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Bernie Sanders

I woke up this morning and it occurred to me Bernie Sanders is the equivalent of that well known American phenomenon: the impulse buy.  He is the equivalent of someone with maxed out credit cards coming under stress and deciding that a new purse, or shoes, or gun, or boat is going to make it all alright.

We are borrowing $1 trillion a year NOW.  We have a $19 trillion national debt NOW, and interest alone on that debt will within a few short years exceed the Defense expenditures leftists love to target as discretionary.  Well, the interest on the national debt will not be discretionary.

Nor will the massive increases in the annual amounts due to our seniors be discretionary.  That is what is defined as non-discretionary.  Members of both parties, but obviously most cravenly and consistently the Democrats, have consistently raised Medicare and Social Security benefits to where they far exceed what was paid in, and even much of what was paid in was long ago spent on the salaries and benefits, and buildings and business conferences of the 100,000 or more bureaucrats who administer these programs.

Social Security is a coerced program of negative investment, where you are lucky to get back 25% of what you paid in, and where the difference is made up on the backs of the working poor–who in all cases cannot avoid this 15% tax on their paychecks–and the young, who pay into programs their whole lives, without it being likely they can make back what they paid in, at least without major reforms.

Returning to my main point, we have some $60 trillion in unfunded liabilities TODAY.  Edit: that seemed low.  Here is one from two years ago: http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/01/17/you-think-the-deficit-is-bad-federal-unfunded-liabilities-exceed-127-trillion/#1ace05a510d3  $127 trillion is the number they use.

And is it not INTERESTING that virtually no one is talking about it today?  Rand and Ron Paul talked about it, but it’s not a major issue with anyone else, that I can tell.  When I Google it, why is such an existential threat the virtual hit equivalent of Googling Belorussian UFO’s?

We are lunatics.  In past times there was an excuse.  It was much easier to hide information.  Now, if you look, it is there, with very little work.  You do not even have to go to the library and search card catalogs or pull microfiche, which some of us remember doing.

Consider, honestly, these claims being made.

Bernie says he can reform instantly a system of higher education which has been getting more and more ridiculously expensive because the Federal government makes and backs student loans, but offers no way to dismiss them in bankruptcy.  He says he can make education “free”, which is to say he thinks he can get taxpayers to foot 100% of the bill of an overbloated, ineffective system, and do it in a short 4-8 years.

Bernie says he can make healthcare “free”, which is to say he thinks he can raise taxes enough, and redistribute them through a system of healthcare which has been evolving over many decades, and do it in such a way that everyone performs better at lower costs.

This is someone with $20,000 in credit card debts–which incidentally were incurred by a long term repetition of the same psychological malady–thinking that if they could only get $5,000 more, everything will be OK.

People who want to vote for Bernie are like 800 pound bed ridden losers who think one more package of Oreos will solve everything.

It is the solution of fools, of the deluded, of the imbecilic, of the childish.

Government is not supposed to give you everything: it is supposed to protect your right to go out there and get it.  If you don’t want to do that work, then you are no longer a responsible human being, and your useful term on Earth is at an end.  There is no learning in sloth and dependency.  It is necessary for infants, but no later than that.  Socialism is the creed of the decadent.  The decadent become weak, and as Eric Ritter argued, weakness becomes hate becomes cruelty, and that is what I call Cultural Sadeism.

If you want to be good, you have to learn to interact with the world’s pain, to feel it, and to become an organizing agent, a worker, a rebel in the face of a world of hunger.  You cannot grant it final ascendancy, as those who simply want a full belly, an empty mind, and endless circuses and games do.