Radicals, Resistance, and Revenge: The Left’s Plot to Remake America Page 10
Outside of his and his wife’s books over the past few years, virtually 100 percent of Bernie’s wealth has come at taxpayer expense. As far as I know, he’s never had a private sector job. This is a guy who was even kicked out of a hippie commune for laziness!51 That explains quite a bit about his economic ideas. He doesn’t understand everyone can’t live off someone else—someone out there has to be producing more than he or she consumes for every bum like Bernie consuming more than he produces.
Bernie became a rich man sponging off taxpayers and demagoguing socialist ideas. But you don’t have to be nearly as rich as Bernie himself to be hit with a tax hike to pay for Bernie’s giveaways. His plan would subject all income above $250,000 to the Social Security payroll tax.52 That means it’s no longer even ostensibly self-funded by the recipients. It’s just more of what Bernie Sanders is quite honest about what he is selling: socialism.
Liz “Fauxahontas” Warren
If you think being a fake Native American pretending to enjoy drinking beer is the worst thing about Elizabeth Warren, think again. Beneath her facepalm-inspiring personal gaffes lurks a power-mad socialist.
That’s not an exaggeration. Big Chief Liz doesn’t just have one plan, she has a whole suitcase full of plans, about twenty as of this writing, that even the New York Times says would, “significantly remake the American economy, covering everything from tax policy to student debt relief.”53
Of course, Warren is also on board with all or most of Comrade Bernie’s giveaways. Under the somewhat deceptive title, “Rebuild the Middle Class,” she casually mentions using her myriad new tax schemes to pay for a whole sleigh full of presents, including “universal childcare, student loan debt relief, and ‘down payments’ on a Green New Deal and Medicare for All.”54 But given the tens of trillions of dollars the Green New Deal or Medicare for All would cost—not to mention the rest of her gravy train—even her oppressive new tax regime doesn’t seem to add up to nearly enough.
For example, Warren has proposed slapping a 7 percent tax on all profits over $100 million made by US corporations.55 This tax would be in addition to anything they owed under the current tax code, after deductions for expenses and exemptions. Warren uses the much-demagogued example of Amazon making $10 billion in profits last year but paying no federal income taxes to triumphantly proclaim they would have paid $698 million under her plan. She leaves out that Amazon didn’t pay any taxes in 2018 because the company reinvested their profits back into their business, taking advantage of a tax incentive that encourages innovation, expansion, and job creation.56 Nevertheless, she says overall this plan would “bring in $1 trillion in revenue over the next ten years.”
That might sound like a lot, but Medicare for All is estimated to cost $32 trillion over the first ten years.57 That’s assuming health care providers currently losing money on Medicare and Medicaid don’t get a raise and nothing we can’t foresee doesn’t drive up the cost further. When Medicare was launched in 1965, the geniuses crunching numbers for the government estimated the program would cost about $12 billion by 1990. The actual cost that year was $90 billion. They thought Medicaid would cost $1 billion by 1992. It cost $17 billion that year.58
Last year, Medicare cost $582 billion and Medicaid $778 billion, counting the states’ contributions.59 So, I would be very skeptical about assuming these cost estimates are at all accurate.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says her Green New Deal would cost about $10 trillion,60 but a study coauthored by a former member of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says it would cost more like $93 trillion.61 Giving Big Chief Liz the benefit of the doubt and assuming her own version of the Green New Deal would only cost $10 trillion, she’s now up to $42 trillion with just two of her proposed spending programs and she’s only collecting $1 trillion with her corporate tax.
Warren has another, even more destructive tax on the accumulated wealth of high-net-worth individuals that I’ll talk more about in a later chapter. This one would raise an estimated $2.75 trillion over ten years, not even enough to pay the $3.2 trillion Warren would spend forgiving student loans, paying for universal child care, and raising teacher’s wages,62 much less the tens of trillions needed for Medicare for All or any Green New Deal.
When you do the math, “tax the rich” just isn’t a realistic way to pay for anything Fauxahontas or any of her fellow radicals are promising. The so-called 1 percent may have a lot more money than you or me, but they don’t have that much. So, where is the other 99 percent of the funds needed to pay for all this going to come from?
It’s going to come from you, just like it does in any of the countries the Democlowns like to cite when pitching their socialist plans, something I’ll also talk more about in a separate chapter. You’re going to pay for their utopian schemes with higher taxes, a lower standard of living, and less opportunity to realize your dreams.
The Worst of the Rest
South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and California Senator Kamala Harris are the last two candidates consistently polling in whole numbers as of this writing.63 On the surface, both seem likable. But therein lies the rub. Once you get past the surface, what they have in mind for our country is as bad or worse than what the front-runners are saying.
Harris is noteworthy mainly for saying her administration would prosecute Donald Trump for obstruction of justice as a private citizen, after he’s left the White House.64 She may as well be telling the hysterical Left, “Elect me and I’ll use the power of the presidency to persecute the man you hate for no reason.” That’s quite an inspiring message. Good luck with that, Kamala.
Buttigieg is especially disturbing given his clean-cut, reasonable-seeming persona. His campaign website says that America’s values should “reflect a deep understanding of Americans’ everyday lives and embody our country’s highest values,” the first one being freedom.65
That sounds great, until you read further. Freedom has nothing to do with the government forcing other people to pay one’s medical bills, but Mayor Pete is on board with Medicare for All, albeit via a public option “along the way while allowing the economy to adjust.”66 He also promises college will be “completely free at lower incomes” and that “middle-income families at public colleges will pay zero tuition.”
His website also says, “Freedom means building 21st century infrastructure, because you’re not free to pursue happiness if you don’t have access to safe roads or clean water,” which is also wrong. We do need infrastructure improvements, but they have nothing to do with freedom. We’d have a bill passed, signed, and being executed if the Democrats would stop reinvestigating the Russia collusion delusion and do their jobs.
The rest of what Mayor Pete calls “freedom” is merely the usual litany of far-Left causes. He’s on board with eliminating the Electoral College, paying reparations for slavery, the Equality Act, and the Green New Deal.67 In other words, the young, boy-next-door Midwestern mayor is just as radically socialist as all the rest.
There are too many clowns in the car for me to talk about every one of them here. Like baggy-pants bozos, they continue to try to one-up each other with new, radical socialist gags that wouldn’t be remotely funny if they managed to make them the law of the land. They’d like to drive their Clown Car over a cliff with all of America trapped in the backseat. Fortunately, Donald Trump is driving a Lamborghini and the Democrat Clown Car is in his rearview mirror.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Home Alone in the White House
It’s Christmas 2018 and the leader of the free world is sitting alone in the West Wing. His family has already departed for the winter White House, Mar-a-Lago. He has stayed back because he is waiting for his invited guests to arrive, but much to his disappointment the Democrats never bother to show up. They’re a little too busy to deal with urgent affairs of the nation, frolicking in places like Hawaii and Puerto Rico. The president has stayed back because he wants to make a deal. The issue to him and most Americans is much too seri
ous to ignore. In fact, it is more than serious; it is a crisis.
Immigration is the single most controversial issue in America today. It is one that has resisted resolution for more than thirty years, since Ronald Reagan in 1986 granted what he thought was the last class of amnesty. He figured his action ended America’s immigration problem and going forward the law would be followed. Reagan, however, had no idea the radicals of the twenty-first century would resist the law as written to get revenge for the election of Donald Trump.
They all talk about comprehensive immigration reform, but neither I nor most people have quite figured out what that oft-used phrase means. It’s kind of like beauty: it’s in the eyes of the beholder. To some it means ignore the law and let them all in; to others it means build a wall and keep them all out. I, for one, believe the law as written should be respected and followed.
It’s really very simple. If you cross our border into our country, unless you do so at our invitation and with our approval, you are violating our law. But then again, I believe laws are meant to be followed and not ignored. The radical Left can’t even be bothered to repeal the laws on the books. They don’t even care to go through the process at all.
Politicians are elected to represent us. They are here to represent our interests over their political interests. Not only did the Democrats refuse to compromise, at first they refused to even show up when the president offered a working lunch. While the president spent the Christmas holiday in the White House, imploring legislators to put aside their political posturing and come back to the table for the sake of the people they represent, House speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi vacationed in Hawaii.1 Apparently, that’s how important Pelosi thought it was to fix immigration reform and end the partial government shutdown.
Refusal to work toward compromise is putting politics over people. President Trump was at the White House virtually every day trying to make a deal—bending, compromising, and offering solutions. The Democrats refused his every overture and dug in their heels, proving that politics are more important to them than putting people back to work. And they openly blamed Trump for the shutdown that they refused to try to end. While 800,000 federal employees faced the loss of a second paycheck in mid-January, the Democrats added to their distress by not even negotiating.
And that, my friends, is a problem.
They were willing to sacrifice the working class they claim to represent simply because they hate Donald Trump. They refused to negotiate for people who live paycheck to paycheck. They don’t consider Americans whose lives, safety, economy, and social services are drained by these illegals. They turned their backs on average Americans, while President Trump worked through the holidays to try to reopen the government.
On January 19, the president offered yet another compromise to reopen the government. It included:
• $5.7 billion for a steel slat barrier fence, in lieu of a concrete wall, dropping the term wall altogether
• $805 million for drug-detection technology
• $800 million for humanitarian assistance
• 2,750 new border patrol agents
• 75 new immigration judges
• A 3-year extension for those with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)2
• Young people can seek asylum in their home country without having to resort to traveling with dangerous human traffickers and coyotes.
The president described in clear and direct language the humanitarian crises, including three hundred of our citizens dying every week from heroin overdoses, 90 percent of which comes through the porous Mexican border. The president also talked about what many of us in law enforcement already knew—that parents give their daughters birth control pills, because they know they will be raped along this dangerous journey.
The Democrats dismissed the proposal out of hand without taking any time to review it or negotiate with the president. The Democrats had their minds made up before even hearing the president’s proposal. Nancy Pelosi called it unacceptable, saying, “What’s original in his proposal is not good and what’s good in his proposal is not original.” Chuck Schumer called it “one-sided and ineffective.”3
No surprise, the Democrats are dug into the theater of radicalism, resistance, and revenge, casting Donald Trump as evil while casting themselves as angels, supported by a mainstream media bent on publishing any anti-Trump story, no matter how absurd.
They went from political theater to theater of the absurd when Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to the president saying it was too dangerous for him to give the State of the Union speech. Hogwash: Pelosi never even spoke to security in charge of the event. There was never a single day when Congress was in session that it was shut down for lack of security.
Nancy concocted the security risk hoax in an obvious effort to keep the president from having the opportunity to speak directly to the American people. It was another new low for her and the Democrats. Never in the history of this great nation has a speaker refused the president the opportunity to give a State of the Union address. It may have been prescient on her part, given that the address he gave weeks later was universally applauded, with a CNN poll showing 76% of viewers approved of the speech.4
Of course, not one to be cowed, the president pulled Nancy and her pals off a government bus thirty minutes before a scheduled junket to Brussels, Egypt, and Afghanistan. The president reminded the Democrats of the priority to work on ending the government shutdown before taking a pleasure trip overseas.
Nancy, what the hell were you doing boarding a bus with your Democrat cronies on the way to Brussels to meet with NATO leaders? There’s a partial government shutdown. We didn’t need you in Brussels! How do you negotiate your way out of a stalemate at home while you’re on a seven-day European excursion that we, the taxpayers, foot the bill for? You got some chutzpah, lady.
What were you going to do on this trip, anyway? Have another few parties on our dime? And bad-mouth the president to those who prefer that we foot their NATO bill, too? Then, you and your band of friendlies were going to Afghanistan, to find out what’s going on from the troops on the ground. Really? You think some soldier is going to saunter up and whisper in your ear to tell you anything his bosses at the Pentagon wouldn’t be happy to tell you in Washington? Or is it that you think the troops are dying to see you? Send them a video, Nancy, and thank them.
By the way, Nancy, is this how you reinforce your power base? By approving trips? Are you Speaker of the House or the official congressional junket organizer? But then again, you’ve never been one to sacrifice, have you? How about instead of the trips, you escrow that money for federal employees? You’d rather not? Is it because polling blames Trump for the shutdown and you’re good with that?
I have news for you, Nancy: so is he. A leader takes the burden just to get it done. How about since you’re in charge of all spending bills, Nancy, you forgo your check until this is over? Man up like the federal employees going through the shutdown? Donate congressional salaries to those who won’t get theirs. After all, reports are you and your husband are worth over a hundred million dollars.
How did you make that money, Nancy? How long is it that you’ve been in Congress? President Trump hasn’t even taken a paycheck. He’s donated his salary since day one to several federal agencies.
Admit it, Nancy. Your big donors in California want people to pick grapes. You remember Cesar Chavez who fought tooth and nail to stop illegal immigrants, to protect legal immigrants and farmworkers. He’s rolling over in his grave over how you and your rich liberal friends have sold out American labor.
The president, they say, is a fear monger. They say this is a manufactured crisis. Say that to the face of an Angel Mom whose child was murdered or massacred by illegal immigrants. And why did you approve securing the border in 2006 and 2013, but won’t do so now? The obvious answer: because Donald Trump wants it.
You disrespect Americans and instead respect those wh
o fight our laws while you and your ilk show pictures of furloughed federal employees while you won’t meet with the Angel Moms who come to your office with pictures of American children killed by illegals.
So, let me see if I understand this: an American mother shows a picture of her child murdered by an illegal. And Chuck Schumer and his gang, they come out and show pictures of federal employees. Is there a moral equivalency here? Are you folks schizo? Are you working for Americans or illegals? Or is it that you just don’t give a damn? You vacation in Hawaii. Your buddies vacation with lobbyists in Puerto Rico during the shutdown. And you plan a jaunt to Europe while federal employees are trying to save every dollar to buy groceries. Admit it! You don’t give a damn. Nancy, you’re a hypocrite, a political operative. Your mantra? Destroy the president of the United States. To hell with the taxpaying, hardworking Americans. Let them eat cake. I’ve got a junket to go on, an ego to assuage, and an electorate to ignore.
Walls Work
The Democrats and their liberal media allies like to point out previous border security bills overwhelmingly supported by Democrats (including Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and other prominent Democrats still infesting our Congress), referred to the barrier as a “fence” instead of a wall. “There is a difference between a fence and a wall,” said Democrat Senator Jeff Merkley.5 There is a difference, Jeff? What is the difference? Both are physical barriers the purpose of which is to prevent people from crossing the border other than through a legal point of entry. The only difference between a wall and a fence is a wall works better.