The Patriot Post® · Sanders Would Need to Double the Debt to Fund Socialist Utopia

The outlook for Socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is bleak. Since joining the race last year, he has managed to recruit a loyal following. But despite unnerving her by winning some key contests, Sanders was unable to rally enough support to defeat Hillary Clinton, the longtime presumed Democrat nominee. Some of that can be traced to Clinton’s recent insistence that at some point people will have to come to the realization Sanders’ dreams don’t translate to reality. That message seems to have resonated with most voters. (For now, at least.)

Case in point: Two new studies further tarnish Sanders’ socialist dream and undermine his assertions that his Big Government programs can be fully funded by merely increasing taxes on “the wealthy.” According to The Washington Post, “The studies, published jointly by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center and the Urban Institute in Washington, concludes that Sanders’s plans are short a total of more than $18 trillion over a decade. His programs would cost the federal government about $33 trillion over that period, almost all of which would go toward Sanders’s proposed system of national health insurance. Yet the Democratic presidential candidate has put forward just $15 trillion in new taxes, the authors concluded.”

By the way, both “nonpartisan” think tanks saying so are liberal. In a March Wall Street Journal op-ed, Marc Sumerlin and Noah Williams wrote, “[T]he tax-policy analyses that receive the most media attention in the electoral cycle — those of the Tax Policy Center (TPC), a joint effort of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution — don’t take into account the interplay between policy and the macro economy. These two Democratic-aligned think tanks disapprove of tax cuts, and their recent evaluations of some Republican plans inflate the static costs of tax reform while ignoring the dynamic impact of tax reform on growth, and thus ultimately on government revenues as well.”

The authors contend that “TPC in reality aims at securing enough revenue to allow the government to grow at its preferred pace — they just need to pluck enough feathers.” None of this is to say Hillary Clinton offers sufficiently better solutions. But when even liberal-sanctioned studies can’t make the math add up, you know Socialism is a force not to be reckoned with.