I confess. There’s a small part of me that finds Bernie Sanders appealing. No doubt that will confirm the suspicions of readers/listeners who believe I’m a closet liberal and sound patronizing to progressives who “feel the Bern” to their very core.
Let me explain.
It is evident that Sanders is sincere…a true believer in how the government should be enlarged and empowered even more to further file down the edges of capitalism while spreading around the wealth.
He says, with great conviction, that college tuition should be free, we would be better off with a Medicare-for-all health care system and family leave with pay, we should stop using fossil fuels, the system is rigged against you, and that Americans will be willing to pay more taxes (or businesses will be forced to pay more taxes) for his proposals.
And he believes it! The fact that he has drawn huge crowds—including an estimated 6,000 people in Huntington Tuesday night—won primaries and remains in the race long after pundits thought he would be gone, demonstrates that many share his passion.
He has a kind of curmudgeon charisma that has played well in this most peculiar election cycle. In a time when we suspect many politicians are lying when their lips are moving, Sanders exudes an earnestness that suggests, “Even if he’s wrong about everything, he seems like a pretty decent guy.”
Beyond the sincerity, however, loom his Quixotic socialist dreams, and this is where the trouble starts.
Richard Rubin, who covers tax policy for the Wall Street Journal, reported last month that, according to a report by the Tax Policy Center, “Mr. Sanders’s proposals would increase federal taxes by $15.3 trillion over the next decade.”
The highest income earners would see their tax rates nearly double to 63.7 percent, while the middle 20 percent of households would pay on average another “$4,692 in 2017 and lose 8.5 percent of their after tax income.”
The Sanders campaign says the calculations are wrong, but somebody is going to have to pay for all the free stuff, and it’s going to be expensive.
But more concerning is the number of Sanders supporters who appear willing to forgo the opportunities (and risks) associated with a market driven economy and instead consign their well-being to the alleged comfort of the welfare state.
It’s predictable that college students would swoon at the idea of “free tuition,” until they enter the workforce and are confronted with the fiscal reality of what “free” means when it’s promised by the government; what appears to cost you nothing actually comes out of someone’s pocket.
Sanders’s would not only finish off coal, but also squelch the emerging natural gas industry by banning hydraulic fracturing, annulling the leading hope for industrial economic revival in West Virginia.
He promises to look out for laid off coal and gas workers, but what about the mechanic at the car dealership or the engineer with the environmental services company or thousands of others in related fields who lose their jobs if Sanders were able to follow through on his clampdown of fossil energy?
Sanders has generally gotten a pass on his positions because Hillary Clinton has always been the presumptive nominee, and now that appears inevitable. Sanders vows to continue in the race, saying his candidacy has always been about the policies he believes are best for the country and not the politics that are pragmatic for the Democratic Party.
Fair enough. Movements are not subject to the laws of political expediency; they either mushroom into something larger or flicker and extinguish.
And this movement needs to fade away.