The Patriot Post® · Sanders Spends the Way to Socialism

A bipartisan group of 20 senators introduced their $1.1 trillion “infrastructure” package on Monday, but the bill is anything but balanced in addressing the concerns of both Republicans and Democrats. That much is demonstrated by its heavy new spending on leftist agenda items, including essentially creating a first installment of the economically disastrous Green New Deal.

The spending bill does nothing to address our skyrocketing national debt, instead only adding to it. Moreover, it piles more burdensome regulations and costs onto the American taxpayer, serving to further limit individual freedom, innovation, and economic upward mobility — all under the guise of repairing and updating the country’s aging infrastructure systems.

But this $1.1 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, 2,702 pages in length, is merely the first installment for Democrats. Several of them, including President Joe Biden, have already tied it to further spending. Senator Bernie Sanders also makes this case in a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled, “Why We Need the $3.5 Trillion Reconciliation Package.”

Sanders, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, claims that without this massive spending on government programs, millions of Americans will be left to suffer. Using misleading statistics like “three people own more wealth than the bottom 50%” and “real wages for workers haven’t increased in almost 50 years,” Sanders pushes socialism as the solution without actually referring to the term.

For example, he advocates for the government, which of course means American taxpayers, to pay for a laundry list of expanded schemes to redistribute income — universal child care, community college tuition for all Americans, guaranteed paid family leave and medical leave, expanding Medicare and Medicaid to essentially include everyone, affordable housing, citizenship to illegal aliens, and energy regulations that force Americans off fossil fuels and toward “sustainable energy to combat the existential threat of climate change.”

Joe Biden may have beaten Bernie Sanders in the Democrat presidential primary, but we can all see who’s running the show.

Of course, Sanders knows that Republicans won’t go along with socializing America, so he advocates that Democrats must pass this monstrosity on a party-line vote. “If Democrats can’t get Republican support for these reforms,” he writes, “then we have to do it alone through the reconciliation process.”

While falsely asserting that Republican tax cuts primarily benefited the rich and larger corporations, Sanders contends that the Democrats’ use of reconciliation is necessary in order to “support the middle class and struggling families and, in the process, create millions of good-paying jobs.” It’s a lie that tax cuts only help the wealthy and hurt the middle and lower class, but repeating this class warfare falsehood continues to help Democrats get elected.

The best thing Congress can do is sit by and let the economy recover from the pandemic without interference from legislative “good intentions” that more often than not stunt economic recovery and growth. Rather than promising more handouts, lawmakers should be encouraging people who are not working to go out and fill the millions of job openings. Of course, Sanders and his socialist posse know that doing so would prevent greater reliance on government, and in turn less opportunity for government bureaucrats to assert ever more control over Americans’ lives.

Politicians promising government-provided economic salvation is the road to authoritarian dictatorships and economic ruin.