy that represents a staggering betrayal of his voters.