Search This Blog

Tuesday, February 26, 2019

A Strange Platform

The Democrats are in full 2020 campaign mode.  The horde of presidential candidates have been offering an avalanche of policy prescriptions for America.  That's not surprising; that's what candidates normally do.  It is a difference from what president Obama did in 2008 and 2012 and from what Hillary Clinton did in 2016.  Those Democrats put forth precious little in the way of actually policies and talked instead in generalities.  2020, however, seems to be marking the return of the policy driven debate.  What is truly odd, however, is the list of policies towards which the Democrat candidates have been selecting to promote.  Here's a partial list:

1.  The abolition of private health insurance as a result of "Medicare for all."  This means people who get their health insurance at work would lose those plans.  Something like 160 million people protected under those plans would lose that coverage.  It also means that the 500,000 to 1,000,000 people whose jobs depend on the private health insurance system would be left unemployed.

2.  Air travel would be banned under the terms of the Green New Deal.  That would destroy millions of other jobs in the airlines industry as well as a big chunk of the tourism business across America.  No meaningful numbers of people would go to Hawaii or even Florida if air travel were not possible.

3.  Beef and dairy products would be banned under the terms of the Green New Deal.  This would mean unemployment for all those who work on ranches or dairy farms.  It would also mean the end of most restaurants and the loss of work for millions of employees. 

4.  Automobiles powered by internal combustions engines would be banned.  That would lead to the unemployment of millions of auto workers. 

5.  Power generation would be limited to solar and wind energy.  This would make the power grid unreliable on windless nights. 

6.  Taxes would be raised to extremely high levels.  This would be needed to pay for things like rebuilding every building in the USA.  While the main discussion right now focuses on the rich, the tax burden would have to fall heavily on the middle class if these is to be any hope of paying for all these schemes.

7.  Income inequality would be remedied by making the wealthy poor rather than by raising up the poor.

8.  Guns would be confiscated by the government.  As a result, only criminals would have guns.

9. Guaranteed incomes for everyone combined with open borders would bring huge numbers of additional people to this country.  The result would be ever more widespread poverty.  Americans currently working on the low end of the wage scale would see more competition for jobs from the illegals, and that would make the poor even poorer.

10.  On the international stage, the USA would rejoin the Iran nuclear deal, with the result that Iran would be guaranteed to becoming a nuclear power.

11.  America would pull away from its support of Israel and would go back to Obama's plan to bring the Israelis down.

12.  In Europe, the USA would suddenly stop confronting Russia and would also stop provoking our NATO allies into meeting their obligations.

13.  The USA would go back to dealing with China in the methods of the past, with the result that China would get a free hand to do whatever it wants in the realm of trade and theft of intellectual property.

14.  Abortion would be common place and optional until a short time after a baby is born. 

There's more, but one really has to wonder just who it is that would actually want to see this program get put into effect.  Are the Democrats serious?  Do they really think Americans want to see all this happen?

1 comment:

Norman Ivins said...

They want to get rid of beef and milk and that's no B.S.......???









































s