FOR 2020 DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES
THE BIG, UNRULY CROWD OFWOULD-BE DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES IS ENGAGED IN A FREE-FOR-ALL. Literally. They’re fighting to see who can promise the most free stuff to the largest number of people – college tuition, student-loan forgiveness, Medicare-For-All, Universal Basic Income (UBI), and throw in the kitchen sink of subsidized housing for the homeless who crowd the sidewalks of places like San Francisco and Portland where everybody votes Democratic.
By P.J. O’Rourke
Some Democratic candidates come right out and call this socialism. Others lie about being socialists. The socialists are lying too... They say we’ll take from the rich and give to the poor. A few numbers: The 10% of Americans who earn the most money make a total of about $4.75 trillion a year. These are the rich. Not that they’re crazy rich... An annual household income of $118,000 puts people in the top 10%. But let’s not quibble, $118,000 ain’t hay. They’re the rich. We’ll take from them. And, what the heck, let’s take everything from them – all $4.75 trillion. Now let’s give to the poor. Or try to. The federal budget for 2018 was $4.1 trillion – without any new programs for dispensing costly goods and services at no cost to the recipients. If we took every bit of the $4.75 trillion from the rich, it would last the federal government 14 and a half months. Meanwhile, the people we took the money from have been earning nothing for more
than a year... so they now qualify for free stuff, too. Where are we going to get it? I suppose we could ask the 10% to go back to work but not get paid. They might be crabby about that. So let’s not tax income... Let’s tax wealth. Being bloated plutocrats isn’t about what the rich earn – it’s about what they own . The filthy rich still have a fortune socked away in physical assets, stocks, bonds, and those secret Cayman Islands bank accounts they all use. (Slip a little Medicare-For-All and UBI to Cayman Islands bank tellers and we’ll have rich people’s PINs in no time.) America has tremendous wealth disparity. A brief search of the Internet... which is free the way Democratic candidates say all good things should be, therefore the Internet is a good thing, and since the Internet is good, all the information I find on the Internet about “wealth disparity” must be true... But I digress.
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April 2019
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