Posted on July 17,
2016
Bernie’s Truth Deficit
So much for Sanders’ “Honesty”
by
Daniel
Clark
All those conservatives who credit Bernie Sanders with
being honest must have been more than a little perplexed by his speech in which
he announced his endorsement of Hillary Clinton. The socialist senator hopped aboard the
bandwagon of the quintessential “Wall Street candidate,” and if that wasn’t
enough of a sellout of his alleged principles, he even pretended to care about
runaway deficits.
During the same speech in which he charged that Donald
Trump “would increase our national debt by trillions of dollars,” he absolved
the sitting president for doing exactly that when he laughably claimed, “We
have come a long way in the last seven and a half years and I thank President 
Obama
and Vice President Biden for their leadership in pulling us out of that
terrible recession.”
Surely he’s aware that the economy has stagnated
throughout the Obama administration (GDP growth under 3% every single year), while
the national debt has almost doubled. By
leadership, one might deduce that he’s referring to Obama’s $831 billion
stimulus plan, which succeeded in stimulating nothing but federal deficits. If Trump is proposing anything that will add
more to the debt than that, it would be helpful if Sanders would cite an
example.
Furthermore, Sanders basically endorsed a repeat of
the Obama stimulus, when he praised Hillary because “she wants to create
millions of new jobs by rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure – our roads,
bridges, water systems and wastewater plants.”
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the government actually
creates 2 million jobs that pay an average of $50,000, through stimulus
spending on infrastructure. That’s
already $100 billion in salaries alone, for a single year. Factor in the total cost of employment, along
with the materials needed for all those projects, and then assume that these
jobs have some degree of permanency, and before long the plan is running in the
trillions.
Bernie said Hillary Clinton “believes that anyone 55
years or older should be able to opt in to Medicare.” Sanders often advocates a “single-payer”
health care system by obliviously employing the slogan “Medicare For All!” It’s
as if he doesn’t realize that the program is on track to become insolvent by
2028, even without dramatically increasing the number of participants. Either that, or he just doesn’t know or care
where the money’s coming from.
Considering that he’s never held a steady job outside of government, we
may reasonably assume the latter.
He continued, “Hillary is committed to seeing
thousands of young doctors, nurses, psychologists, dentists and other medical
professionals practice in underserved areas as we follow through on President
Obama’s idea of tripling funding for the National Health Service Corps.” What, only tripling?
“Hillary Clinton believes that we must substantially
lower student debt, and that we must make public colleges and universities
tuition-free for the middle class.” Under
Bernie’s plan, the federal government would pay two-thirds of the tuition for
all in-state students, without any mechanism for cost containment. Does that sound like somebody who cares a
whit about the national debt? Honestly.
Sanders faulted President Bush for “running up a
record-breaking deficit of $1.4 trillion” in 2009, on the basis that the
first-year deficit for one president results from the last budget of his
predecessor. He neglected to mention that
outlays from Obama’s stimulus package – which was not part of Bush’s budget,
and for which Democrats were wholly responsible – made up no less than
one-sixth of that year’s record amount.
Much of the rest of the 2009 deficit was caused by the
subprime mortgage crash, which was the culmination of an exercise in what
socialists like Sanders euphemistically call “social and economic justice.” To promote “affordable housing,” the federal
government required lending institutions to make home loans to people who would
likely never be able to repay them. More
specifically, Bill Clinton, the husband of the candidate Sanders just endorsed,
imposed subprime lending quotas on banks through his revision of the Community
Reinvestment Act, and also on “government-sponsored enterprises” Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac through mandates from HUD.
Implicit all along was the understanding that when these entities went
bankrupt, the taxpayers would bail them out.
Maybe this hypocrisy doesn’t seem like anything
remarkable. Democrats often get away
with feigning concern for the national debt, while also devising new programs
and bureaucracies that result in massive increases in annual federal
spending. This is no ordinary Democrat,
though. This is Bernie Sanders, who,
however misguided he may be, is reputed to be impeccably honest and
principled. Remember?
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