In 2016 during Bernie Sanders’ first run for president, Investor’s Business Daily called him “the bum who wants your money.”
Sanders failed at everything he tried, IBD explained, except yakking about socialism and the crimes of the rich.
Now, 29 years after he was elected to Congress, he’s still yakking about socialism but has become one of the rich. In other words, he’s learned nothing about economics in those three decades, likely because he got rich through elected politics, not private enterprise.
Such is Sanders’ ignorance that he thinks he can put half the American workforce on government payrolls and boost the cost of government to nearly $200 trillion through the next 10 years.
Everything for Everybody … Free
Writing at City Journal yesterday, Manhattan Institute’s Brian Reidl predicted that his “plans would cost as much as $97.5 trillion over the next decade, and total government spending at all levels would surge to as high as 70 percent of gross domestic product. Approximately half of the American workforce would be employed by the government. The ten-year budget deficit would approach $90 trillion, with average annual deficits exceeding 30 percent of GDP.”
Sanders, Reidl wrote, offers three “ambitious proposals,” a generous description of his blueprint to say the least.
“Daft,” might be more like it, but anyway, Medicare For All accounts for $30 trillion to $40 trillion of Reidl’s estimate. Sanders’ climate plan would cost $16.3 trillion, while his promise to give every American a full-time government job at $15 an hour, with full benefits, is pegged at $30.1 trillion.
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Free public-college tuition and erasing student debt would cost $3 trillion; and housing, $2.5 trillion. Expanding Social Security requires $1.8 trillion, and paid family leave, $1.6 trillion. Sanders would spend another $1 trillion on “infrastructure,” and $1.2 trillion on K-12 education and higher salaries for teachers.
“This unprecedented outlay would more than double the size of the federal government,” Reidl wrote. “Over the next decade, Washington is already projected to spend $60 trillion, and state and local governments will spend another $29.7 trillion…. Adding Sanders’s $97.5 trillion — and then subtracting the $3 trillion saved by state governments under Medicare For All — would raise the total cost of government to $184 trillion, or 70 percent of the projected GDP over ten years.”
That would outdo even the most generous social democracies in Europe:
The 35 OECD countries average 43 percent of GDP in total government spending. Finland’s 57 percent tops the list, edging France and Denmark. Meantime, Sweden and Norway — regularly lauded as models for the U.S. — spend just under 50 percent of GDP. The U.S. government, at all levels, spends between 34 percent and 38 percent of GDP, depending on how one calculates.
Sanders’s agenda is virtually impossible to pay for. Adding $97.5 trillion in new spending to an underlying $15.5 trillion projected budget deficit (under current policies) creates a ten-year budget gap of $113 trillion. Yet Sanders’s tax proposals would raise at most $23 trillion over the decade.
Though tax increases won’t come close to covering the bill for Sanders’s “Everything Is Free” plan, “tax rates would soar,” Reidl concluded.
Sanders would boost payroll taxes from 15.3 percent to 27.1 percent, and the top federal income-tax rate to 52 percent. He would tax capital gains and dividends as ordinary income, and hit the wealthy with another 10-percent tax. “Overall, upper-income taxpayers would face a marginal tax rate as high as 80 percent from their federal income, state income, and payroll taxes,” Reidl wrote. “They would also be assessed a 62 percent investment tax rate, an annual wealth tax of up to 8 percent, and a 77 percent estate tax.”
And after all that, taxpayers would still be left with a $90 trillion budget deficit — 34 percent of gross domestic product. “Closing the rest of the gap … $66,000 per household annually — is basically impossible.”
Skinflint Sanders
Reidl’s final tallies show how many Americans would work for government. Right now, that figure is 23 million, but Sanders’ plan would add about 45 million. The nation’s 16 million private healthcare employees would go public, and another one million would staff it all. “That’s 85 million … out of a 170-million-person American workforce,” Reidl wrote.
So after three decades of watching government from the inside, Sanders believes the American taxpayer can and should support a government that will cost nearly $10 trillion a year over the next 10 years.
Sanders used his position in government to get rich after years of not working. A millionaire with three homes, he gives virtually nothing to charity. He has stopped denouncing millionaires and now aims at billionaires.
He isn’t just a bum who wants your money. He’s a crazy socialist who wants to wreck your country.
Photo: AP Images
