Didja hear the one about the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who thought he knew how to save America?
Sadly, this isn’t a joke. The newest Democratic presidential contender for 2020 is Andrew Yang, dubbed the “Ross Perot for millennials” because his style is being called a “soft reboot of the Texan businessman’s maverick populist wonkery.”
“Most of the 2020 Democrats have websites full of donation buttons and windy nonsense about hope and unity,” applauds Matthew Walther in The Week. “You would have to go a long way to discover what, if anything, most of them have to say about public policy. Not Yang. His is the most detailed platform I have ever seen from any candidate in a primary election. It is also far and away the most interesting.”
Among the things Walther finds to intriguing is Yang’s “universal health care, the reform of the student loan industry, the implementation of a postal banking system, and free financial counseling for Americans.” Yang wants to “eliminate robo-calling and to increase public funding for the arts and local newspapers. He would like to protect children from smartphones and to pay college athletes. He argues – rightly – that the best way to ensure that wealthy people pay their fair share of taxes is to impose a VAT, something that would also help to restructure the economy so that it is not organized around endless wasteful consumption of cheap goods.”
Oh, and Yang will also fight against fake news by creating a “news and information ombudsman, a kind of imperial fact-checker who would award media liars heavy fines instead of pinocchios.” (Good to know the arbiter of “fake news” will be in the hands of leftists.)
Walther seems particularly charmed by Yang’s new and improved terminology. His proposed $1,000-per-person universal basic income, for example, will be called a “freedom dividend,” which, Walther enthuses, “sounds a million times cooler.”
Naturally, Yang is a little vague about where the money will come from for all these reforms. “The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan think tank, estimates a basic income of $10,000 a year – $2,000 less than Yang’s proposal – would cost the government $3 trillion a year,” notes Time magazine. “Social Security, by comparison, totaled $988 billion in Fiscal Year 2018.”
Then of course, there’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “ambitious” plan to fight climate change. Bloomberg reports, “The so-called Green New Deal may tally between $51 trillion and $93 trillion over 10 years. … That includes between $8.3 trillion and $12.3 trillion to meet the plan’s call to eliminate carbon emissions from the power and transportation sectors and between $42.8 trillion and $80.6 trillion for its economic agenda including providing jobs and health care for all.”
Not to be outdone, Sen. Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren pitched $100 trillion in new spending for her 2020 presidential platform. In a CNN town-hall meeting earlier this week, “Sen. Warren responded to almost every question with a proposed new government program,” reports Grabien. “Over the course of the 80 minute forum, Sen. Warren endorsed Medicare-for-All, slavery reparations, universal childcare, universal pre-K, ‘universal pre-pre-K,’ the creation of 3 million new federal housing units, increasing infrastructure spending several times, forgiveness of student loan debt and the Green New Deal. Add it all up, and it’s more than $100 trillion.”
Do you sense a theme here? Apparently, the best Democratic platform is to outspend the competition with no regards to fiscal reality. Conversations are taking place like the following:
“Well, I can spend a hundred trillion dollars.”
“Oh yeah? Well I can spend a gazillion fincillion pipkillion dollars!”
We’ve seen promises of government largesse before, of course, but never have we seen such blatant pledges to spend money that doesn’t, and cannot, exist. And the voters – the stupid saps – say “gimme gimme” as they sell their souls and their country into hell.
Republicans are just as bad, but not as flagrant. They spend just as much, but those kinds of promises aren’t usually part of their platform because they know their voters aren’t in favor of more government control.
So here’s a taste of fiscal reality. The total American Gross Domestic Product for 2017 was $19.5 trillion. To fulfill, say, Pocahontas Warren’s promises, she would have to confiscate every single penny of every single individual in America – and that wouldn’t even come close to paying for her programs. As an even more interesting fact, the GDP for the entire planet is estimated by the International Monetary Fund as just a touch over $80 trillion. There is, literally, not enough money in the whole world to fund the Democrats’ crazy schemes.
“The $93 trillion Green New Deal would bankrupt this country while throwing millions of Americans out of work,” notes columnist Daniel Turner. “Unemployment and deficits would skyrocket, and energy shortages would plague our electric grid. These socialist policies would wreak havoc on our freedom and way of life, as they have done throughout history.”
Turner documents the objections to the Green New Deal by the nation’s largest union, who wasn’t fooled by Ocasio-Cortez’s pledge to create “high-quality union jobs that pay prevailing wages.”
“The AFL-CIO correctly realized that her pledge is nothing more than hollow words,” said Turner. “You cannot throw millions of people out of work and expect new jobs to fall from the sky.”
In all cases, the unifying leftist agenda of these proposed programs is to eradicate capitalism and replace it with socialism. Once again, reality (history, facts, common sense) doesn’t enter the picture. Capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system on the planet, throughout history and with every nation that’s tried it. But socialism, in the words of Walter Williams, is “a system that has caused more deaths and human misery than all other systems combined,” with an estimated death toll of 262 million people in just the 20th century alone.
When you hear promises like those of Yang, Ocasio-Cortez, or Warren, consider what they’re appealing to: greedy individuals who want everything for “free” without working for it, whose mantra is “Gimme gimme gimme.”
Now compare this to Trump’s platform, which is this: “You want something? Then work for it yourself. My job is to get the governmental busybodies out of the way so you can do it.”
So whenever you hear people like Warren promise $100 trillion in spending, visualize this clip from the movie Austin Powers where Dr. Evil makes his ransom demands:
… and replace Dr. Evil with Pocahontas:
America is the land of the Free, not the home of the Gimmes.
