Here’s an article from Robert Gagnon from the American Spectator. Dr. Gagnon is someone I trust on the gay marriage / homosexuality / gay rights issues. In this post he makes a list of all the things Sanders is doing and intends to do on the gay rights vs religious liberty issue.
He writes:
I have encountered a fair number of persons holding a more or less traditional view of marriage who are warming up to Sanders because Sanders strikes them as a “nice man” who just wants to “help the poor.” Pay attention, please, for Sanders has told us exactly what he would do to you as President (rest assured that Hillary Clinton would do the same):
First, Sanders will kill any sort of religious liberty legislation, such as the the “First Amendment Defense Act”:
1. “Veto any legislation that purports to ‘protect’ religious liberty at the expense of others’ rights” (the scare quotes are his). In other words, he is going to get you, you hateful, ignorant bigots who have a problem with supporting directly with your talents, goods, and money the full homosexual and transgender lifestyle.
Second, if anyone in your office finds out that you oppose gay marriage, Sanders is authorizing your pro-gay co-workers to have you fired on the spot:
2. “Sign into law the Equality Act,” of which he “is currently a cosponsor,” “which would expand the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other anti-discrimination laws to include protections for sexual orientation and gender identity.” This would include a so-called “employment nondiscrimination” legislation that renders you the moral equivalent of a racist should you utter in or out of the workplace the view that homosexual activity is harmful or immoral. Think of it as anti-Christian (and anti-Muslim and anti-Orthodox Jewish) employment discrimination legislation.
Expect lots of firings and terminations to take place. Imagine your workplace as a sort of “secret police” state, except the policing won’t be so secret. Expect there to be a full-court federal push to punish with hefty fines those who do not want to contribute their talents and goods directly to “gay weddings” (bakers, florists, photographers, caterers). Churches that allow non-parishioners to use any of their facilities will have to offer these to “gay weddings” and any other homosexual or transgender activities. In some cases white-collar employees who outside the workplace write in favor of a male-female foundation for marriage (even on a Facebook post) could be charged with creating a hostile work environment and terminated.
Pro-gay indoctrination of police officers into the gay agenda:
4. “Require police departments to adopt policies to ensure fairer interactions with transgender people, especially transgender women of color …, and institute training programs to promote compliance with fair policies.” This is a mandate to indoctrinate forcibly police departments along the lines of “progressive” sexual ideology. Either they learn to advance the transgender cause or face discipline and termination. That means converting law enforcement into the most active enforcers of a homosexual and transgender agenda against the citizenry. You have no rights, except the right to remain silent.
Pro-gay indoctrination of young children in the schools:
5. Pass “anti-bullying” legislation requiring indoctrination of children in the schools into the LGBT agenda. Your children will be taught to regard you as a “bully” and a “homophobic bigot” if you don’t affirm homosexual and transsexual identities. Your children will be given exercises that will urge them to declare their affinity with the LGBT cause. “If you believe that sexual orientation is not a choice, walk across the room to us, where these treats are waiting.” If your children don’t comply, they will be ostracized.
Dr. Gagnon lists a few policies favored by Sanders, and takes a look at his record on gay rights issues in Vermont. Suffice to say that if this man is elected President, religious liberty and freedom of conscience for Christians will be finished. Some voters think that forced redistribution of wealth by a secular government is more important than the right to live by Biblical sexual ethics. For myself, I’m not for redistribution of wealth by a secular big government. I believe in Biblical sexual ethics, and I believe in natural marriage. I don’t want to elect someone who would punish me for being supportive of natural marriage and traditional morality.
Democrats took control of government spending in 2007
This article from Investors Business Daily takes a look at his record and experience in the areas that are relevant to economic growth.
It says:
Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders said Monday his parents would never have thought their son would end up in the Senate and running for president.
[…]He explained his family couldn’t imagine his “success,” because “my brother and I and Mom and Dad grew up in a three-and-a-half-room rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn, and we never had a whole lot of money.”
It wasn’t as bad as he says. His family managed to send him to the University of Chicago. Despite a prestigious degree, however, Sanders failed to earn a living, even as an adult. It took him 40 years to collect his first steady paycheck — and it was a government check.
“I never had any money my entire life,” Sanders told Vermont public TV in 1985, after settling into his first real job as mayor of Burlington.
Sanders spent most of his life as an angry radical and agitator who never accomplished much of anything. And yet now he thinks he deserves the power to run your life and your finances — “We will raise taxes;” he confirmed Monday, “yes, we will.”
One of his first jobs was registering people for food stamps, and it was all downhill from there.
Sanders took his first bride to live in a maple sugar shack with a dirt floor, and she soon left him. Penniless, he went on unemployment. Then he had a child out of wedlock. Desperate, he tried carpentry but could barely sink a nail. “He was a shi**y carpenter,” a friend told Politico Magazine. “His carpentry was not going to support him, and didn’t.”
Then he tried his hand freelancing for leftist rags, writing about “masturbation and rape” and other crudities for $50 a story. He drove around in a rusted-out, Bondo-covered VW bug with no working windshield wipers. Friends said he was “always poor” and his “electricity was turned off a lot.” They described him as a slob who kept a messy apartment — and this is what his friends had to say about him.
The only thing he was good at was talking … non-stop … about socialism and how the rich were ripping everybody off. “The whole quality of life in America is based on greed,” the bitter layabout said. “I believe in the redistribution of wealth in this nation.”
So he tried politics, starting his own socialist party. Four times he ran for Vermont public office, and four times he lost — badly. He never attracted more than single-digit support — even in the People’s Republic of Vermont. In his 1971 bid for U.S. Senate, the local press said the 30-year-old “Sanders describes himself as a carpenter who has worked with ‘disturbed children.’ ” In other words, a real winner.
This is the man that so many Democrats want to put in charge of our economic policy. He’s never run a damned thing in his entire life, but his words sound nice if you have no understanding of how the world works. Besides, doesn’t a person’s good intentions automatically mean that he will achieve good results? He doesn’t have to know anything if his heart is in the right place, does he?
Here’s an article from the Washington Free Beacon that talks about a non-partisan study from the Tax Foundation think tank, which analyzes Sanders’ plans for the US economy.
Excerpt:
Bernie Sanders proposed tax plan would raise taxes by $13.6 trillion over the next decade and reduce the economy’s size by 9.5 percent, according to an analysis by the Tax Foundation.
[…]After accounting for reductions in economic growth, Sanders’ plan would lead to 12.84 percent lower after-tax incomes for all taxpayers, 6 million fewer full-time jobs, and an 18.6 percent smaller capital stock.
That’s who just won the Democrat primary in the Live-Free-Or-Die state of New Hampshire on Tuesday night. They used to want freedom in New Hampshire, now they just want free stuff. Free stuff that their neighbor has to pay for. Or maybe their neighbor’s children.
The problem with all these new taxes ($13.6 trillion) is that you can’t get that money from ONLY “the wealthy”. Although ignorant college kids may think that you can get $13.6 in tax revenue from the rich, the truth is that the so-called 1% don’t make that much money.
Let’s say that $13.6 trillion is $1.36 trillion per year.
John Stossel explains why you can’t make $1.36 trillion per year from taxing the rich:
Progressives say, if you’re so worried about the deficit, raise taxes! There are lots of rich people around, squandering money. On my show, David Callahan of the group Demos put it this way: “Wealthy Americans who have done so well in the past decade should help get us out.”
But it’s a fantasy to imagine that raising taxes on the rich will solve our deficit problem. If the IRS grabbed 100 percent of income over $1 million, the take would be just $616 billion.
[…]My $616 billion assumption above is absurd. Rich people wouldn’t work if government takes all their earnings.
Progressives claim an increase in tax rates won’t stop producers from producing. But they presumably understand that people don’t work for free. When the top marginal rate was 90 percent, actor Ronald Reagan worked just half the year. As soon as he made enough money such that every additional dollar was taxed at 90 percent, he stopped working and went off to ride horses. Reagan later said that woke him up to the damage that high taxes impose.
Maryland created a special “tax on the rich” that legislators said would bring in $106 million. Instead, the state lost $257 million. Some of Maryland’s rich just left the state. When New York state hiked its income tax on millionaires, billionaire Tom Golisano moved to Florida, which has no personal income tax. “[M]y personal income tax last year would’ve been $13,800 a day,” he told us. “Would you like to write a check for $13,800 a day to a state government, as opposed to moving to another state?”
That $13.6 trillion in taxes cannot come from the rich – they will stop producing, or more likely move their production to another country with more reasonable taxes. (Canada’s corporate tax rate is 15% – less than half our 36% corporate tax rate). The tax money Bernie wants is going to have to come out of the pockets of middle-class families, small businesses and other job creators.
Now think, Democrats: how well can your employer afford to employ you if they have to pay much higher taxes? They can’t, and you won’t have a job. Everything doesn’t stay the same when you make these changes to go in a socialist direction. People react to the changes. We have to think beyond stage one. What comes next, for ALL the people who are impacted by the change?
Democrats took control of government spending in 2007
It’s very strange to me that young people seem to like Bernie Sanders’ rhetoric so much. Have they really considered what his budget would require?
Here’s an article from the Washington Free Beacon that talks about a non-partisan study from the Tax Foundation think tank.
Excerpt:
(I., Vt.) proposed tax plan would raise taxes by $13.6 trillion over the next decade and reduce the economy’s size by 9.5 percent, according to an analysis by the Tax Foundation.
While on the campaign trail, the senator has proposed $18 trillion in spending over the next decade. His plan includes $15 trillion for a government-run single-payer health care plan and trillions more for Social Security, roads and bridges, higher education, paid family and medical leave, and private pension funds, to name just a few.
Sanders’ proposed tax plan will increase marginal tax rates and the cost of capital, a move that will significantly reduce GDP, lower wages, and eliminate jobs.
According to the Tax Foundation, Sanders aims most of his tax provisions at high-income households, creating four new income tax brackets with rates of 37 percent, 43 percent, 48 percent, and 52 percent. Additionally, Sanders would tax capital gains and dividends for households with income over $250,000 and create a 2.2 percent income-based health care premium.
However, as Sanders has admitted, his plan also includes tax increases on the middle class. “We will raise taxes. Yes, we will,” Sanders said at the CNN town hall last weekend.
“A majority of the revenue raised by Sanders plan would come from a new 6.2 percent employer-side payroll tax, a new 2.2 percent broad-based income tax and the elimination of tax expenditures relating to healthcare,” the analysis explains.
According to a recent report from the Congressional Budget Office, even without Sanders’ tax plan the nation’s economy is projected to expand at a rate much lower than in recent decades. Sanders’ plan would lower the growth rate further, as its proposed marginal tax rate increases on labor and capital would reduce GDP by 9.5 percent in the long term.
“At the center of my campaign is how we’re going to raise wages,” Sanders said at the first Democratic debate. “Yes, of course, raise the minimum wage, but we have to do so much more, including finding ways so that companies share profits with the workers who helped to make them. And then we have to figure out how we’re going to make the tax system a fairer one.”
“And in my view what we need to do is create millions of jobs by rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure; raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour; pay equity for women workers; and our disastrous trade policies, which have cost us millions of jobs; and make every public college and university in this country tuition-free,” he said.
After accounting for reductions in economic growth, Sanders’ plan would lead to 12.84 percent lower after-tax incomes for all taxpayers, 6 million fewer full-time jobs, and an 18.6 percent smaller capital stock.
Let’s take a look at a few of these from the perspective of a non-clown.
Minimum wage
You know, you don’t have to be an economics genius to understand that this man is a fool – the equivalent of a clown trying to take control of a nuclear power plant. Just look at his position on minimum wage. Every economist understands that raising the minimum wage causes businesses to lay off workers. Why? Because they have to pay for the higher minimum wage somehow. Either they lay off workers and scale back their business, or they charge consumers more. When you charge consumers more, they buy less of what you’re selling. So, usually it means laying off workers.
This Daily Signal article explains what happened when liberal cities raised their minimum wage rates.
Payroll tax
Raising the rate o the employer payroll tax means that employers will basically have to pay more for the same labor. They X labor out of their employees now, and paying Y wages. After Sanders, they will be getting X labor still, but paying a higher Y in wages. What will they do? They will simply let go of their least productive employees and scale back their business, maybe expanding abroad and sending jobs to a country where they are taxed less.
This article from the Fraser Institute explains what happens when companies have to pay more to employ workers.
Tariffs
Bernie Sanders thinks that consumers should pay more for consumer goods. That’s what happens when you slap tariffs on goods manufactured in other countries. Consumers and businesses end up paying more for the same product, leaving less money for other things that you need for your family.
Single payer health care is supported by economic illiterates in the Democrat and Republican parties – both Sanders and Trump support it. What single payer does is allow government workers to take a cut of every transaction between you and your doctor, effectively imposing a tax on medical treatment without adding any value. It would be as if every transaction between you and Amazon.com were to be funneled through the government to see if you were allowed to buy what you wanted, and for how much. Obviously, we would have to hire government workers to make decisions about your Amazon purchases, to make you wait in line behind others who wanted the same items, and to process payments to Amazon.
Just read this Boston Globe article about the costs of Vermont’s (failed) proposal to have single-payer health care.
Public Works
Henry Hazlitt’s book “Economics in One Lesson” explains the problem with taxing the private sector to build public works.
Therefore, for every public job created by the bridge project a private job has been destroyed somewhere else. We can see the men employed on the bridge. We can watch them at work. The employment argument of the government spenders becomes vivid, and probably for most people convincing. But there are other things that we do not see, because, alas, they have never been permitted to come into existence. They are the jobs destroyed by the $10 million taken from the taxpayers. All that has happened, at best, is that there has been a diversion of jobs because of the project. More bridge builders; fewer automobile workers, television technicians, clothing workers, farmers.
And consider Chapter 5 as well, entitled “Taxes Discourage Production”.
In our modern world there is never the same percentage of income tax levied on everybody. The great burden of income taxes is imposed on a minor percentage of the nation’s income; and these income taxes have to be supplemented by taxes of other kinds. These taxes inevitably affect the actions and incentives of those from whom they are taken. When a corporation loses a hundred cents of every dollar it loses, and is permitted to keep only fifty-two cents of every dollar it gains, and when it cannot adequately offset its years of losses against its years of gains, its policies are affected. It does not expand its operations, or it expands only those attended with a minimum of risk. People who recognize this situation are deterred from starting new enterprises. Thus old employers do not give more employment, or not as much more as they might have; and others decide not to become employers at all. Improved machinery and better-equipped factories come into existence much more slowly than they otherwise would. The result in the long run is that consumers are prevented from getting better and cheaper products to the extent that they otherwise would, and that real wages are held down, compared with what they might have been.
There is a similar effect when personal incomes are taxed 50, 60 or 70 percent. People begin to ask themselves why they should work six, eight or nine months of the entire year for the government, and only six, four or three months for themselves and their families. If they lose the whole dollar when they lose, but can keep only a fraction of it when they win, they decide that it is foolish to take risks with their capital. In addition, the capital available for risk-taking itself shrinks enormously. It is being taxed away before it can be accumulated. In brief, capital to provide new private jobs is first prevented from coming into existence, and the part that does come into existence is then discouraged from starting new enterprises. The government spenders create the very problem of unemployment that they profess to solve.
Why anyone would consider a man who has never held a private sector job for any length of time is beyond me. That article explains that Sanders has only ever collected unemployment or worked in government jobs. My cashier at Chick-Fil-A understands more about economics than this fool.
WINTERY KNIGHT 