Bernie Sanders’ socialized medicine plan (he calls it ‘Medicare for all,’ which is precisely as horrific as it sounds*) wouldn’t just raise taxes through the roof. It would also hit working seniors particularly hard; there are about eight and a half million folks over 65 who are both on Medicare AND working, and they’d get hit with those taxes as well.  Don’t you just love this wonderful economy that Barack Obama and his party have cultivated for us?  It’s great stuff if you’re a crony of the Democrats; not so hot for the rest of the population.

But that’s just part for the course, really.  To get back to those tax increases, it’s remarkable just how blatantly the Sanders campaign is signalling how they want to levy an 8.4% tax increase on workers. Oh, sure, they’re hiding most of the tax increase in a supposed ’employer’ tax, but that’s even more unsurprising. You see, Communists – oh, excuse me: ‘democratic socialists’ – have the minor problem that their economic system doesn’t work in real life.  Ever. They get around this with conspiracy theories: in their world, there is a nigh-omnipotent cabal of greedy capitalists who suck up all the profits without blinking, but who will meekly hand over said profits without complaint if directed to.  Hence, obviously the solution to everybody’s problem? Tax the rich! It’s not going to even hurt them.

Alas, this is the real world: and in the real world a company’s profit margin is typically much narrower than Communists are capable of comprehending, let alone ‘willing to concede.’  If you levy a tax on a company that doesn’t actually have the money to pay it, it will do one of three things. One, it will go out of business.  Two, it will pass along the tax to the consumer by raising prices.  Three – and this is what would happen under Sanders’ ’employer’ tax – it will pass along the tax to its workers by lowering wages or benefits.

The typical response to this basic dose of objective reality by Communists?  Well, it depends.  When they’re not in sole power, they whine about unfairness and say that you’re a bad person for pointing out that Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people.  When they are in sole power, they put you on a show trial for being a wrecker, assuming that they don’t just take you and your family to a basement and then shoot you in the back of the head.

Look, it’s not my fault that Bernie Sanders skates as close as he dares to the single most murderous political/economic ideology in human history.  I refuse to apologize for despising Communists, and not trusting socialists to not turn into Communists. It’s  neck that we’re talking about here.

Moe Lane

*Medicare is a method by which Democratic politicians shunt poor people into a program where they ostensibly have medical insurance, if only it covered enough procedures and an acceptable number of doctors took it. Which it doesn’t, and they don’t. And that’s why Republicans fought Medicare [Medicaid] expansion tooth and nail: it would have been easier to go along with it, but most of us don’t in fact take pleasure in watching poor people suffer.

[Let me update this footnote: well, half-update, half correct.  As has been noted in both comments to this article and here,  Medicaid expansion is what the GOP fought, because Medicaid is indeed horrible and the doctor shortage is a real concern. So my bad for using the wrong name in the second instance. Medicaid expansion is still an issue, however, because Bernie Sanders himself is (I think) deliberately conflating the two himself: calling his program ‘Medicare for all’ sounds a lot better than calling it ‘Medicaid for all,’ not least because the alternative is to call it ‘socialized medicine.’ I hope that this clarifies matters for people.]