I haven't paid much - any, really - attention to Bernie Sanders' presidential policy platform, because he's never going to become president any more than a Trumpless Hillary Clinton will. He's a sideshow novelty act, nothing more.
And there are over eighteen trillion sound reasons why:
Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders' extensive call for change in Washington consists of a wide variety of new programs that would cost at least $18 trillion over a decade, an amount that even concerns liberals, while creating the largest peacetime government expansion in modern times.
Larger even than Barack Obama's, which exploded the national debt at a little over half that rate.
“Senator Sanders’s agenda does cost money,” Warren Gunnels, Sanders' policy director, told the Wall Street Journal, with the Vermont senator refusing a request for a direct interview. “If you look at the problems that are out there, it’s very reasonable.” [emphasis added]
Kinda redefines that term radically, doesn't it?
The Vermont senator says his agenda is needed to provide "essential services"....
Everything, essentially, after the private sector was formally outlawed.
....for Americans, but the plans, which include $15 trillion for a healthcare program that covers all Americans....
You know, like ObamaCare was supposed to do.
....would also come with tax increases to collect up to $6.5 trillion over the same decade. [emphasis added]
Spend our way to solvency and tax our way to prosperity. Sounds like a plan. In Arkum Asylum, anyway.
Want the details? I knew you would:
Medicare (single-payer healthcare plan): $15 trillion
Obama already has that in the pipeline.
Social Security (increase benefits and bolster solvency): $1.2 trillion
It's already broke and hemorrhaging red ink, but what the hell? We'll still need bathroom tissue.
Infrastructure (Rebuild roads, bridges and airports): $1 trillion
Which environmental groups will never allow.
College Affordability (Tuition-free public schools and favorable loan refinancing): $750 billion
Socialized higher education that teaches violent, racist, leftwing radical revolution to go with socialized primary and secondary education that is making kids dumber and more ignorant when they graduate than when they started. Brilliant!
Paid Leave Fund (Allow workers paid family and medical leave) $319 billion
Didn't that used to be called "vacation"?
Bolster private pension funds (to prevent companies from cutting pensions): $29 billion
Socialized pensions - wait, didn't that used to be called "Social Security" before it went bankrupt? The funds to come from confiscation of all IRAs and 401(k)s, no doubt.
Youth jobs initiative ($1 million jobs for disadvantaged youth): $5.5 billion
On top of the national $15/hour minimum wage, I'm guessing.
This is, of course, all madness and lunacy. It'd be a crazy-train race to see whether the doomsday tax increases could incinerate the economy before the spending tsunami could destroy the dollar, since all the borrowing would have to come from the Fed's printing presses because nobody is buying our debt at zero interest rates as it is. Obamanomics is already Cloward-Pivening the country at warp velocities; Bernienomics would kick it into quantum slipstream drive. None of it will ever happen.
Of course, if Senator Sanders were black, I'd be even more terrified than I am already, because then his (central) plan would be a fait accompli.
But then he is a socialist, and he's open about and proud of it. And he's taking the Democrat party by storm. Which tells us as much about where that party is today as it does who they frantically want to escape.
I can only half blame them for that.
UPDATE: Brother Hinderaker made use of, shall we say, "more colorful metaphors" to describe Bernienomics:
It would be hard for anyone in this room today to make the case that the United States of America, our great country, a country which all of us love, it would be hard to make the case that we are a just society, or anything resembling a just society today.
In the United States of America today, there is massive injustice in terms of income and wealth inequality. Injustice is rampant.
Bullshit. Inequality does not equal injustice. In fact, a society without unequal incomes and wealth would scarcely be worth living in. One wonders: what society, contemporary or ancient, does Sanders consider more just than ours? Soviet Russia? Maoist China? Communist Cuba? He doesn’t say, of course.
In my view, there is no justice, when here, in Virginia and Vermont and all over this country, millions of people are working long hours for abysmally low wages of $7.25 an hour, of $8 an hour, of $9 an hour, working hard, but unable to bring in enough money to adequately feed their kids.
Bullshit. There is a market for labor, whether Sanders likes it or not. Someone who wants to earn more than $7.25 an hour should gain skills and experience that are worth more than $7.25 an hour. Actually, hardly anyone works for that low wage, and 64% of those who do are working part-time. Half are aged 16 to 24, doing precisely what I said–gaining skills and experience so that they can advance and make more. Sanders wants to make it illegal for teenagers and part-timers to work for the wages they can command, even though they want to do so. He thereby dooms them to unemployment. Thanks, Bernie!
In the last two years, 15 people saw $170 billion increase in their wealth, 45 million Americans live in poverty. That in my view is not justice. That is a rigged economy, designed by the wealthiest people in this country to benefit the wealthiest people in this country at the expense of everybody else.
Bullshit. What does Sanders want to do about the fact that the people who founded Facebook have made a lot of money? Prohibit innovation? Limit the number of people who can access popular web sites? Make it illegal to sell advertising if the owners of the web site are already rich? The only “remedy” he can come up with is higher taxes, but America already has the most progressive income tax regime of any developed country–more progressive than Sweden, Denmark, you name it. And yet Democrats like Sanders keep telling us how awful things are for most Americans. Maybe we should try lower taxes on the “rich,” since the world’s highest taxes evidently haven’t worked. By the way, when Democrats talk about rich people, they always use Mark Zuckerberg–a Democrat, no doubt–as an exemplar, but when I read the fine print, I always find that they mean me.
This is why profanity should be kept in reserve for those rare occasions when it can be most effective, instead of, well, "liberally" sprinkled in every second or third word.
Maybe when Senator Sanders gets to foreign policy, Brother Hinderaker will break out the F-bombs.
I know I can't wait.
No comments:
Post a Comment