This is the most mind-boggling thing you will hear all week: the left still loves Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has done nothing but make a fool of herself on the national stage, and the progressives only praise her more. Everything out of her mouth is fundamentally wrong in every way, and that doesn’t seem to matter at all. So, we’re going to do something exhausting. We’re going to look at the very basic math surrounding her three proposals and show how they don’t add up.
Health Care
Bernie Sanders himself quotes the price tag of his Medicare for all proposal at $1.38 trillion a year. A year! That comes out to $14 trillion in 10 years. This is the same Senator who complained about a $200 billion a year tax cut that has already clearly stimulated massive economic growth.
If we leave delusional Bernie land and look at slightly less partisan estimates, the cost of single-payer health care rise to $2.8 trillion a year. Even Vox estimated that it could get above $3 trillion a year. Keep in mind, our entire federal budget is $3.8 trillion. That includes Social Security, our already bloated entitlement programs and a defense budget of around $700 billion.
Here’s the most insane part of the whole thing. Bernie thinks he can pay for this by reversing the Republican tax cuts. He is genuinely claiming that a $200 billion-a-year tax increase can pay for a $1.38-trillion-a-year increase in spending. Is there a first grader in our country who can’t see why this won’t work? Don’t even get started on the Ocasio-Cortez claim that reduced funeral costs will pay the difference. Apparently social medicine makes people immortal.
Housing
Only slightly less egregious is the progressive call for universal housing. Their champion, Ocasio-Cortez, is the mouthpiece for the claim that people in America can’t afford housing. This is predicated on research that suggests minimum wage is insufficient to afford median housing for a family of four in every state. Of course it’s insufficient! How is minimum wage supposed by buy median anything? Progressives out themselves on their fundamental failures at math with the very premise.
It gets worse when you look at the housing numbers. With our current national housing subsidies, only 25 percent of families who qualify receive a stipend. The system runs on a lottery, so a lot of families don’t have their housing paid by the U.S. government. Despite that, they are not homeless, starving or dying in the streets as the left would suggest. Still, just expanding this program to cover the current qualifiers would require us to quadruple the program’s budget to $210 billion a year. Does that number look bigger than anything else we’ve seen today?
That’s not the end. Progressives want to expand the qualifications to a “universal” level that would cost at least $400 billion a year. That’s $4 trillion in 10 years. To Cortez’s credit, she hasn’t actually offered a means to pay for this. She just demands it. Maybe, just maybe, she’s learned enough to realize that she needs to avoid talking about real numbers to dodge embarrassment.
Universal Basic Income
This is the most insane idea. These progressives genuinely think that giving everyone a salary is both a good idea and magically affordable. Let’s look at the most basic proposal. The idea is that you give everyone in the country $12,000 a year. That means parents would receive a stipend for each child (we don’t have time to talk about why that’s a terrible idea). That would cost $3.8 trillion a year. The left wants our federal deficit to increase by the entire budget for just one program.
The Total Bill
If the Republican tax cuts led to zero economic growth, reversing them could not pay for any of these programs. More damning is the fact that 2018 has so far seen record tax revenues, proving Trump’s point all along. Any one of these ideas would push our deficit high enough to cripple economic growth. All three would put federal spending at 50 percent of our GDP.
Now, the left will argue that a bunch of European countries have done this and their economies have been fine. That’s a lie. Only one country in the entire EU has seen net economic growth since 2008: Ireland. Even Germany has a lower GDP today than they did a full decade ago. Social programs kill growth. If your GDP doesn’t grow and your population does, you build poverty. That’s how math works, and that’s what the left fundamentally fails to understand. It is simple addition, and it is beyond their mental faculties. It is abject stupidity and completely unacceptable.
Now, relax that exasperated look on your face before it freezes that way. Good. Don’t let these fools win a single seat.
~ American Liberty Report
