CBS Host Savages Bernie Over Mindbogglingly Expensive Plans
Surging dramatically in the polls, Democratic presidential primary candidate Bernie Sanders suffered something of a media ambush last week regarding the projected cost of a myriad of social welfare programs he’s proposed on the campaign trail this past year.
Clearly uncomfortable and entirely unwilling to speak to those costs when cornered by “CBS Evening News” host Norah O’Donnell in a video released Friday, the progressive Vermont senator and self-professed democratic socialist went on the defensive, claiming such things are simply “impossible to predict.”
“Your agenda has promised free health care for everybody, free college tuition, and to pay off people’s college loans. The price tag for that is estimated to be $60 trillion over 10 years, correct?” she asked.
“Well, look,” Sanders responded. “We have political opponents who come up –.”
Bernie Sanders: “nobody knows” how much my plans will costhttps://t.co/r8nrLNX7vT pic.twitter.com/u76pZWjdNz
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 25, 2020
Not letting the interview slip away from her, O’Donnell interjected, “You don’t know how much your plan costs?”
“You don’t know,” Sanders accused. “Nobody knows. This is impossible to predict,” he claimed.
“You’re going to propose a plan to the American people, and you’re not going to tell them how much it costs?” O’Donnell asked.
Unfortunately for Sanders, however, any good economist will tell you it is far from “impossible” to predict the cost of his supposedly groundbreaking plan for the American people to undertake a monumental 10-year expansion of the social safety net.
In fact, Brian Riedl at the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal went to the trouble of doing just that last October.
Perfectly labeling Sanders “the unaffordable candidate,” Riedl broke down the estimated cost of every campaign promise made by the Vermont senator at the time — from Medicare-for-All to total student loan forgiveness — and found the combined cost to be approximately $97 trillion.
The “unprecedented” plan would reportedly also see the federal system spending roughly 70 percent of U.S. gross domestic product each year, with half of the nation’s workforce “employed by the government.”
But Reidl was apparently so kind as to not take the whole hatchet to Sanders by tallying up the astronomical social cost of a borderline communist overthrow of the American way of life.
Put plainly, the nation would be a wreck.
Of course, those commendable few on the left who have maintained their sanity as the Democratic Party went completely off the rails in light of the 2016 presidential election already know this.
In fact, that knowledge is exactly what gives rise to establishment media snares like this — or CNN’s recent decision to string Sanders up at the Jan. 14 Democratic debate over unsubstantiated allegations he had made misogynistic statements to Elizabeth Warren in a private meeting months ago.
Moderates on the left know well the cost of a Sanders presidency.
Worse still, they know an honest discussion of the financial cost would undoubtedly impact a cost all the more important: that of a Sanders nomination.
With openly socialist policy proposals carrying a price tag three times that of the current national debt, the cost of a Sanders nomination is almost certainly the re-election of President Donald Trump — something left-wing establishment and punditry could never stomach.
Why else would they be taking a more and more transparent hatchet to Sanders amid a major polling surge just one week prior to the Iowa caucus?
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