Posted on 04/26/2018 7:57:46 AM PDT by Kaslin
There he goes again. Despite the lowest unemployment rate in 17 years, including declining rates for minorities, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), affectionately called "crazy Bernie" by some conservative talk show hosts, is again flirting with the idea that the federal government should guarantee every American a job, paying a minimum of $15 an hour and health care benefits.
The Washington Post reports the plan would "...fund hundreds of projects throughout the United States aimed at addressing priorities such as infrastructure, health care, the environment, education and other goals. ... every American would be entitled to a job under one of these projects or receive job training to be able to do so, according to an early draft of the proposal."
The 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. George McGovern (D-SD), ran on a similar platform and lost 49 states. Go, Bernie, go!
Are we not already spending plenty on these "priorities"? Just on education, record spending hasn't helped improve the knowledge of students. They still lag behind students in other countries when it comes to science and math, and, apparently, even English, as the overuse of the words "like" and "you know" have dumbed down our common language.
What is it about socialism that remains so attractive to many liberals? In most communist countries, it is a form of mutually-shared poverty. At a minimum it starves incentive.
A thriving economy is the best guarantee of a job. The American economy is now thriving, expanding at an annual rate of 2.9 percent, which many economists said just a few years ago was impossible to expect. According to Tradingeconomics.com, the "unemployment rate is expected to be 4 percent by the end of this quarter" (it is now 4.1 percent). Going forward, it says, "We estimate the unemployment rate in the United States to stand at 3.80 in 12 months."
The goal of Sanders and others in the guaranteed-income crowd, according to Darrick Hamilton, an economist at the New School and Stony Brook University's Stephanie Kahn, who are quoted by The Washington Post, is to "eliminate working poverty and involuntary unemployment altogether."
Wait, hasn't that already been tried? The Great Society programs launched more than 50 years ago by President Lyndon Johnson had similar goals. They have so far cost a collective $22 trillion. While those programs include Medicare and Medicaid, which are long overdue for reform, the poverty rate in America is roughly the same as it was in the mid-1960s.
According to the Library of Economics and Liberty, "The United States produces more per capita than any other industrialized country, and in recent years governments at various levels have spent about $350 billion per year, or about 3.5 percent of gross domestic product, on programs serving low-income families. Despite this, measured poverty is more prevalent in the United States than in most of the rest of the industrialized world."
If government spending is the solution, wouldn't the problem of poverty and the dwindling number of unemployed be solved by now? How will more spending (and the inevitable higher taxes and increased debt) improve their lot?
Sanders' proposal is as likely to win approval as McGovern's failed to do in 1972, but it taps into a growing feeling, particularly among many young Americans, for whom feelings, not results, are ultimately what liberalism relies on. Many liberals feel corporations are evil, that some people are paid "too much," "income inequality" is something that should be addressed by government and, because some people make more money than others, America is an unfair nation.
This worldview appears to be increasingly taught in public schools and at the higher level by tenured college professors. This worldview did not build America, and if it ever takes over, it will never sustain us. Consider where it has been tried.
Would RATS be stupid enough to allow Bernie to run as a RAT for 2020 ?
Amazing how many young people latched on to this old fool.
Parasitic, punk socialism. BS ALERT!
” “...fund hundreds of projects throughout the United States aimed at addressing priorities such as infrastructure, health care, the environment, education and other goals. ... every American would be entitled to a job under one of these projects or receive job training to be able to do so, according to an early draft of the proposal.”
“The 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. George McGovern (D-SD), ran on a similar platform and lost 49 states. Go, Bernie, go!”
Bad news.
The electorate of 2020 is not the electorate of 1972. McGovern would not far ENOUGH Left for today’s Democrats. On that platform, Bernie would have a good shot at the Democrat nomination and the White House.
... and the only two jobs there will be to choose from will be the only two real jobs that Bernie ever tried and failed at: 1. registering people for food stamps, and 2. construction.
These socialists are all for redistributing our money....but not theirs. The third house Bernie bought only cost $600k. Maybe he should sell it and give the money to the poor and then he might have some credibility.
Usually the candidate uses his own resources to buy votes. Crazy Bernie is seeking to use the voters own money to buy their votes.
Didn’t the old USSR have a jobs for all program? Give a nation enough time with a jobs for all program and you will not need military might to bring it down. It self destructs. Who needs missiles when you have jobs for all to decimate the village.
What was amazing is, he’s an independent and the RATs let him into their nominating process.
Just a cleverly disguised way of giving the government control over all jobs. Government = sole employer = communism.
“Consider where it has been tried.”
I can think of some bloody, brutal, costly and hard-core ‘revolutions’ that were fought to throw off JUST such an exploitative, dehumanizing and feudalistic system.
Bernie is a regular half-wit
There’s always plenty of work to be done under communist tyranny. Hand digging mass graves for example.
It’s universal basic income by a different name, the scam that just failed in Finland. But bernie will explain the failure saying that it wasn’t implemented by the right people. His plan to pay for the scam is pure fiscal genius: He’ll pay the government loafers $15 an hour and tax them $20 an hour.
Whenever I experience a glimmer of optimism or hope for the future of the country, I’m sobered by facts like this, including the fact that BH0 was elected POTUS twice, and that the radical-Left Dems hold as many seats as they do in both houses of Congress.
“Amazing how many young people latched on to this old fool.”
Including my grandson during the 2016 election....he went for it.....”Mister free-everything.” I can’t wait for grandson to get out in the work force for real after finishing college.
As are most of his felonious schemes, this is nothing more than a redistribution of wealth—OURS. Where do government wages come from? OUR taxpayer monies. I strongly suspect that the holders of such make-work jobs would be barely functional in their new positions, probably rarely showing up or doing productive work, which is why they had no jobs to begin with.
Yeah, well, you see, we haven't had the "right" people in charge yet!
I was dumb enough to vote for Mr. Magoo in 1972...
I smartened up later on in life...
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