Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who is considering running for president in 2020 as an independent, slammed far-left Democrats on Saturday at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Conference & Festivals in Austin, Texas.
“For us to start moving towards a level of socialism is such an extreme position and something that is inconsistent with the values, the heritage, and the tradition of the country,” Schultz said. “And that is what Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and others are proposing to try and defeat Donald Trump with a far extreme proposal.”
“If Donald Trump runs against one of those types of candidates it’s my belief that Donald Trump will be reelected, that the vast majority of Americans are not going to embrace socialism,” Schultz continued. “Going back to the Green New Deal, in the Green New Deal there is a proposal that says that by 2030 every building in America is going to be transformed to clean energy. Now, that’s a well-intentioned idea but it’s never going to happen.”
“Let’s propose things that are true, that are honest, that are sincere, and that are realistic,” Schultz said in a clear shot at socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
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Several minutes later, Schultz told the audience at the left-leaning event that the proposals that the Democratic Party is proposing are not free and they are not feasible.
“There’s nothing free in America,” Schultz said. “So these proposals about Medicare for all, and free college, and a government job for everybody, that is not free. So someone is going to have to pay for that and that means that taxes for everyone is going to have to go up or someone’s going to have to wave a magic wand and do something that doesn’t exist but that has to be paid for by somebody and the difficulty in trying to pay for any of that is we’re sitting with twenty-two trillion dollars of debt that has to be addressed.”
“So, it’s not realistic,” Schultz added.
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Bloomberg reported last month that Ocasio-Cortez’s far-left plan would “tally between $51 trillion and $93 trillion over 10-years, concludes American Action Forum, which is run by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who directed the non-partisan CBO from 2003 to 2005.”
The massive price tag would cost over $650,000 per U.S. household and would cover “a low-carbon electricity grid, net zero emissions transportation system, guaranteed jobs, universal health care, guaranteed green housing, and food security.”
In its final analysis of the plan, American Action Forum wrote: “The Green New Deal is clearly very expensive. Its further expansion of the federal government’s role in some of the most basic decisions of daily life, however, would likely have a more lasting and damaging impact than its enormous price tag.”
The devastating report comes after Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said earlier in February that the greatest internal threat to U.S. national security was the national debt.
“I’m concerned that our increasing fractious political process, particularly with respect to federal spending, is threatening our ability to properly defend our nation both in the short term and especially in the long term,” Coats said. The failure to address our longterm fiscal situation has increased the national debt to over $20 trillion and growing. I would urge all of us to recognize the need to address this challenge and to take action as soon as possible before a fiscal crisis occurs that truly undermines our ability to ensure our national security.”