HORIST: Political silly season has arrived early

We are just short of a year and a half from the 2020 General Election, and already the leading Democrat candidates have entered the silly season of political campaigning.  That may be true of all the Democrat candidates for president, but who knows.  There are so many with sub-zero support that they cannot command enough attention from even the overly friendly media to get their silly suggestions noticed.

It would appear that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren are in a dead heat for the most preposterous ideas.  It would appear that they a willing to spend trillions of dollars of the taxpayers’ money to buy votes, I mean … if you are going to bribe people, at least do it with our own money.

You cannot accuse Sanders of hypocrisy in proposing silly, impractical and unfundable ideas to merely get votes for his current campaign.  Sanders has been proposing silly, impractical and unfundable ideas since he was the mayor of Burlington, Vermont. Though he has pragmatically decided to operate under the Democratic Party flag, he has been — and remains — a dyed-in-the-wool socialist.

Sanders is hoping that his “Medicare for all” scheme – yes, scheme, not plan – will appeal to those who drifted to the radical left, who hate Trump so much that they have lost their ability to think rationally or just do not understand the economics and outcomes of such ideas.  It may all sound good, but we must beware of things that seem too good to be true for the obvious reason.

As a class warrior, Sanders has one solution for financing all his give-‘em-everything proposals. Soak the rich and the corporations.  But not even the rich have enough money – even if you took it all – to underwrite all of Sanders pie-in-the-sky ideas – and corporations never pay taxes, they add it onto the price of the goods and services — and WE, the consumer, pay the tax.

Not to be outdone in advancing silly ideas, Warren proposed that the $1.6 trillion student debt be wiped out, eliminated, forgiven and simply removed from the books.  This is part of her free college for all scheme.   But consider this … if graduates already owe $1.6 trillion – and that is NOT the total cost of their education – can you imagine how much it would cost to underwrite the entire education bill for virtually everyone ad infinitum?

Well … Warren has what she calls “a plan” (scheme?) to pay for all that.  Her idea is to … soak the rich and the corporations.  One can only wonder where she came up with that idea.  Warren is banking on the belief that this promise will get her a lot of Millennial votes – and it may.  Of course, they are being flimflammed.

While there is an outside chance that enough congressional Democrats might buy into some form of Sanders’ silliness, the proverbial snowball in Hell will survive Warren’s $1.6 trillion gift card.  There are just not enough Democrat members of the silly faction in the House and Senate to turn that bit of campaign puffery into reality.

While Sanders and Warren are taxing corporations – and that means the overwhelming number of small businesses — California Senator Kamala Harris takes her anti-business silliness to the regulatory side.  She proposes that every business in America would have to proactively prove that they do not discriminate against women.  It would not be a matter of following up on accusations, but to require constant reporting that the business has not done anything wrong.  Following that theory, businesses could be required to constantly report that they have not engaged any number of wrongful actions.  It is a bit like you and me having to report every month or quarter to Uncle Sam that we did not rob any banks during the previous reporting period.

Washington State Governor Jay Inslee has a multi-trillion-dollar plan to save the planet from overheating.  New Jersey Senator Cory Booker will spend his (our) trillion dollars on reparations for slavery – giving to people who have never been slaves for generations while taking from people who had nothing to do with the institution of slavery.  (As an aside, I have long believed that if we do apply common sense justice, the Democratic Party should pay for the sin of slavery and that 100 years of post-slavery oppression of black Americans.  But I digress).

Again, not to be undone, Warren proposes reparations for gays.  She did not say who would pay for it, but I can guess.  And what about the Japanese, Chinese and other Asians.  And what about the descendants of those Jews that Democrat President Franklin Roosevelt literally shipped back into the arms of Hitler.

And what about the Native Americans – those who died along Democrat President Andrew Jackson’s forced march known as the Trail of Tears.  With this one, if the Native American tribes would agree to take back Manhattan Island as compensation, I might give it some consideration.

Democrats want to give us a Green New Deal.  It is so silly that even that cannot call it a plan.  They say it is aspirational.  That means they have no idea how to implement it.  Thank God.  I have come to believe that the “Green” refers to the money it would cost.

And then there is very silly old Joe Biden. He has promised to cure cancer during his term of office.  That is a pretty bold claim when you consider that, at his age, he may have to accomplish it in one term.  His campaign is based on the silliest strategy of all – “I am not sorry I did (blank), but I won’t do it again.”  So far, we can fill in the blank with Anita Hill testimony, the crime bill, sniffing ladies’ hair and palling around with hardcore racist Democrats.  We can rest assured that there will be more.

I often joke that if the Department of the Treasury discovered $1 trillion in cash in the basement, EVERY one of the 535 members of Congress would spend $1 trillion each.  We are seeing that joke played out in real time without the $1 trillion windfall in the basement – especially among the Democrats seeking their party’s presidential nomination.

The difference between my silly joke and the silly proposals we see flying like fireworks on the Fourth of July is that their silliness could get enacted if Democrats took control of Washington – and that would not be funny at all.

So, there ‘tis.