Bernie Sanders may be way older than I am, but that aside, we grew up under strikingly similar circumstances: no frills working class families in small rent-controlled Brooklyn apartments. And yet, the guy’s a raging socialist while I’m so fiscally conservative it’s a miracle that the Silicon Valley elite still put up with me living here.
That’s why I own a gun. Fear of progressive lynch mobs. Sometimes I imagine them coming to get me with their medical marijuana cards, sustainable clothing, tats, and Birkenstocks stuffed into dozens of Suburu Outbacks singing Bernie’s theme song, Simon & Garfunkel’s America.
Speaking of things that terrify me, I was having a glass of Pinot and grilling some salmon after a typical 10-hour workday (my wife takes lots of night classes, probably to get out having to cook for me … which is ironic because they’re culinary classes) and caught Bernie’s speech after he won the New Hampshire primary.
All his crazy entitlement programs and new taxes to pay for them would crush our anemic economy and just about double the national debt from $19 to $37 trillion. When the dust settles, half of us will be working stiffs for the federal government and the other half will be on welfare and food stamps. Then we go bankrupt.
The question is, how can anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of economics and finance not see that as a death spiral? The answer is you can’t. Either that or you’ve gone off your meds. Last time I checked, this was still the real world, not utopia.
I guess that explains the entitlement mentality: how so many Americans don’t have a pot to piss in, are in debt up to their eyeballs, and still have to have the latest clothes, cars, and consumer gadgets. They’re fine sacrificing free speech for political correctness but just try taking away their iPhones, crossovers, and hundred dollar hoodies.
As Margaret Thatcher said, “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” The same is true of entitlements. And Bernie Sanders.
While we’re on the subject: Why Hillary and Bernie are Wrong About Wall Street
Image credit Gage Skidmore via Flickr
Great article, Steve. First, I get angry at “progressives” ( which is just a polite buzz word for communists), then I actually come close to tears asking myself how so many people could be so naive. Nikita Khrushchev said it best when he said (am I paraphrasing) “We won’t have to take America, they’ll fall like an over ripened fruit right into our hands”. Every single person in this country wanting to vote for a socialist should be forced to watch Milton Friedman’s 6 part interview with Phil Donahue from 1979. All that Friedman said 35 years ago remains just as true today as it was then, but then, to quote another great American “Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one”. That was Ben Franklin, and unfortunately, I think this is exactly what’s about to happen to us all. 53% of the U.S. population is suffering from a lack of experience of what it means to really work, raise families, take pride in what they do and to have a shot at the American dream. Our grandparents and great grandparents must be rolling around in their graves watching this time of U.S. history.
Naivety on the part of students I suppose I get … I was sort of idealistic at that age as well. But there really is no rational explanation or excuse for others to be so willfully blind to reality.