Getting down to crunch time on 78-year-old President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion infrastructure and social welfare program, 80-year-old Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) put down the hammer on the White House to advance his progressive agenda. Sanders told Biden “the very fabric of American democracy is in danger,” raising the stakes in last-ditch wrangling over the liberal agenda including free college tuition, enhanced Medicare benefits and a raft of liberal proposals that have nothing to do with infrastructure or creating new jobs but taxing the rich to subsidize a wide variety of minority interests, including defunding police and opening up U.S. borders to more illegal immigrants. Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda could bankrupt the U.S. treasury, driving U.S. businesses overseas, pulling the rug out from underneath jobs creation, prolonging the current recession.
Biden complains that Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) and Sen. Krysten Sinema (D-Az.) obstruct Democrats from resolving differences from Sanders’ sweeping plan that includes dental, hearing and vision care in the Medicare program. “Let me just say a few words,” Sanders said. “Sometimes, when we’re inside the beltway, we lose track of reality and where the American people are,” referring to the liberal agenda to push for an endless wish list of liberal promises having nothing to do with infrastructure. “So let me repeat. The American people are very clear about what they want their government to do,” Sanders said, speaking for Black Lives Matter and other progressive groups that want a Robinhood agenda, redistributing wealth from the haves-to-the-have-nots. Sanders doesn’t speak for the vast majority of Americans, he speaks for a narrow cross section of minorities and poor people.
All the rioting last summer on American streets pushed the radical left agenda, seeking redistribution of wealth, taxing billionaires and corporations. Letting Sanders dictate the liberal agenda, Biden proposes a billionaires’ tax that he hopes would fund his many ambitious programs bound to add billions to the federal treasury. With the federal budget deficit hitting $2.8 trillion, Biden’s big spending plans could have disastrous consequences on the projected GDP growth rate, now at 5.6%, but only climbing out of the whopping 12% GDP deficit in 2020, largely caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. With the U.S. treasury forced to borrow trillions more to keep the government afloat, Biden’s plan adds insult-to-injury to the U.S. economy. Sanders talks about what the “American people” wants, but they don’t want another recession that tosses a good portion of the population into unemployment.
Manchin and Sinema represent what’s left of a tiny minority of Democrats that have any fiscal responsibility, trying but failing to control Sanders’ voracious appetite for government spending. “The challenge that we face in the really unusual moment in American history is whether we have the courage to stand with the American people and take on the very powerful special interests,” Sanders said, completely misstating the real challenge to the U.S. economy. Sanders knows there’s no free lunch when it comes to government spending. Taxing the rich or corporations has been tried-and-failed in the past, getting the economy into hot water. Biden doesn’t seem to consider the damage to long term economic growth by many of his lavish spending proposals, causing the government to compete with the private sector, going into more national debt to finance his vast plans.
Sanders describes himself as a democratic socialist, something that accurately describes his economic philosophy. Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, now the richest man in the world, expressed serious doubt over Biden’s proposal to subsidize his liberal agenda on the backs of the nations’ billionaires. Musk doesn’t like the proposal not because it will cost him some $5-10 billion a year in new taxes but because it will drive American industry overseas. ”And I’m going to do everything that I can support the president’s agenda and make sure that we do just that,” Sanders said, not concerned about the possible disastrous consequences to the U.S. economy. Sanders and other liberals, asking the rich to pay for his progression programs, doesn’t know how to create jobs and build a middle class. Sanders likes to bully audiences into accepting his socialist vision of America.
Sanders’s the first to tout the economic development in Canada and Scandinavian countries, especially when it comes to social programs like college education and universal health care. But when Canadians and Scandinavians flee their countries because of intolerable taxes, Sanders diverts attention to failures of the U.S. system. When foreign leaders need life-saving medical treatments or surgeries, most come to the U.S., not their own countries. “If we fail—in my view, if the American people do not believe that government can work for them and is dominated by power special interests, the very fabric of American democracy is in danger,” Sanders said. Sanders hints that if progressives don’t get what they want, revolution, like the riots last summer, is right around the corner. Sanders doesn’t speak for the American people, he speaks for himself and disenfranchised minorities.
