The Patriot Post® · Bernie's Billionaire Bilking Scheme

These days, it seems like your government is doing everything it can to keep working-class people in a never-ending struggle to make ends meet.

From the soaring national debt to runaway inflation to the new mortgage penalty for people with good credit, Uncle Sam keeps putting up barriers that keep us from financial freedom. Maybe, just maybe, if the government would stop wasting billions of our hard-earned tax dollars, we’d be less inclined to reach for our torches and pitchforks.

After all, why should we trust a government that’s clearly proven it can’t balance the national checkbook? In many cases, the same politicians who debilitate us are themselves multimillionaires.

And it’s people like socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders who are the biggest hypocrites. He thinks a billion dollars is too much wealth, and he wants the government to confiscate it. But there’s more to Sanders’s demagogic “For the 99.5 Percent Act” than just punishing billionaires.

As The Epoch Times reports: “The proposed legislation calls for wealthy heirs to pay more on their inheritances by expanding the estate tax to 45 percent on estates worth at least $3.5 million. It will also impose a 65 percent tax — a so-called ‘billionaire’s tax’ — on estates worth over $1 billion.”

How convenient for Sanders to talk about the necessity of wealth confiscation when he himself lives a life of luxury. Remember, this is the same guy who once said bread lines are “a good thing,” but who owns multiple large and expensive homes. That’s the point of socialism: to make sure government elites have all the power and all the money, while the proles live in poverty.

In an interview with a CNN irrelevancy named Chris Wallace, Sanders tried to defend his billionaire tax idea by claiming that no one should have that kind of money “when you have got a half a million people who are homeless in America today, when you have 85 million people who can’t afford health insurance.” And here we thought ObamaCare fixed that last part.

Even Wallace, no ardent defender of capitalism, questioned Sanders as to why it was fair to penalize a company like Walmart that employs 1.6 million Americans. Of course, Sanders just shrugged it off. Clearly, he’s got no qualms about soaking these companies.

In a press release, Sanders’s Senate office proudly played the class-warfare card: “Under the Republican estate tax legislation, the Walton family, the owners of Walmart, would save up to $88 billion in estate taxes on their $220.9 billion fortune. In contrast, they would pay up to $55 billion more in taxes under Sanders’ legislation.”

We wonder: Would most Americans rather trust the Walton family to wisely spend their tax dollars than government bureaucrats?

Sanders’s statement continues: “Under the Republican estate tax legislation, the family of Elon Musk would save up to $72 billion in estate taxes on his $180 billion fortune. In contrast, his family would pay up to $45 billion more in taxes under Sanders’ legislation.”

Unlike our federal government, though, Elon Musk seems to be doing some beneficial things for society. And he probably spends his money more efficiently than the spendthrift pols in Washington who never saw a debt ceiling they couldn’t blow past.

You see, people who earn their money actually have to think about how they spend it. They don’t have the convenience of simply printing trillions more like the Treasury Department.

Sanders and his socialist colleagues always paint the wealthy with a broad brush. They conveniently ignore the fact that most wealthy individuals and corporations do more for the rest of us than any government programs. They provide jobs, engage in philanthropy, invest in education and science, and create goods and services.

Maybe that’s why Sanders is upset about the billionaire class. Rather than the money, which Congress will end up wasting anyway, it’s the fact that these billionaires have the power to make a real difference in the lives of Americans without any need for government involvement. As President Ronald Reagan once said, “We don’t have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven’t taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much.”

For people like Bernie Sanders, it’s never going to be enough. And that’s one reason our debt is nearing $32 trillion.

Fortunately, Sanders’s legislation will be dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled House. It’s a slim majority, but it’s the only thing keeping Bernie and his fellow big-spenders from taking even more of what’s not theirs to take.