The Patriot Post® · The Birds & Bees of Economics
When it comes to making money, self-confirmed Socialist Bernie Sanders is no slouch. In spite of his hatred of Capitalism, he has managed to accumulate over a million dollars and three homes. What’s more, he isn’t ashamed of his wealth. He even boasts that he earned it writing books, something that I, who have devoted most of my life to writing, haven’t been able to do.
Still and all, he doesn’t appear to know the simplest facts of life when it comes to money.
The things he has proposed during his presidential campaign come at a very steep price. And while these can only be estimated, I think we can all agree that when it comes to government spending, there will always be cost-overruns.
But let us, for the sake of argument, agree with these seemingly reasonable guesses: Medicare for All, $36 trillion; Federal Jobs Guarantee, $44.6 trillion; Housing for All, $2.5 trillion; Green New Deal, $161 trillion. So, even without including free college tuition, the paying off of college debt and providing free health care to illegal aliens, we’re talking about $244.1 trillion. And that’s only for the first 10 years.
When asked how he (meaning we) would pay for all this, Sanders talks about raising taxes on the super wealthy.
What he appears to be unaware of is that even if you include his two former competitors, Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, there are only another 605 billionaires in America. Their accumulated wealth amounts to a paltry $9.1 trillion. That would cover only one-fourth of Bernie’s Medicare for All wet dream.
And keep in mind I’m not talking about raising taxes on the likes of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Ted Turner, Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros, Warren Buffett, Charles Koch, Sam Walton’s kids, Elon Musk and even Oprah Winfrey. I’m talking about confiscating every last one of their dollars and leaving them barefoot on the streets, sleeping in cardboard boxes.
The scary thing isn’t just that a presidential contender is proposing something as insane as a series of expenditures that are not rooted in anything even slightly resembling reality but are the delusions of a committed Communist who holds the United States in contempt.
Sanders is not merely a fantasist, he is someone who finds the time to compliment the achievements of murderous despots like Mao, Stalin, Castro, Che Guevara and Hugo Chavez, but has never had a good word to say about the moral and intellectual titans who founded this nation.
But as scary as he is, what’s even more blood-curdling is the fact that there are tens of millions of Americans who are eagerly awaiting the opportunity to vote for him.
In case you missed it, Chelsea Clinton, who is now being identified as an assistant professor of public health at Columbia, weighed in on the coronavirus to complain that Rush Limbaugh was downplaying the seriousness of the threat and deriding President Trump for not doing enough to keep us safe from what, so far at least, is not living up to the media hype.
I happen to agree with Mr. Limbaugh. As I see it, any disease that can’t kill off more than about 2,500 people world-wide in a month hardly deserves to be called an epidemic.
But speaking of diseases, is there no way to rid ourselves of the Clintons? At least Bill seems to have retired from politics, the better to pursue women in his 70s. But Hillary keeps hanging around like a bad head cold, while her equally unattractive and obnoxious daughter keeps popping up like the world’s homeliest jack-in-the-box.
Does anyone, including Kirsten Gillibrand, doubt that New York City resident, Assistant Professor of Public Health Chelsea Clinton, could run for Gillibrand’s Senate seat and win? After all, New York is one of the few places where Hillary Clinton could walk the streets and not have people pointing at her and screaming “Unclean!”
Speaking of obnoxious New Yorkers, Michael Bloomberg has spent many years and donated millions of dollars to help elect like-minded politicians who sought to revoke the Second Amendment.
Just because he has given up hopes of becoming President Bloomberg doesn’t mean he won’t continue doing everything in his power to revoke the Second Amendment.
Now that he has dropped out of the race, he will be spending his money to help Joe Biden get elected. No doubt with the understanding that Biden and his gun czar Beto O'Rourke will attempt to confiscate the guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens.
But I wonder if it has ever occurred to Bloomberg that long before the NRA was created, it was the likes of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, who constituted what he and his fellow morons so contemptuously refer to as the gun lobby.
China has lately been much in the news, but never in a good way. If it’s not a disease they’re exporting, it’s tainted dog food. When they’re not conquering Tibet and threatening Taiwan and Japan, they’re propping up their loony, nuclear-armed, puppet in North Korea. When they’re not building islands in the South China Sea and turning them into military installations, they’re churning out electronic devices capable of spying on their owners. When they’re not rolling tanks over Chinese freedom seekers in Tiananmen Square, they’re turning firehoses on freedom seekers in Hong Kong.
And if all that isn’t bad enough, they’re chowing down on bats, skunks, snakes, badgers and puppy dogs.
But it didn’t all happen overnight and they didn’t do it all by themselves.
First, it took Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to swing open the door to the West.
Then a series of presidents stood idly by while our factories closed, placing millions of workers on the unemployment roster, so that their jobs could be moved to China.
As we’ve just recently discovered, among the essential things we’ve entrusted the Chinese to produce for us are antibiotics, penicillin, face masks and most of our generic pharmaceuticals.
For his part, Bill Clinton saw to it that whatever American technology the Chinese weren’t able to steal be provided to them in exchange for contributions to his re-election campaign.
But even those creeps couldn’t have carried it all off by themselves. The rest of us had to do our part to help make China the financial giant, and thereby the military colossus they’ve become, by buying all their crapola at Target and Walmart.
There is a certain cruel irony in the fact that a nation that demands a minimum wage for unskilled workers and union wages for all the rest insists on buying so many things produced by serfs earning coolie wages.
Time for a few more thoughts culled from the pages of “Screw Calm and Get Angry”: “Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret.” (Benjamin Disraeli)
“If you wake up and you’re not in pain, you know you’re dead.” (Russian proverb)
“Life is easy to chronicle but bewildering to practice.” (E.M. Forster)
“I know that God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish He didn’t trust me so much.” (Mother Teresa)
“It is preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly.” (Bertrand Russell)
“In our civilization, and under our form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.” (Ambrose Bierce)