Vermont Senator and Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders admits his plan to use environmentalism as a vehicle to replace the U.S. economy with socialism comes with a crippling price tag.
“It’s $16 trillion,” Sanders casually said.
“Building on the Green New Deal, we have brought forth a rather detailed proposal, and I have been criticized by some who say it is expensive,” said Sanders, speaking at a “Climate Crisis Summit” Democrat campaign event in Iowa. “Well, they’re right, it is. It’s $16 trillion.”
“The scope of the challenge ahead of us shares similarities with the crisis faced by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940s,” reads Sanders’ plan, comparing the spread of Nazism with people today using the wrong light bulbs.
“Battling a world war on two fronts — both in the East and the West — the United States came together, and within three short years restructured the entire economy in order to win the war and defeat fascism,” Sanders’ plan continues, insinuating that socialism won World War II when it was America’s capitalist might.
“Sanders proposes paying for the plan by cutting military spending, increasing taxes on the wealthy and corporations, litigation, fees, and taxes on the fossil fuel industry, and ‘collecting new income tax revenue from the 20 million new jobs created by the plan,’ in addition to other ideas,” The Washington Examiner reports.
But in defending the plan Sanders finds himself defeated by an old enemy. Basic math.
The entire Defense Department budget is less than $600 billion, less than what we spend on Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security. That’s less than four percent of the entire plan.
That means gutting defense spending by 25 percent comes up with less than one percent of the funds for his plan, and that’s the first thing he mentioned.
In fact, Sanders’ plan is four times larger than the annual budget of the entire federal government.
Making it even more ridiculous, the combined net worth of every billionaire in the United States is $2.4 trillion.
If Sanders were to forcibly seize all money, property, and assets of all billionaires and liquidate everything they own in a Soviet-style uprising, he gets only one-eighth of the funding he needs for his plan.
AAN Staff
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