Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) would like to fill some Americans’ stockings with a big, fat check from Uncle Sam this Christmas.
According to Sanders, who is a self-described socialist, “Congress cannot go home for the holidays unless we pass a $1,200 direct payment to working-class adults and $500 in payments for their kids. Congress is not going to go home until we do that. That’s what the American people want.”
So, if America’s working class adults, as Bernie says, want a taxpayer-funded check from the U.S. government, we should just nod in agreement and move on? Look, I’m all for helping people who have been hurt financially by the government-imposed lockdowns passed in an attempt to slow the coronavirus, but Bernie wants to hand out checks to everyone who fits his definition of “working class,” even if they haven’t been harmed by the pandemic.
Sorry, Bernie, that is not how things work, even during the holiday season.
Sanders doesn’t want to spend a little more than what is now being discussed, either.
“What kind of negotiation is it when you go from $3.4 trillion to $188 billion in new money? That is not a negotiation. That is a collapse,” Sanders also said.
It sure is easy for Sanders to promise stimulus checks when he is not footing the bill. It always is easier to spend other people’s money, or, more accurately, to have the Fed print it out of thin air.
If Sanders had any common sense at all, he’d know that the United Sates cannot afford a new $3.4 trillion bag of goodies, especially not one that sends money to people who haven’t even been hurt by the pandemic. considering our nation is drowning in debt.
You know what would be a better gift for the holidays? Instead of sending money to millions of working-class Americans who still have their jobs, or even to those who have become jobless due to the far left’s unnecessarily restrictive lockdowns, why don’t we do them a much bigger favor and focus on distributing the vaccine, reopening the economy, and getting the nation’s public schools back to in-person learning?
That, surely, would be a Christmas miracle most Americans would celebrate with open arms.
BASE PHOTO: U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders speaking with attendees at the 2019 California Democratic Party State Convention at the George R. Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0). Edits to image made by Donald Kendal.
Chris Talgo ([email protected]) is the editorial director and a research fellow at The Heartland Institute, as well as a researcher and contributing editor at StoppingSocialism.com.
