To get an intellectually honest statement out of Senator Bernie Sanders, we have to go all the way back to the 1980s.
The anti-capitalist crusader sure is good at promising his followers the world – and then some. Hillary Clinton even complains in her new book that she was competing against a man “promising everyone a free pony.” Bernie’s style in making promises is simple: Identify something everyone would rather not pay for, offer it for free, and then don’t mention how you’re going to pay for it.
If anyone inquires about how the freebies will be funded, just mention “millionaires and billionaires,” as if the richest one percent in the country aren’t already paying half of federal income taxes.
While Bernie’s always been a socialist, he at least acknowledged budget constraints existed back in the 1980s – a time when the government collected much less revenue than it does today. In a video reported on by the Washington Free Beacon, Sanders is caught saying that a single-payer health care system would bankrupt the U.S.
In the interview, Sanders says, “You want to guarantee that all people have access to health care as you do in Canada, but I think what we understand is that unless we change the funding system and the control mechanism in this country to do that—for example, if we expanded Medicaid [to] everybody. Give everybody a Medicaid card—we would be spending such an astronomical sum of money that, you know, we would bankrupt the nation.”
Watch below:
If only the 1987 version of Sanders was around to talk some sense into the Bernie of today. He probably could’ve told him that his newly proposed socialized medicine plan would cost nearly $1.5 trillion a year.
That’s a lot of money.
Maybe Bernie still knows the truth, But who can blame him for trying to pass socialized medicine despite it? He knows it’ll never get passed – and since Democrats will never have to deal with the fiscal reality of implementing it, they can use the opportunity to demonize Republicans for supposedly not caring about the sick.
It’s a cynical win-win.
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