Saturday, February 29, 2020

How Barack Obama's Good 'Intentions' Destroyed Libya

How Barack Obama's Good 'Intentions' Destroyed Libya

The observation that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions is especially true with respect to foreign military interventions. It is well past time for the architects of such debacles to accept responsibility for their awful handiwork.
Humanitarian crusaders trot out a variety of excuses to evade responsibility when their military interventions go awry. One frequent excuse is that a failure is because the U.S. and Western commitment to the mission was either inconsistent or insufficiently robust.  Another popular explanation for disappointing results is that the effort would have succeeded if not for malign foreign interference.  That rationale has become a favorite for the architects of the Syria debacle, who contend that Russia’s intervention beginning in 2015 saved Bashar al-Assad’s beleaguered, evil regime.  One striking feature is the absence of diminished confidence that a more determined U.S.-led effort can succeed or that Washington has a moral and strategic obligation to make the attempt, even when the previous meddlesome policy has imploded.
 
When those excuses are not available, defenders of a failed humanitarian crusade insist that their intentions were good, and that they should be judged according to that standard. The good intentions dodge is perhaps the most maddening. Barack Obama seemed to recognize the inherent deficiency when he first met Samantha Power, an advocate of the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) doctrine, and a passionate proponent of U.S. involvement in multilateral military interventions for humanitarian goals. Obama reportedly praised Power’s book on the Rwanda genocide, but then he observed that it “seemed like malpractice to judge one’s prospects by one’s intentions, rather than making a stren­uous effort to anticipate and weigh potential consequences.” 
Obama was right, but he didn’t heed his own insights. Not only did he choose Power for a series of high-level policy posts when he became president, culminating in her appointment as ambassador to the United Nations, but he launched several disruptive, catastrophic interventions, most notably in Libya and Syria. The unintended negative results of those crusades continue to reverberate nearly a decade after the initial U.S. actions.
Daniel Larison, senior editor at the American Conservative, provides a provocative analysis that has the ring of truth about why humanitarian interventionists focus so heavily on their supposed good intentions.
Interventionists rarely anticipate and weigh potential consequences, because if they did that it would be much harder for them to get the interventions they want. Advocates for military action routinely minimize the risks and costs of war in order to reduce opposition to it, but “humanitarian” interventionists have another incentive to downplay negative consequences and preferably to ignore consequences in their entirety. If a “humanitarian” intervention creates worse conditions than existed prior to the intervention, it has to be declared a failure on its own terms. That is why “humanitarian” interventionists go to such lengths to turn a blind eye to the destructive effects of their interference.
Ultimately, they see themselves as defending the legitimacy of humanitarian military intervention and R2P, thereby preserving the possibility of future interventions.  “To admit that one of their interventions failed and made things worse,” Larison concludes “would be to bring discredit” on the entire concept. 
But there is little doubt that the situations in both Libya and Syria are substantially worse than they were before the United States and its NATO allies began to meddle. Overthrowing Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi produced pervasive chaos that has now culminated in a bloody armed struggle between two rival autocratic governments. The author of a new UN report states that the impact of the country’s 9-year internecine conflicts on civilians “is incalculable,” Washington’s effort to oust Assad not only appears to have failed, but it helped lead to the rise of ISIS. More recently, nasty contests for influence between Turkey and Russia have erupted in Syria and Libya, raising the prospect of a dangerous clash between those two major powers, especially in Syria.
In both arenas, the civil wars have displaced vast numbers of civilians, and the resulting refugee flows have caused severe disruptions and societal tensions in neighboring countries—including Washington’s European allies. Those episodes demonstrate why policies must be judged by their consequences, not their intentions. The observation that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions is especially true with respect to foreign military interventions. It is well past time for the architects of such debacles to accept responsibility for their awful handiwork.
Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in security studies at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at the National Interest, is the author of 12 books and more than 850 articles on international affairs.

AP FACT CHECK: Democrats distort coronavirus readiness

AP FACT CHECK: Democrats distort coronavirus readiness

February 26, 2020
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Democratic presidential candidates, former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, right, and former Vice President Joe Biden, left, greet supporters at the end of the Democratic presidential primary debate at the Gaillard Center, Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2020, in Charleston, S.C., co-hosted by CBS News and the Congressional Black Caucus Institute. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democratic presidential contenders are describing the federal infectious-disease bureaucracy as rudderless and ill-prepared for the coronavirus threat because of budget cuts and ham-handed leadership by President Donald Trump. That’s a distorted picture. For starters, Trump hasn’t succeeded in cutting the budget.
He’s proposed cuts but Congress ignored him and increased financing instead. The National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention aren’t suffering from budget cuts that never took effect.
A look at some of the Democrats’ remarks:
MIKE BLOOMBERG: “There’s nobody here to figure out what the hell we should be doing. And he’s defunded — he’s defunded Centers for Disease Control, CDC, so we don’t have the organization we need. This is a very serious thing.” — debate Tuesday night.
JOE BIDEN, comparing the Obama-Biden administration with now: “We increased the budget of the CDC. We increased the NIH budget. ... He’s wiped all that out. ... He cut the funding for the entire effort.”
THE FACTS: They’re both wrong to say the agencies have seen their money cut. Bloomberg is repeating the false allegation in a new ad that states the U.S. is unprepared for the virus because of “reckless cuts” to the CDC. Trump’s budgets have proposed cuts to public health, only to be overruled by Congress, where there’s strong bipartisan support for agencies such as the CDC and NIH. Instead, financing has increased.
Indeed, the money that government disease detectives first tapped to fight the latest outbreak was a congressional fund created for health emergencies.
Some public health experts say a bigger concern than White House budgets is the steady erosion of a CDC grant program for state and local public health emergency preparedness — the front lines in detecting and battling new disease. But that decline was set in motion by a congressional budget measure that predates Trump.
The broader point about there being “nobody here” to coordinate the response sells short what’s in place to handle an outbreak.
The public health system has a playbook to follow for pandemic preparation — regardless of who’s president or whether specific instructions are coming from the White House. Those plans were put into place in anticipation of another flu pandemic, but are designed to work for any respiratory-borne disease.
Among the health authorities overseeing the work are Dr. Anne Schuchat, CDC’s principal deputy director and a veteran of previous outbreaks, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, NIH’s infectious disease chief who has advised six presidents.
“The CDC’s response has been excellent, as it has been in the past,” said John Auerbach, president of the nonpartisan Trust for America’s Health, which works with government at all levels to improve the nation’s response to high-risk health crises. Some Democrats have charged that Trump decimated the nation’s public health leadership, but Auerbach said CDC’s top scientific ranks have remained stable during the past three years.
Will the preparations be enough?
One of the lessons learned in prior crises, such as the anthrax attacks, is not to offer false assurances when scientists have questions about the illness.
The CDC, for example, can accurately test for the virus but has struggled to get working test kits to state health departments. That’s key if there’s a need to rapidly increase the number of tests being performed.
The U.S. closed borders to travelers from China to buy time as preparations began but, “classically that’s not the way you address an outbreak,” Fauci told The Associated Press this week. “If you do it for a very limited period of time, temporarily until you can get things in order in your own country, it could have some benefit. But in general, the concept of closing borders, you cannot do that for an extended period of time.”
But with infections now in much of the world, one of the questions for U.S. policymakers is whether it’s time to modify any of those border or travel restrictions.
___
Associated Press writer Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar contributed to this report.

Trump: Sotomayor Must Recuse Herself for Trying to 'Shame' Justices 'Into Voting Her Way'

(AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)
Last week, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a scathing dissent against her fellow justices, criticizing them for acting too quickly to grant the Trump administration's requests in the onslaught of litigation coming from liberal activist groups. President Donald Trump responded by calling on her and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to recuse themselves from cases involving the Trump administration.
He quoted Laura Ingraham, saying, "Sotomayor accuses GOP appointed Justices of being biased in favor of Trump."
"This is a terrible thing to say. Trying to 'shame' some into voting her way? She never criticized Justice Ginsberg when she called me a 'faker'. Both should recuse themselves on all Trump, or Trump related, matters!" the president tweeted. "While 'elections have consequences', I only ask for fairness, especially when it comes to decisions made by the United States Supreme Court!"
During remarks at a press conference in India early Tuesday morning, the president explained why he took this stance. "I just thought it was so inappropriate, such a terrible statement for a Supreme Court justice," he said. "She’s trying to shame people with perhaps a different view into voting her way, and that’s so inappropriate."
Sotomayor criticized her fellow justices in a dissent to a Supreme Court ruling granting a stay from an injunction against a Trump administration policy. She condemned what she saw as a pattern among the Trump administration and her fellow justices.
"Claiming one emergency after another, the Government has recently sought stays in an unprecedented number of cases, demanding immediate attention and consuming limited Court resources in each. And with each successive application, of course, its cries of urgency ring increasingly hollow," she wrote. "... this Court is partly to blame for the breakdown in the appellate process. That is because the Court—in this case, the New York cases, and many others—has been all too quick to grant the Government’s 'reflexiv[e]' requests. Ibid. But make no mistake: Such a shift in the Court’s own behavior comes at a cost."
Yet the Supreme Court's actions in granting stays to the Trump administration do not come from a vacuum. The administration has faced an unprecedented onslaught of lawsuits from liberal groups resulting in nationwide injunctions from various courts.
Last month, Justice Neil Gorsuch condemned the frequent practice of lower courts granting injunctions against Trump administration policies — effectively vetoing the executive branch's attempts to do its job.
"The real problem here is the increasingly common practice of trial courts ordering relief that transcends the cases before them. Whether framed as injunctions of 'nationwide,' 'universal,' or 'cosmic' scope, these orders share the same basic flaw—they direct how the defendant must act toward persons who are not parties to the case," Gorsuch wrote.
"Despite the fluid state of things—some interim wins for the government over here, some preliminary relief for plaintiffs over there—we now have an injunction to rule them all: the one before us, in which a single judge in New York enjoined the government from applying the new definition to anyone, without regard to geography or participation in this or any other lawsuit," he added, citing a specific injunction. "The Second Circuit declined to stay this particular universal injunction, and so now, after so many trips up and down and around the judicial map, the government brings its well-rehearsed arguments here."
"It has become increasingly apparent that this Court must, at some point, confront these important objections to this increasingly widespread practice. As the brief and furious history of the regulation before us illustrates, the routine issuance of universal injunctions is patently unworkable, sowing chaos for litigants, the government, courts, and all those affected by these conflicting decisions," Gorsuch wrote.
Trump went too far in calling for Ginsburg and Sotomayor to recuse themselves from cases, but he was right to push back against Sotomayor's deceptive rhetoric on this issue. The Supreme Court is defending the Trump administration more frequently because so many lower court judges are issuing injunctions that prevent the executive branch from doing its job.
I would prefer that Congress made the crucial decisions of legislating, rather than leaving it up to administrative agencies and the president to oversee. Yet under our current system, the work of administrative agencies rightly falls under the president's purview, and it is not the courts' job to fight his policies.
Tyler O'Neil is the author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Follow him on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.

'Progressivism' Versus Progress

'Progressivism' Versus Progress

John O'Sullivan • 25 Feb, 2020 • 6 Min Read
Acry is going up across the world— in Cambridge England, in Germany, and above all in Canada. It’s the cry heard down the ages from the Common People, the Reasonable Person, the Over-burdened Taxpayer, the Forgotten Man, the Silent Majority, and whoever is feeling his shoes pinching and his belt tightening. That cry today is more puzzled and poignant than usual because it expresses bafflement as well as indignation.
That cry is: “What the hell’s going on?”
The note of inquiry is entirely justified. Last week some hooligans (in Newspeak: protesters) invaded Trinity College, Cambridge and dug up its famous lawn, carting off the soil and dumping it in Barclay’s Bank. They were activists from Extinction Rebellion, or XR, a group of Green extremists, who argue that since there is a “climate emergency” that will destroy humanity, civilization, and the world in about a decade, they will take direct action now to obstruct and punish companies and institutions that “profit from” the emergency.
Their justifications for this ecological vandalism—the Trinity lawn was itself a symbol of environmental stewardship over centuries—both vary and multiply.
In this case the protesters were angry both because Trinity has investments in “fossil fuel” companies and because it had sold land to the Port of Felixstowe which might be used for a car park. Half of Britain (and most of the world) depends on fossil fuels for their energy. Industry and individual car-owners depend on car parks in order to move goods and themselves around the country. All these activities are legal, and the government regulates them to ensure that, as far as possible, they don’t impose unwanted costs on third parties or the general public. XR’s vandalism, on the other hand, imposed quite serious costs on Trinity, Barclay’s, the people living in Cambridge, and not least the environment.
Two days later, while the public outrage was still fresh, the protesters added a new complaint: the university had sold land for developers to build housing. The project in question had been designed to be environmentally sustainable. The claim of sustainability did not save it, however, because it was to be sold at a unit price of £385,000 that could only be bought by wealthy people.
A quick check via Google shows that £385,000 is lower than the average price for a Cambridge house which is a little over £388,000. So, in principle, Extinction Rebellion is opposed to building sufficient housing in Cambridge for a rising population. If XR runs out of specific justifications for its vandalism, however, that won’t really handicap it. Any extended discussion of XR’s aims invariably climaxes with its call to end “capitalism” which in XR’s ideology is the cause of all environmental ills.
Yet even a brief glance at the history of the Soviet bloc would show that it had a far worse environmental record than any Western country. Two examples from its last days suggest the ecological consequences of replacing capitalism with “socialism”: the pollution of Lake Baikal so befouled with chemicals that it actually caught fire—and the breakdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor (recorded in a brilliant dramatized HBO miniseries.) Chernobyl’s breakdown scattered nuclear fallout over a large region but it was concealed for a time by a managerial bureaucracy anxious to protect the good name of Soviet nuclear power. Such risks inevitably grow when a Politburo which manages industry consists of the same people who appoint the regulators and dictate coverage in the media.
If it makes you happier, by all means call them “the People.”

Nevertheless, the environmental history of socialism provides a very weak argument for getting rid of capitalism. Yet, it is where most solutions to the climate emergency end up and, not coincidentally, where they begin too.
Why so?
XR’s multiplication of justifications for their hooliganism is explicable when you realize that their predictions of doom keep not happening. And when any particular doom doesn’t happen, the climate seer needs to invent another likely catastrophe to justify his activism. Dr. Madsen Pirie, founder of the Adam Smith Institute in London, gave a fairly comprehensive list of such predictions here.
  • 1966: Oil will run out in ten years
  • 1967: Famines by 1975
  • 1968: Worldwide overpopulation
  • 1970: World's natural resources run out
  • 1970: Ice Age by 2000
  • 1970: Water rationing in US by 1974, food rationing by 1980
  • 1971: New ice age by 2020 or 2030
  • 1974: Satellites show new ice age near
  • 1976: Scientific consensus that Earth is cooling.
  • 1978: 30-year cooling trend continues
  • 1980: Acid rain kills life in lakes
  • 1980: Peak oil in 2000
  • 1988: Regional droughts by 1990s
  • 1988: Maldives underwater by 2018
  • 1989: Nations will be wiped out if nothing done by 2000
  • 2000: Children won’t know what snow is
  • 2002: Peak Oil in 2010
  • 2002: Famine in 10 years unless we stop eating fish, meat, and dairy products
  • 2004: Britain will be Siberia by 2020
  • 2008: Arctic will be ice free by 2018
  • 2008: Al Gore predicts ice-free Arctic by 2013
  • 2009: Prince Charles says we have 96 months to save the world
  • 2009: Gordon Brown says we have 50 days to "save the planet from catastrophe"
  • 2013: Arctic ice-free by 2015
  • 2014: Only 500 days before ‘climate chaos’
Of course, Pirie was writing in 2014; the list will be longer now. But however often the predictions are falsified, the soothsayers never admit error. Like the religious lunatics who assemble on a mountain to witness the Apocalypse in this Peter Cook sketch, their conclusion is always: “Okay, next week, same time, same place. We must get a winner some time.”
This combination of hooliganism and hysteria is happening not only in Cambridge. Similar protests erupted recently in Germany where the local XR activists were trying to halt the building of a factory that will manufacture electric cars. (Such are the contradictions of climate emergency ideology.) Parts of London have been repeatedly brought to a halt by XR demonstrators who have glued themselves to streets and police vehicles in recent months to demand a change in government energy policy from its current enthusiasm for carbon reduction to monomaniacal passion on the topic. And as readers of The Pipeline know better than anyone, half of Canada has been effectively immobilized by protesters who block railroads and highways in a campaign of forceful obstruction to prevent a pipeline that has passed every legal, democratic, and indigenous test laid down by governments hostile to it.
All of these cases of activism, though described as “non-violent,” involve the use of force to prevent individuals and companies going about their lawful business or simply going about. This is worth pondering. If protesters leave others only a choice between using force of their own to overcome obstruction or abandoning their lawful business, it is false to describe the obstruction as non-violent. Obstruction is itself a kind of tame violence—which is why laws in every country prohibit it. And why the police are required by law to intervene, prevent the obstruction, and enable the general public to live their lives.
Which brings us to a curious aspect of these protests—namely, the passive (and sometimes active) cooperation of the police and governments with the protesters. In Cambridge the police discussed with XR protesters which roads should be closed; they were on hand to see that their obstructionism observed the agreement; and they stopped members of the general public from removing the obstacles erected (one of which forced an ambulance to turn back.) They took no action to prevent the digging up of the Trinity lawn. Nor does Trinity seem to have requested their intervention. And though they have since brought charges against people suspected of offenses in these cases, that was probably in reaction to the angry and widespread public criticism of their previous inaction.
Earlier that inaction had been defended by a police spokesman on the grounds that legislation gives police a duty to superintend political protests. That seems right. But commonsense suggests that it means they should regulate such protests rather than assist them to gain their objectives. Laws also require the police to enable ordinary citizens to go about their lawful business unhindered. Taking those two duties together, they require police to regulate protests in such a way as to enable citizens to go about their lawful business. If it comes to a choice between those two duties, helping members of the public should come ahead of enforcing the will of activists upon them.
In the case of Canada, an entire government has been wobbling nervously for more than a week in order to avoid enforcing public order on left-wing and environmentalist constituencies whose support it is reluctant to lose. Only when those defending the pipeline failed to surrender in a timely fashion did the Trudeau government move—still nervously—to require that the law and the democratic decision making process it supports be upheld. And as to that, we’ll see.
For the moment, these different but similar events illustrate the degree to which our political life throughout the West has been changed by the cultural conquest of our institutions by progressive ideas. Under progressive governments which sympathize with the protesters, of course, but also under conservative governments which fear to challenge a respectable orthodoxy even when it breaks the rules that are supposed to govern everyone.
That conquest, which had already taken over the HR departments of corporations, the media, and even the armed forces, has now spread to the police who seem to have imbibed the silliest sociological ideas of the last few decades. In these cases they apparently have decided that the police should, where any choice exists, side with the protesters against society—even when, as here, the protest movement is unusually “white”—against the respectable classes who bear the odium of keeping society’s rules, obeying the law, and seeking change only through democratic channels. It looks liberal, but it is really a form of anarchy. And an anarchic police force is not something to treat lightly. It is odd and perhaps sinister.
Which is why people say: “What the hell is going on?”

Friday, February 28, 2020

Hey Bernie: Less Government = MUCH More Money for Everyone – Including Government

Hey Bernie: Less Government = MUCH More Money for Everyone – Including Government

Seton Motley | Red State | RedState.com
For all but the most befuddled by basic math – government costs a LOT of money.
Unfortunately, some of those most befuddled by basic math – are running for the Democrat nomination for President.
“In a ’60 Minutes’ interview with host Anderson Cooper, Sen. Bernie Sanders acknowledged that he’s not yet put a ‘price tag’ on much of the proposals he’s pushed.  That’s kind of a big concern – yes?”
It’s not a concern of any size – if you remain steadfastly impervious to math.
Fortunately for Sanders, a working plurality of Democrat primary voters has joined him in math-free oblivion.
If they don’t care – and are willing to elect him without said price tags – why should Sanders care to proffer them?
Of course, Sanders, his voters and his ilk remain steadfastly impervious to facts of any kind.  Get this bit of Sanders’ complete, sweeping dismissal of 100+ years of human history:
“We do, I mean, you know, and, and, the price tag is, it will be substantially less than letting the current system go. I think it’s about $30 trillion.”
Emphasis ours – because that’s where the most stupid is.
Sanders is calling his total government takeover of the health care industry – Medicare-for-All.
So it would make sense to check how the program he seeks to fundamentally transform – Medicare-for-Seniors – did at government cost containment, would it not?
So let’s….
“When these programs were created back in 1965, no one ever thought they would get this big or cost this much. Congressional budgeters at the time thought Medicare, the healthcare program for the elderly, would cost about $12 billion by 1990. The actual cost that year was $90 billion….
“We should have seen it coming. After all, it didn’t take decades for actual Medicare and Medicaid costs to overrun projections. That pretty much happened right away….
“Fifty years later, we’re still trying to figure out how to control costs—and still failing. Waste and fraud remain a persistent problem in both programs—an estimated $60 billion in Medicare funds just last year—and with an estimated 10,000 Baby Boomers joining Medicare rolls every day, the cost problem is likely to get much worse in the near future.”
Oh yes: Medicaid – another government medicine program – is also killing us, and was also immediately WAY off on its cost estimates.
And then we were told Affordable Care Act (ACA) – Obamacare – would fix what Medicare and Medicaid had broken.  Only…not so much:
“Wasn’t the ACA was supposed to fix healthcare? Remember when President Obama said the ACA would lower the average premiums by $2,500 for a family of four? It never happened. Instead, premiums have gone up since the passage of the ACA—by some estimates, the increase in national health spending under Obamacare will amount to an average premium increase for a family of four of $7,450.”
What Sanders and his many, many cohorts all refuse to admit – is government costs a WHOLE LOT more money than the private sector.  Because of human nature – as ensconced in my Wallet Rule:
If you go out on a Friday night with your wallet, and you go out the following Friday night with my wallet – on which Friday night are you going to have more fun?
Obviously, you’re going to have a whole lot more fun with my wallet – because you don’t care what my wallet looks like at the end of the evening.
Well, government is always on other peoples’ wallets – ours.  In gambling parlance – they’re playing with house money.
Government will never spend money as wisely or well as the people who earned it – from whom government takes it.
And here’s the dirty little secret Sanders and his Fellow Travelers miss:
Less government = MUCH more money for everyone.  Including government.
The Donald Trump Administration is ongoing, rolling proof thereof.
Trump cut taxes – which is less government.  And Trump has massively cut regulations – which is much less government.  The result?
More money for everyone.  And everyone – includes government.
A great microcosm of this less government success – is the Internet sector…and the Trump Administration’s Network Neutrality repeal.
Net Neutrality is an all-encompassing government takeover of the Internet sector.  The Obama Administration imposed it – and after but a year of its infliction upon us the Trump Administration un-imposed it.
And all along the way: Just as the Left was completely and totally wrong about Medicare (and Medicaid, and Obamacare, and…) – they were WAY wrong about Net Neutrality.
Everything the Left said would happen – didn’t.  Everything they said wouldn’t happen – did.
And over the weekend, we were delivered something Sanders and his Fellow Travelers remain incapable of doing – giving us the price tag of a government (in)action.
“According to the (Council of Economic Advisers) CEA’s February ‘Economic Report of the President,’ the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality regulation raised real annual incomes by more than $50 billion per year and consumer welfare by nearly $40 billion per year….
“The CEA said that FCC’s regulations against blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization as well classification of ISPs as public utilities ‘restricted the vertical pricing arrangements of ISPs—that is, monetary transactions between ISPs and the providers of Internet content such as Netflix and Yahoo.’
“The council added that the rule ‘imposed government oversight on communication services, making it difficult for these companies to quickly respond to competition and provide new goods and services on the market.’
“The CEA also found that Congress’ repeal of the Wheeler broadband privacy rule would raise incomes by $22 billion every year. The council found that Congress’ repeal of the rule led to lower broadband prices.”
Less government Internet regulations – means less compliance costs for Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
Which means more money…everywhere for everyone.
Higher wages.  And lower prices – which means even more money in everyone’s pockets.
A big bump up front – when government is initially lessened.
And ongoing, rolling bumps…so long as we keep government lessened.
Oh: And all these people making all this additional money – means they pay more in taxes…which means more money for government.  As we’ve already noted – the current record tax revenues.
Oh: And where is Sanders on Net Neutrality?
Because of course.
If Sanders and his Fellow Travelers were actually interested in helping us – he would be pushing Medicare-for-None.  And Net Neutrality-for-None.  And Medicaid-for-None.  And….
But Sanders and his Fellow Travelers are actually interested in helping government.  And themselves – since they’ll be the ones running government.
So, directly in the face of facts, math and ten thousand years of human history – they push for the very policies that destroy they people they claim to want to help.