Liar Liar Bernie is on Fire

If you approached the American public to propose a new social welfare program, there’s a good chance that most people would be enthusiastic about your idea. The people who could benefit from the program would obviously be receptive, and even the people who didn’t need it, would like the idea of helping the less fortunate members of our society.

However, these attitudes can turn on a dime once you tell the second group that they are going to pay for this program. See, we all like free stuff without strings attached, and most of us feel good about helping people, but only to a certain extent. If it’s no skin off our backs then we’re more than happy to help, but if it’s going to be a major financial burden to help someone, especially if we’ve never met this person before, it’s going to be a hard sell.

Now that our lesson on human behavior 101 is over, let’s start a new lesson on socialism 101. Socialists know that the average person doesn’t like to spend his money on people he doesn’t know, and for services that he doesn’t need. So how does a socialist convince everyone to accept the social programs that they want to impose on society? They lie of course.

They always tell the middle and lower classes that somebody with more money than themselves, is going to foot the bill. Unfortunately, everybody who lives under a socialist system will lose something, one way or another. In moderate socialist states, like the kind that Bernie Sanders has proposed, everybody pays with either higher taxes, low quality products and services, or a loss of economic freedom. Under extreme leftist regimes, the bill is paid with a mountain of corpses.

Make no mistake though, everybody will pay, so don’t believe any socialist who tells you that somebody else is going to be your sugar daddy. Least of all, don’t believe Bernie Sanders when he says that only the upper class is going to pay for his social programs, which is exactly what he claimed when he was interviewed by Bill Maher recently.

Maher, despite being sympathetic to Sanders, actually challenged him on the notion that we could pay for his programs by simply taxing the super rich. After discussing his ideas and how America would pay for them, he broke everything down into simple terms.

OK. But you want to increase social security.

“And you know how we do that? We pay for it. We say that somebody who’s making $10 million should not end up paying the same amount as someone making $118,000. Lift the cap. We can extend and expand social security.”

You also want free college.

“We do. Not free college—free tuition at public colleges and universities. You know how we pay for that? Through a tax on Wall Street speculation.”

So you’re saying we can pay for all this without raising taxes on anybody but the 1 percent?

“We may have to go down a little bit lower than that—but not much lower. And what people have to understand is right now people can’t afford to send their kids to college, and people are graduating school deeply in debt. Do I think we should join Germany and many other countries and encourage young people to get the education that they need, and make the country stronger? I sure do.”

You’ve got to love statements like “not free college-free tuition at public colleges and universities.” That’s socialist doublespeak at its finest.

What’s worse though, is that he’s clearly lying about only taxing the rich. That’s obvious enough, but not just because he’s a socialist. Contrary to his interview with Maher, he revealed on ABC’s “This Week” that everyone is going to feel the Bern. After Stephanopoulos repeatedly asked him if he would tax people below the 1%, he had this to say.

Sanders said, “I think if you are looking about guaranteeing paid family and medical leave, which every other major country has so that when a mom gives birth she doesn’t have to go back to work in two weeks. Dad or mom can stay home with the kids. That will require a small increase in the payroll tax.”

Stephanopoulos said, “That’s going to hit everybody.”

Sanders agreed saying, “That would hit everybody, yeah, it would but it would mean we were drawing the rest of the industrialized world and make sure that when a mom has a baby she can in fact stay home with that baby for three months rather than go back to work at the end of one week.

Perhaps that’s just one issue, but he seems to think that he can pay for everything else by closing tax loopholes and penalizing Wall Street. It can certainly be said that there is a serious income inequality problem in this country, but there is no amount of money in the world that is going to pay for socialism, because it always leads to insolvency and poverty. And since the rich never have enough money to support this kind of system, all of us will wind up paying.

Sorry Bernie, you can’t fool us all.