Spending Plans of the Presidential Candidates

But don't worry.  Only the rich will be taxed to pay for all of these promises.  The socialists of the Democratic Socialist Party, who do not actually believe in democracy, have assured us that very few of us will be taxed to pay for all the goodies a much multiplied bureaucracy of swamp creatures and the special interests their handouts will spawn will provide.  We will just tax the producers of wealth in America and hand their money over to politicians and bureaucrats and we will be well taken care of.  No worries.

Reality: You will have to work mighty hard to become one of the special interest factions able to soak up the money unless you want to join the vast majority of Americans in a lower standard of life.  Forget about voluntary associations and acts of cooperation in a free society.  Forget about choosing your own values and dreams.  Forget about managing your own life in accordance with your self-chosen values.

Stop working hard -- if you do, everyone else will just take all you produce, stealing the very hours of your life.  Don't be a slave to government -- go fishing or watch endless hours of TV, or stare at your cell phone all day.  This is the good life according to the many socialists among us.  Any purpose but the pursuit of power over others is pointless.  Is it any wonder the majority of the people will turn to alcohol and opiates in their ideal society, while the ambitious will become brutal savages in the pursuit of the power to deny everyone else their voluntary associations and acts of cooperation?

Socialism only appeals to the unbelievably ignorant, the insane, and the most brutish persons of a society.

Update on 6 March 2020:

Only Sanders and Biden remain of the Democratic Party significant contenders of the spending plans plot above.  Buttigieg, Bloomberg, Steyer, and Klobuchar only wanted federal spending over 10 years of $68 trillion or less.  That was not enough for the modern Democratic Party.  They all failed to acquire enough votes from their highly socialist party adherents.  Biden promises to spend $75.6 trillion over the next 10 years and that might be enough to satisfy enough party members for him to secure the party nomination with the generous help of the party political hack delegates who do not need to get votes.  Sanders wants an unbelievable $139.5 trillion in spending over 10 years.

Sanders wants to spend enough to collapse the federal government.  This is the real revolution he has been advocating.  Collapse the federal government and in the ensuing chaos, create a communist government to take its place.  His passion has always been for the kind of socialism that makes everyone equally poor.  He has never had any use for people who produce the goods and services of the private market.  His is a real passion for socialism and he has no real interest even in stealing from the private sector in an ongoing manner.  No, he only wants to steal all its wealth once.  Once and done.

Biden and the political establishment of the Democratic Party do not want to collapse the government.  They do not want to entirely kill the wealth generating private sector.  No, they are parasites and they have just enough self-interest not to kill their host.  They need the wealth-generating private sector to generate the wealth they will steal and the money they will use to acquire more power over the American people.  These people include most of the media, almost all of academia and the bureaucrats, almost all the lobbyists, and some environmentalists and labor leaders.  They want to maximize the amount of wealth they can steal, which means they have to allow wealth to be generated still.  If they understood economics better, they would allow more wealth to be generated than they will allow and they would actually get away with stealing more, though at a lower percentage.  However, these are also envious people who depend heavily upon getting the votes of envious people, so they have to compromise by maximizing some combination of envy + stolen wealth.

Comments on Medicare-for-All

Elizabeth Warren's plan to nationalize the health care system in the USA has a price tag of $52 trillion according to her no-doubt reliable cost accounting.  She has claimed repeatedly that billionaires will pay all the taxes to pay for it.  The middle class will pay nothing, so she says.

The total wealth of American billionaires is estimated to be about $2.4 trillion.  If every last penny of that wealth were confiscated by Warren's socialist government, the tax on the billionaires would cover about 4.6% of cost of the first 10 years of her Medicare-for-All program.  Now, mind you, who is then going to pay that same 4.6% of more of the next 10 year period of her Medicare-for-All?  When those American billionaires sell off all their assets to pay their confiscatory taxes, will those who buy up the assets manage them as well and generate as many jobs and as much GDP growth?

Other portions of the costs are to be paid by having the states transfer their Medicaid payments to the federal government.  Companies will have to turn over what they are paying into employee health plans to the federal government.  Companies will lose the ability to tune their health insurance costs to their industry, location, and profitability.  Many more companies will fail without this flexibility, causing a loss of jobs and a loss of GDP growth.  Still, these sums will fall far short of providing the $52 trillion costs of Warren's plan.  Who do you think is going to make up the huge difference?

Both Warren and Sanders plans will shut down the private health insurance markets.  This means they will put 2 million Americans in that industry out of work.  Do either of their plans cost estimates include putting these 2 million Americans on unemployment insurance payouts and other welfare programs?  When 2 million Americans lose their jobs, how many will become alcoholics or other drug users?  How many will commit suicide in their despair and depression?  Have we learned nothing from the human disaster that occurred in part as Obama acted to destroy the coal mining industry and the jobs of those who transported coal, burned coal in power plants, and ran the retail and services industries of the towns that depended upon coal production?

Medicare-for-all will result in lower quality medical care for everyone.  Innovation, medical care giver training and intelligence, equipment, and facilities will all deteriorate more and more over time.  Bureaucrats will be in charge of deciding who will live and who will die.  And every American will lose the sole ownership of their minds and bodies.  When someone else gets to dictate how you will act to maintain your own mind and body, then you have lost your most critical property right.  You are no longer sovereign.  You are a slave.

My Tax Rate as an Individual and as an Employer

Bernie Sanders is proposing raising the highest bracket of the federal income tax from 37% to 52%.  This caused me to think once again about the taxes I pay.

I pay all of the usual personal taxes such as federal income tax, Social Security tax, Medicare tax, Maryland income tax, real estate taxes on my home, and the Maryland state sales tax.  In addition, I am a small business owner.  As a small business owner, I pay the following taxes:

Social Security (half for each employee)
Medicare (half for each employee)
Federal Unemployment
Maryland Unemployment
S Corporation Tax
Workman's Compensation Insurance (required by state)
Real Estate Property Tax
Personal Property Tax (laboratory equipment, supplies, computers, furniture, etc.)
Sales Tax

The sales taxes are too onerous to calculate, so I am going to leave those out of my calculation of the tax burden I carry as an individual and as an employer.  I did this calculation for the year 2018.

Leaving sales taxes out of the calculation for both the company and at home, the other taxes I paid equal 99.0% of my income.  Taking into account the sales taxes, that percentage goes well beyond 100%.

Now most of you are likely to argue that many of the taxes I paid are just a cost of doing business and it is not as though the various governments ganged up on me and took every penny I earned and more and left me to actually starve in the streets.  But it is true that if these governments did not tax me, my personal income could have been about 60% more than what it was.  Viewed from this perspective, I was likely only able to control the spending of about 35% of the income I could have had were it not for the many government taxes I pay both as an individual and as a small business owner.  I am one hell of a taxpayer.

Is it any wonder in the modern era that so few people choose to be employers and so many prefer to be employees.  This does not even consider the many risks involved in being an employer and a business owner.  It does not include the paperwork burdens.  It does not include the weight of the responsibility for your employees' welfare.  It does not include the cost of complying with the many regulations imposed by governments, many of which have little regard for a cost-benefit ratio that is rational.

Reducing the costs and the many other burdens that governments put on employers has a truly dramatic effect on encouraging entrepreneurs, who are under extremely heavy burdens at present.  The entrepreneurial spirit in America is being squelched.  Let it flourish and the growth rate in our economy will skyrocket.  Even small improvements in the growth rate have a tremendous impact on compounding the growth of the economy over the 40 year period that most people have yet to live.

Think about this when the Democrat Socialist Party politicians propose more taxes to partially cover the expenses of their many proposed new welfare programs.  Not only are they not going to allow entrepreneurship to grow the economy more, but they are actually determined to further squelch it, to smother it, to brutally murder it.  They simply view employers as the enemy, which is exactly what is to be expected of socialists.

More and more employers will go on strike -- they will shrug their shoulders and let all of these heavy burdens crash to the ground.  Atlas will shrug.  The many American employees will have far fewer jobs with far fewer people willing to bear the many burdens of being an employer.  The number of employers has fallen dramatically over our history as governments have grown.  This is not the only reason for this, but it has been an important reason for it.

Concern for Socialist Dictator Maduro of Venezuela is an Indicator of the True Intentions of Democrat Socialists in the USA

The Venezuelan National Assembly was duly elected, while the embattled dictator Nicolas Maduro was the winner of a "sham election under absurdly rigged conditions" according to Democrat Senator Dick Durbin, though he himself is hardly a supporter of the many and broad rights of the individual.  The National Assembly of Venezuela appointed Juan Guaido its interim president, which it is empowered to do by the Constitution of Venezuela.  According to many American Democrat Socialists, the U.S. anointed Juan Guaido and has no business meddling in Venezuelan affairs, though what the U.S. actually did was to recognize the constitutionally appointed President of Venezuela.  Meanwhile, Maduro uses the military to murder and imprison any opposition as he drives more and more Venezuelans into unemployment and ever starvation.

Venezuela was among the richest nations in the world a couple of decades ago.  Venezuela began a bad downward trend after the election of Hugo Chavez in December 1998.  The CIA World Fact Book estimated the loss of GDP in 2015 at 6.2%, in 2016 at 16.5%, and in 2017 at 14%.  The World Bank estimated the GDP loss in 2017 at 14.5% and estimates that the 2018 loss of GDP will be 18%.  The CIA World Fact Book says that the per capita GDP in PPP terms in 2015 was $17, 300, which fell to $12,500 in 2017.  The unemployment rate in 2017 was 27.1%.  The 2017 consumer price inflation rate was 1090% and it is worse now.

The brutality of the Maduro regime and the catastrophic economic deterioration of the country do not put a dent in the international solidarity of American Democratic Socialists and like-thinking nations around the world.  Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Turkey, Nicaragua, and Hezbollah all support the Maduro regime.  American socialist Bernie Sanders says the U.S. must not support a coup against Maduro, though he has usurped the Presidency of Venezuela and thanks to the National Assembly is no longer the President of Venezuela.  The people are rioting against his dictatorial regime in the streets, but their opposition to his regime is not to be supported by the U.S. if Sanders gets his wishes.  Meanwhile, Maduro continues on with the support of Cuban intelligence, Cuban troops, and Putin's private army of mercenaries backing him up.  Protestors are shot in the streets.  Bernie, the coup has already occurred and it is being led by Maduro and his Cuban and Russian allies.

California Democat Ro Khanna and the socialist pop star Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are among the many American socialist critics of an "American Coup."  The Maduro - Cuban - Russian Coup is of no real concern to them.  After all, socialism is to be supported by the faithful no matter what hardships it entails.  So many American socialists had no problem with Stalin starving 6 or 7 million Ukrainians to death.  They had no problem with Chairman Mao starving and killing about 60 million Chinese.  Socialism at any cost!

As is usually the case, a religion has no problem killing massive numbers of people to achieve its ends.  The god of the Israelites killed all of the people of Jericho, Sodom, and Gomorrah.  The Catholic Church under Pope Innocent III called for a crusade in 1209 against the heretic Catharists who had become prevalent in southern France, then the most wealthy part of Europe.  This murderous crusade is estimated to have killed more than 1 million people before the end of the century according to Homer Smith in Man and His Gods.  Then there was 300 years of total devastation for vast regions of Europe as the Catholics and Protestants fought each other viciously for the soul of mankind in Europe.  The Christian churches also murdered many thousands of people for having sex with others of the same sex or for being witches.  Islam has a similar murderous reputation, which continues to this day.  So why balk at the murders and hardships needed to set the world on a socialist path?  It is as much a religion as these others.

Unless you have a shred or more of rationality in your character.  If you are capable of and value independent thinking, then the answer is clear.  Socialism is not for us.  It is to be fought as though your life depends upon it.  Your life does depend upon the defeat of socialism.  We have to win this battle against international and against American socialists, because if you are like me, they will kill you.  No brutality is too great for a religion like socialism.