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With the 2020 presidential election already underway, Democrats are tripping over themselves to promise the most redistribution of wealth to their key constituencies. Top presidential prospect, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker appears to take the cake, however, with his latest scheme: “baby bonds” which would give kids up to $50,000 by the time they turn 18, to be used for “wealth-creating” purchases like college tuition or buying a home. The more your parents make, of course, the less you get funded in your baby bond account annually.
This is the worst public policy legislation in so many ways. In the first place, isn’t the Democratic Party constantly warning us of the dangers of over-population? Now they are encouraging people to have kids…but not just any people. This is a clear incentive for the poorest of the poor to have kids, live off of the taxpayers and the federal government’s social safety net, and wait to get that big fat check when they turn 18.
This Marxist redistribution of wealth scheme is the perfect example of why I will never support the Democratic Party. The idea that we are going to solve all of society’s ills by raising taxes on corporations and capital gains, to “give” kids from poor families money, is questionable, at best. They didn’t work for this. They didn’t earn it. You’re telling me that giving an 18 year old kid from a low-income neighborhood in the Bronx or South Central LA a check for $50,000 is going to solve urban poverty once and for all?
If this was the solution…why not just give every 18 year old (regardless of personal achievement, criminal record, behavior, aptitude, talents, et cetera) a quarter of a million when they come of age? How about half a million? Why not just make it an even million?
Booker has just proposed this ingenious legislation, and I guarantee that the socialists in the Democratic Party (Sanders, Warren, Harris, Brown) will be tripping over themselves to one up him and propose something even more radical in its Marxist redistributive nature.
The Marxist nature of the Democratic Party’s schemes is only exceeded by that of the leftist and socialist and Communist parties on the South American continent: particularly the dependency boondoggle that is Bolsa Familia in Brazil, which simply hands money each month to poor Brazilian families in exchange for their loyalty to the Workers Party, which ruled and ruined Brazil for the past 14 years.
If you analyze the rhetoric of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and their allies, it really differs little from that of Marxist guerrilla groups that have terrorized Latin America for decades: the FARC and ELN in Colombia, the Shining Path in Peru, the MST in Brazil, Cristina Kirchner and her band of thugs in Argentina, and Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. At the heart of all of their ideology is class warfare and envy: some have less than others, so if the government could be taken over by a socialist government, directed by the proletariat, we could solve the distribution problem, smash the oligarchy, and institute “social justice.” Well, I know that is never going to work.
The Democrats can water down these hair-brained schemes, but fundamentally, it’s the same principle as Hugo Chavez seizing private companies, Fidel Castro expropriating sugar plantations, the MST attacking agro-business crop fields, and the FARC destroying the oil pipelines of multinational corporations. The entire rhetorical basis of the left in the Americas boils down to: blame entrepreneurs, capitalists, and the free-market.
Some may see through the smoke and mirrors of a ludicrous scheme like “baby bonds,” but most rank-and-file Democrats will support it, and most Congressional Democrats will support it, and down the rabbit hole of socialism we go. Giving poor people money for doing nothing may give them a roof, food, and clothes, but it sure isn’t going to change anything long term.
Virtually every leftist party in South America is promising something along the lines of Booker’s plan right now, and surprise, surprise…they have not lifted poor people out of poverty. They have, however, furthered class warfare and resentment, and succeeded in making a lot of low-skilled, low-achieving, low-functioning people across the region dependent upon the government, and reliant on Marxist rhetoric to explain away their lack of achievement.
We are heading for a very dark place in our country, and people like Bernie Sanders and Cory Booker want to place the blame in all the wrong places: you can boil down all their rhetoric into one sentence: “It isn’t fair that corporations and the wealthy have so much, so if the government just took more of it (a lot more of it) we could solve all of society’s problems, and make everyone equal.”
Socialism doesn’t seem to have worked so well anywhere it’s been tried…but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t work in the United States in 2018 when we’ve got $20 trillion in debt, right?
