The modern-day Democratic Party is, on any number of issues, simply beyond parody. The far-left tail that is the AOC-led “Squad” has long come to wag the dog that is the institutional party apparatus, and perhaps nowhere is this dynamic more obvious than in the intersection of economics and mathematics that sentient human beings have hitherto referred to as “sanity.”
In the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Communist – VT) was notable for proposing sundry pie-in-the-sky socialistic nostrums that far outflanked eventual nominee Hillary Clinton on the hard left. In the clown car pile-up that is the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Sanders has once again outdone himself. As economic policy expert Brian Riedl recently broke down for City Journal, Sanders’ “current plans would cost as much as $97.5 trillion over the next decade,” and government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product would rise to an astonishing 70% — or three and a half times the 20% that has been the frequent post-World War II American norm. The single priciest component of Sanders’ hammer-and-sickle agenda, as the erstwhile Soviet Union honeymooner has conceded, is his bankrupting “Medicare for All” plan — to the tune of $30–$40 trillion over a ten-year timeframe.
What is simply remarkable is that Sanders’ “Medicare for All” price tag now looks positively conservative compared to the newly unveiled plan of 2020 Democratic presidential primary rival Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). As The Daily Wire’s Ashe Schow noted earlier today, Warren’s new “Medicare for All” proposal “would cost $52 trillion over 10 years.” Proving even more thoroughly that the quixotic Democratic Party mind lies somewhere between the idyllic river of dragon dreams and the paradisal valley of unicorn farts, Warren doubled down on the disingenuous mathematical impossibility that she peddled ad nauseam at the last presidential primary debate and informed us gullible plebeians that her plan will somehow not result in middle class tax hikes.
Hmmmm.
As Riedl has previously demonstrated, there is simply no world in which this exorbitant level of federal spending can be sustained. It is a complete and utter mathematical impossibility. Heck, we as a nation cannot even fiscally sustain our own previously pledged commitments to bankrupting entitlement programs!
But sure, what’s another $52 trillion in health care going to do, once we’re all already heading straight for a Greece-style sovereign debt abyss? At this point, the entirety of both the Democratic Party and “progressive” economic firmament seem to be unanimously in thrall to the economically illiterate fiction that is co-called “modern monetary theory” (MMT) — the nonsensical notion, as explained by Investopedia, that governments that print their own currency “do not need taxes or borrowing for spending” because “they can print as much as they need and are the monopoly issuers of the currency.” Intellectually honest Democrats would publicly proclaim their fealty to the MMT cabal, in lieu of constantly equivocating when pressed about how they might possibly fund their fiscally ruinous and un-fundable schemes.
Sober-minded citizens have already seen the 2020 Democrats lurch to the far left on all sorts of bread-and-butter cultural and civilizational issues — from border security to religion to abortion to transgenderism. But on perhaps no issue is this crop of hucksters more transparently nutty than on their various plans for perhaps the most rudimentary political issue of all: Government spending.
