It should come as no surprise that socialists are hypocrites and Senator Bernie Sanders is no different.  He likes to spend his time blaming capitalism and free markets for the 1% when he himself is a true 1%er.

Sanders has never actually created much of anything over the course of his life, other than the hot air he expels as he looks down on those who actually produce wealth in a country with a very limited (if any) free market left.  He may have written some books in which he bemoans the system that has allowed him to get rich, but Sanders is wealthy not just from his books, but off the backs of the taxpayers.  Don’t let him fool you – he became a millionaire in 2016.  He was rich because the government steals money from producers and gives it to him and other criminal hypocrites as a salary for being an authoritarian politician. And this was going on long before he wrote a book.

In the “Land of the Fee and Home of the Slave,” it isn’t uncommon for imbeciles to follow along what Sanders and other socialists proclaim.  They will jump and cheer if the government ever confiscates wealth from those who have worked hard, all because they have never actually created enough wealth to provide anything to society – other than the constant complaining about “the system” that keeps them down (the very system they want to be expanded and larger.)

Totalitarian millionaire, Bernie Sanders, who has infamously made income inequality a hallmark of his presidential campaign, earned with his wife about $566,000 last year and $1.15 million in 2017, putting them in the nation’s highest income brackets, according to tax returns released by the presidential candidate Monday. Sanders and his wife are officially in the top 1% of income earners in the United States according to The Washington Post.

Ironically, the money made from his book, which is a battle cry against freedom and free markets was only able to be successful in the teeny arena of capitalism the United States has left. Sanders is essentially using the system he rails against daily to get wealthy.  But it’s not like he wasn’t rich before – that was just money stolen from others who mostly made less than he did to be his slaves.

Sanders’s annual Senate salary is $174,000. Much of his income came from books he has written about his democratic socialist platform, which includes a call for higher taxes on the wealthiest Americans – such as himself.  Perhaps he should lead by example and give up 90% of his income to the government.

This should really not come as a surprise. After all, if socialists were logically and morally consistent, they wouldn’t be socialists.

When Venezuela’s Marxist dictator Nicolas Maduro addressed his citizens on Sunday, he told them that their electric power would be rationed: “I have approved a 30-day plan to regulate the output.” He called the plan “a load management regime.”

Unfortunately, owing to the rolling power outages that have plagued Venezuela over the last month, most of those citizens, if they had television, weren’t able to view his speech because their power was out.

That is the end point of socialism: When government interferes, products and services formerly provided by the free market become limited. Prices go up and price controls follow. The price controls further limit supply, and the final step is rationing what’s left.

Maduro admitted to two failures in that short sentence: His government is unable to provide for his people; and those shortages are likely to last for a long time. The unspoken message being delivered is that socialism, no matter what it might be called, always ends in tyranny, misery, and death.

Venezuela’s power industry was nationalized in 2007 under the socialist administration of Maduro’s predecessor and mentor, Marxist Hugo Chavez. The ideology of socialism, termed Chavismo, continued under Maduro following Chavez’s death in 2013. Consequently, those professionals running the energy grid were removed and replaced with political appointees as rewards for their loyalty to the socialist regime. Since then some 25,000 technicians skilled in running the power industry have left the country, leaving the incompetent in charge.

As Maduro’s economy spiraled downward, funds for maintenance dried up. In early March a grassfire burned some trunk lines feeding power from the country’s Guri dam, causing turbines generating power to fail. This plunged the populace into darkness for days. On March 25, another outage led to more misery, and more socialist intervention in the form of rationing the remaining electricity that the power plant is able to produce.

The impacts are predictable, and widely known: Patients are forced to bring their own bedding, water, and medicines to hospitals, where there is no air conditioning and few sanitary services available. Without gasoline, which is limited in supply, backup generators are only able to provide electricity to parts of the hospitals. Newborns are dying due to lack of sanitary conditions and adequate supplies.

When the power grid goes down, nothing works: no phones, no gas, no water, no credit card transactions. Without water citizens are forced to find what they can on their own, many filling jugs from the polluted Guaire river flowing through Caracas. This predictably leads to more sickness, more demand for diminishing medical hospital services, and more deaths.

In the final analysis, socialism is a political and economic system of war against the most helpless in society, as Alexis de Tocqueville explained 171 years ago. In February 1848, the Second French Republic was established and debates raged about how to cure the problem of unemployment.

The issue centered on continuing the public assistance programs established by the monarchy of Louis Phillippe, and de Tocqueville’s eloquence in explaining why it would continue to fail is unmatched:

Now, the first characteristic of all socialist ideologies is, I believe, an incessant, vigorous and extreme appeal to the material passions of man. [Signs of approval.]

Thus, some have said: “Let us rehabilitate the body”; others, that “work, even of the hardest kind, must be not only useful, but agreeable”; still others, that “man must be paid, not according to his merit, but according to his need”; while, finally, they have told us here that the object of the February Revolution, of socialism, is to procure unlimited wealth for all.

A second trait, always present, is an attack, either direct or indirect, on the principle of private property. From the first socialist who said, fifty years ago, that “property is the origin of all the ills of the world,” to the socialist who spoke from this podium and who, less charitable than the first, passing from property to the property-holder, exclaimed that “property is theft,” all socialists, all, I insist, attack, either in a direct or indirect manner, private property. [“True, true.”] I do not pretend to hold that all who do so, assault it in the frank and brutal manner which one of our colleagues has adopted. But I say that all socialists, by more or less roundabout means, if they do not destroy the principle upon which it is based, transform it, diminish it, obstruct it, limit it, and mold it into something completely foreign to what we know and have been familiar with since the beginning of time as private property. [Excited signs of assent.]

Now, a third and final trait, one which, in my eyes, best describes socialists of all schools and shades, is a profound opposition to personal liberty and scorn for individual reason, a complete contempt for the individual. They unceasingly attempt to mutilate, to curtail, to obstruct personal freedom in any and all ways. They hold that the State must not only act as the director of society, but must further be master of each man, and not only master, but keeper and trainer. [“Excellent.”]

For fear of allowing him to err, the State must place itself forever by his side, above him, around him, better to guide him, to maintain him, in a word, to confine him. They call, in fact, for the forfeiture, to a greater or less degree, of human liberty, [Further signs of assent.] to the point where, were I to attempt to sum up what socialism is, I would say that it was simply a new system of serfdom. [Lively assent.]

Just as there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9), nothing new is occurring in Venezuela that hasn’t happened countless times in history. What Venezuela teaches is unknown to so many who want to make policy in the United States. Absent knowing their history, they should make a short visit to Caracas to see for themselves the end game of the socialism they so ardently revere and promote.

An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at badelmann@thenewamerican.com.

The Green New Deal calls for upgrading every existing building in the U.S. to “maximum energy efficiency” within 10 years, but how much would that cost Americans to just replace common household appliances?

It would cost nearly $244 billion, according to a rough cost estimate put together by the Consumer Energy Alliance (CEA), a ratepayer advocacy group. The group looked at the cost to replace natural gas-fueled furnaces, water heaters, stoves and dryers present in tens of millions of U.S. homes.

“The Green New Deal is not a practical solution for American consumers,” CEA President David Holt said in an emailed statement. CEA represents households, energy end-users, like businesses, and energy producers.

“Many common household appliances including furnaces, water heaters, stoves and dryers are powered by abundant, affordable energy resources including natural gas, which the proposal aims to eliminate,” Holt said.

For perspective, replacing “greening” common appliances would dwarf the economies of entire states, including Oregon, South Carolina and Kentucky. The cost is also more than the gross domestic product of many countries, like Vietnam and Romania.

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, both Democrats, introduced Green New Deal resolutions, calling for a World War II-level mobilization of national resources to fight global warming.

The Green New Deal aims to move the U.S. to “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions” within 10 years while also calling for a slew of welfare and “social justice” programs aimed at “repairing historic oppression” of certain groups.

The resolution also calls for “upgrading all existing buildings in the United States and building new buildings to achieve maximum energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability, including through electrification.”

It’s difficult to put a cost on upgrading every building. The federal government does keep data on household appliances, including furnaces and air conditioners. CEA multiplied the number of homes with certain natural gas appliances by average installation costs.

While gas appliances are often more efficient and cost-effective, the Green New Deal’s call to cut emissions likely mean those appliances would need to be replaced with electric ones.

It would cost more than $155.5 billion to replace gas furnaces used in roughly 59.5 million households, CEA estimated. Gas furnaces are more efficient, especially in the frigid cold.

CEA estimated it would cost another $50 billion to electrify water heaters for the 56.3 million homes that currently rely on natural gas, $26.4 billion to replace natural gas cooking ranges at 39 million homes and $11.9 billion to install electric clothes dryers in 17.9 million homes.

This doesn’t include the cost of replacing coal and gas-fired power plants with renewables and other zero-emissions sources, which could cost anywhere from $5 trillion to $40 trillion. Not getting rid of fossil-fueled power plants could make electric appliances drive more emissions.

“American consumers need better, more practical energy solutions than this proposal offers,” Holt said.

Many Democratic presidential hopefuls have embraced the Green New Deal, including every Democratic senator seeking the nomination in 2020. However, not all Democratic lawmakers are sold on the Green New Deal.

The Green New Deal is meant to be a litmus test for 2020 candidates, but the proposal has got Republicans confident about their chances in the next election cycle.

Many Republicans derided the plan as “socialist,” and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants to bring it to a vote in the Senate — that’s how sure he is it will fail.

“I think the current occupant of the White House is an embarrassment to our country,” Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Tuesday morning in announcing he will seek the Democratic Party nomination for president a second time. Although not a member of the Democratic Party, Sanders ran a strong race for that party’s nomination in 2016, eventually losing to Hillary Clinton.

“I think he is a pathological liar,” Sanders said of President Donald Trump. “I also think he is a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, somebody who is gaining cheap political points by trying to pick on minorities, often undocumented immigrants.”

In addition to his overt dislike of all things Trump, Sanders said his platform for 2020 will include universal healthcare (paid for by the taxpayers), a $15 minimum wage, and reducing student debt. In other words, a repeat of the socialist agenda he championed in his last presidential run.

Some political experts expect as many as 20 Democrats (if you count Sanders) will seek the Democratic Party nomination next year, even more than the 18 Republicans who sought that party’s nod in 2016. Five senators, in addition to Sanders, are entering the fray, including Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobucher, and Elizabeth Warren.

Sanders has some advantages — and some disadvantages — in comparison to his previous bid. He now has almost universal name recognition, always an advantage for a politician seeking any office. When he launched his campaign in 2015, he was at only three percent in the polls. Hillary Clinton was the presumed Democratic Party nominee, and few Democrats even dared to oppose her — even Vice President Joe Biden apparently saw it as hopeless.

Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager, recalled the difficulties they had to overcome then, as opposed to a second run in 2020: “I think he has an opportunity to create a much more robust campaign infrastructure than we had last time when we were all running around, trying both [to] do a campaign and build the organization at the same time. So, there were a lot of unknowns last time which I think are known this time, and that does create a big difference.”

One big difference this time, however, that will work to Sanders’ disadvantage is that he is no longer the only alternative to Clinton. As Trump’s victory in the general election powerfully demonstrated, there are many Americans who simply do not like Hillary Clinton, and will vote for just about anyone running against her. The fact that Sanders garnered millions of votes in the Democratic primaries can partly be attributed to the fact that he was not Hillary Clinton.

Certainly, his brand of unadulterated socialism unfortunately does have an appeal to a large segment of Americans, especially in the Democratic Party. But, in 2016, when Clinton was asked to explain the difference between a Democrat such as herself and an avowed socialist such as Sanders, she really could not delineate any differences. In contrast to Sanders, Clinton may have appeared to offer a non-socialist Democrat choice, but there was little substantive difference.

This time, however, Sanders is not alone in espousing an overt socialist agenda. Weaver argued that this will rebound to Sanders’ credit, because he brought the progressive agenda to the Democratic Party. The again, multiple Democrats seem to be opting to drop the mask and come out as socialists, as well, reducing the chances that the 77-year-old Sanders can claim a monopoly on that designation. (Readers should note that “progressive” is largely just a more acceptable word for socialism.)

“He really has an established record,” Weaver insisted. “If he were to run for president and if he were to be successful, you know, people will have confidence that in fact he will follow through on the policy agenda that he has articulated for decades and decades.”

That is no doubt true, and is the very reason that Americans who value limited government and the free enterprise system will reject Sanders.

During his TV debate with Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in October 2017, Sanders took offense when Cruz compared Sanders’ model nation of Denmark to Communist Cuba. Cruz quoted Ronald Reagan, who noted that the guns on the Berlin Wall all pointed the same way — against those who wanted to escape communism in East Berlin. He then added that the rafts were also going one way — leaving Castro’s Cuba — but no one got on a raft to escape to Cuba.

Sanders took umbrage, telling Cruz not to compare Denmark, a socialist “democracy,” to a totalitarian system such as Cuba.

But Sanders has also lauded Cuba, praising the late Communist dictator Fidel Castro for that island prison’s universal healthcare system and its regimented education system, which he said he would like to see implemented in America. Besides that, Sanders was a member of the Young People’s Socialist League in college, and he even flirted with communism itself, even taking his honeymoon in the old Soviet Union. Then, in the 1980s, Sanders was a featured speaker at a celebration of the Marxist Sandinista’s government in Nicaragua.

In regard to Denmark, Sanders insisted that Americans would be quite willing to pay the higher tax rates paid by that nation’s citizens, if only they knew about all the free stuff they would get in return — healthcare, education, daycare, and so on. Under grilling from Cruz, Sanders reluctantly admitted that all working Americans would pay higher taxes under his plan.

Sanders also strongly supported the continuation of the estate tax — which Cruz called “the death tax.”

But Sanders did indicate there was one area of the federal budget that he would be willing to cut — the military budget.

The unsettling thing about Senator Sanders’ run for president is that he now seems to be “mainstream” in the Democratic Party.

Wherever it has been tried, true socialism as an economic model has been a resounding failure in literally every case, as evidenced in places like Venezuela and Cuba, the latter of which has elements of communism thrown in for good measure.

And yet, it is a model that leaders around the world continue to push, as though trying it one more time will finally yield positive results.

Nowhere is the push for socialism more confusing than in the United States, where the capitalist economic model has led to the greatest economic expansion and creation of wealth among the largest number of people than in any country throughout history.

Nevertheless, socialism has several supporters in the newly-seated 116th Congress, and already backers are proposing the very same measures that have doomed socialism as a successful economic model around the world.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has proposed a “Green New Deal” that, if it were to ever become law or policy would be the biggest expansion of the federal government since our founding, wants to pay for the tens of trillions of dollars it would require by — wait for it — ‘taxing the rich.’

A lot. Like 70 percent.

In an interview with Anderson Cooper for the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” Ocasio-Cortez made a number of historically incorrect and wholly inappropriate statements to justify leveling new tax rates of between 60-70 percent on Americans at the “tippy top” of the earnings range.

Mediate reported:

Ocasio-Cortez suggests in the clip that in her esteem, people should be doing more to pay their “fair share.” When Cooper pressed on how she could possibly pay for the deal, she pointed to the progressive tax rate system in the 1960s, explaining that if you earn 0 to $75,000 a year, you would only pay 10% or 15% in income tax.

“But once you get to the tippy tops, on your $10 millionth, sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60 percent or 70 percent. That doesn’t mean all $10 million are taxed at an extremely high rate. But it means that as you climb up this ladder, you should be contributing more,” she explained.

What Ocasio-Cortez gets wrong about her plan is… everything

For his part, Cooper called that “radical.” Ocasio-Cortez replied, “I think radicals changed this country. Abraham Lincoln made the radical decision to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the radical decision to establish programs like Social Security.”

What is it about Democrats — or in her case “Democratic Socialists” — that makes them believe government should have the authority to confiscate, by force, most of a person’s wealth so that they can then dole it out to others who did not earn it?

Of course, the answer to that question is that Democrats and socialists crave power, and the best way to gain it is to control the masses by making them dependent upon, and subservient to, big government.

First of all, Lincoln’s proclamation was a wartime decision he made in the interests of rallying the North; since the Southern states had formed their own country at the time, the proclamation had no legal effect (the slaves were officially freed by ratification of the 13th Amendment).

For another thing, FDR didn’t ‘create’ Social Security, he signed a piece of legislation — the Social Security Act of 1934 — which created the entitlement. Today, the Social Security fund, a wholly socialist construct, will be broken by 2034.

As for taxing the wealthy to make them ‘pay their fair share,’ the top 40 percent of earners already pay all federal income taxes; the top 20 percent pay nearly 90 percent of all taxes. And Cortez wants to raise them further.

There is a reason why socialism fails as an economic model. It robs citizens of incentives to be productive and generate wealth because doing so just results in wealth confiscation.

You’d think Cortez would understand this given that she has a degree in…economics.

Read more about the Leftist tax tyranny at Tyranny.news.

Sources include:

Fool.com

Mediaite.com

TheNationalSentinel.com

NaturalNews.com

As the middle class disintegrates and poverty grows, more Americans than ever are becoming dependent on the government just to survive.  Today, we live in a country where most workers do not earn enough to support a middle class family, and we are seeing the homelessness crisis spiral out of control in major cities on both coasts.  During this election cycle, many conservatives have been freaking out that an increasing number of Democrats are openly embracing socialism, but the truth is that we are already most of the way to becoming a socialist country.  In fact, as you will see below, more than half of all Americans currently receive more money from the government than they pay in taxes.  We have become absolutely addicted to government money, and this is one of the major trends that is eating away at our nation like cancer.

The government is not supposed to take care of us from the cradle to the grave.

Rather, our founders understood that the proper role of government is to create and protect an environment of liberty and freedom where we would be empowered to take care of ourselves.

Today, most Americans cannot independently take care of themselves, and that makes them dependents.  And when you are a dependent, you aren’t really free.

One of the reasons why I write so much about the decline of the middle class is because it is an existential threat to our way of life.  If you look around the world, or if you go back through history, you will see that tyrannical regimes tend to thrive when populations are poor and cannot stand up for themselves.  If we want our Republic to survive, we need a strong, independent population that is not economically dependent on the government.  That is what we had throughout most of our history, and that is now what we are rapidly losing.

Just because you are working does not mean that you are independent.  At this point, most jobs do not pay enough to support a middle class family, and the ranks of the “working poor” continue to explode.  In reality, Americans are working harder than ever in 2018, and yet things continue to deteriorate.

The following are a few numbers that prove that we are rapidly becoming a nation of government dependents…

–Over half the country now receives more in government transfer payments than they pay in taxes.

-According to one recent survey, the cost of living is higher than the median income in 42 U.S. states.

-Today, 50 percent of all American workers make less than $30,533 a year.

–62 percent of Americans say that their financial situations have not improved since the last presidential election.

And here are six more from my friend Alan Yerushalmi…

• According to a FED report, about 40 percent of adults in the U.S. said that if faced with a $400 unexpected expense, they would either not be able to pay it or would do so by selling something or borrowing money
• Almost 1 in 3 U.S. households have challenges paying energy bills
• About 40% of the American middle class face poverty in retirement
• 1 in 3 Americans have hardly any retirement savings
• Those over 65 have been filing for bankruptcy in droves
• Health spending per capita in the U.S. increased nearly 29 fold in the past 40 years, outpacing the growth of the economy

If things are this bad now, how dreadful will the outlook be once we are deep into the next recession?

History has shown that once national governments begin to expand in size, they usually keep expanding until they ultimately collapse.

Sadly, a large portion of the population has become convinced that the government should be in the business of handing out as much “free stuff” as possible.  Housing, healthcare and college education are now being called “human rights”, and tens of millions of our fellow citizens feel that they are entitled to be given these things by the government.  Needless to say, this has chilling implications for the future of our country, and I really like how Ryan McMaken made this point in his most recent article…

The political implications of this are considerable. As Ludwig von Mises once noted, once we get to the point that a majority of the voting population receives more in benefits than it pays in taxes, then voters will demand more and more wealth be transferred to them through government programs. It will then become politically necessary to extract larger and larger amounts of wealth from a minority in order to subsidize the majority.

Market economics will become less and less popular because the voters will have realized they can — in the words of James Bovard — “vote for a living” instead of work for a living.

Every additional dollar that the federal government spends is an additional dollar that is being stolen from our children and our grandchildren, and we are already more than 21 trillion dollars in debt.

We have been on the greatest debt binge in human history, and that debt binge delayed our day of reckoning, but it did not cancel it.

In fact, one of my contacts just emailed me with some deeply troubling information.  He has a customer that is a Bank of America board member, and that board member told him that they expect things to really start falling apart by late March “at the latest”.  This is word for word what my contact told me…

“I had a customer this past Saturday who was a very high ranking Bank of America board member, and she said in the meetings, they expect late March, at the latest, that things will really start to disintegrate fairly quickly or very quickly. That was AT THE LATEST she said.”

When I say that “dark days are ahead”, I am not using hyperbole.  We really have reached a turning point, and things will never be the same again.

The relentless march of time is inexorable, and eventually the clock runs out for everyone.  America has been living on borrowed time for quite a while, and a perfect storm is looming on the horizon.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is publisher of The Most Important News and the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

For some reason, many millennials (and even some older adults, like the actor Jim Carrey and politician Bernie Sanders) believe that capitalism is the cause of all of America’s woes, and that socialism is the solution.

Those who advocate for socialism fail to accept Venezuela as a cautionary tale, claiming that “other” problems caused the collapse of that country. Funny, because even Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro has admitted that his socialist economic model has “failed” amid food and medicine shortages and failing infrastructure. The inflation rate in Venezuela is forecast to reach 1,000,000% by the end of 2018, and the country’s GDP is set to plummet 18%.

Proponents of socialism often claim that Nordic countries like Sweden are examples of socialism “working”, but what they do not understand is that those nations actually are “capitalist societies with a welfare state,” as Daniel Lacalle explains in Face It, Nordic Countries Aren’t Socialist. In Nordic countries, Lacalle writes, “Private property is guaranteed by law and citizens’ savings are fully private and free of government control. All Nordic countries have been lowering the tax wedge and — until the recent US tax cuts — had lower corporate tax rates than the US.”

In a recent interview with Yahoo Finance’s Julia La Roche, Ken Langone – the billionaire investor, businessman, and philanthropist co-founder of Home Depot – cited the market crash that followed the demise of Lehman Brothers as the reason many millennials have a negative view of capitalism.

To the millennials who favor socialism, Langone has a message:

“I’ll put you in my plane and I’ll fly you down to Venezuela, and let’s see how good socialism is doing down there.”

Lagone, whose new book, I Love Capitalism! was published in May, explained that the criticisms many millennials have of capitalist systems were likely borne out of growing up through the Great Recession. One of the most visible effects in the wake of the recession has been the increasing burden of student loan debt, which has caused some young people to delay life milestones.

“But that wasn’t capitalism,” Langone said of the market crash and recession. “That was a system that’s gone amok.”