Last year, Bernie Sanders lost a rigged primary contest to Hillary Clinton. The competition may not have been fair, but at least we were spared the cradle-to-the-grave welfare state Sanders wanted.
One of the early estimates of the cost for his socialistic vision came from the Wall Street Journal. The paper estimated that it would require an additional $18 trillion above what the federal government is already expected to spend over the next decade to fund Bernie’s freebies.
Among the programs the Santa Claus candidate promised were socialized medicine, free daycare, an expansion of Social Security, free college, a trillion dollar infrastructure program, among others.
Now, Bernie will never succeed in getting those programs passed with Republicans in control of Congress. The man has only passed three bills during his entire career as a senator, two of which were to rename Post Offices, so we don’t expect a surprise wave of success now. Despite the fact that Bernie will never get any of his freebies passed through Congress, it is true that there are plenty of congressional Democrats who have a favorable view of socialism, but who aren’t quite as outspoken as Bernie is about it.
Given that socialism still exists as an ideology despite failing literally every single place it’s ever been tried, lawmakers like Bernie are still trying to make it a part of American public policy. As Ronald Reagan said in his famous 1963 “Time For Choosing” speech, “back in 1927 an American socialist, Norman Thomas, six times candidate for president on the Socialist Party ticket, said the American people would never vote for socialism. But he said under the name of liberalism the American people would adopt every fragment of the socialist program.”
And he was right.
But as you’re all aware, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Every dollar in government benefits given for “free” is a dollar taken from the private sector, and to give you just a preview of how expensive socialism would be, just look at the tax rate that Bernie is proposing. According to the Daily Wire, “the Vermont Democrat backs a top tax rate of 90%. You read that right — 90%.”
Bernie made his call for a return of the 90% bracket in an interview with Alec Baldwin. Here’s what he told the actor: “During [President Dwight] Eisenhower’s period, I think the highest income tax was what, 90% or something like that for the very, very, very wealthy. And these are marginal rates. I mean, that means at the very top, that’s what you’re going to be paying.”
Bernie is hilariously clueless when it comes to the history of taxation in this country, because when we had the 91% top tax rate that Bernie wants, nobody actually paid it. Well, not literally nobody, but only people who earned above $3,425,766 annually in inflation adjusted dollars. In most years, the number of people actually paying the full 90+% tax rate was in the single digits, as write-offs and loopholes were essentially mandated in the face of such a strikingly high tax rate.
So, no, we never really had a 90 percent tax rate in the past, but it’s sure as hell something we don’t want introduced in the future.
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