Radio host Rush Limbaugh told listeners on Friday that a good way of understanding presidential politics within the Democratic Party is to imagine Santa Claus.
The iconic conservative closed out the week by addressing Sen. Bernie Sanders’ $16 trillion environmental plan. Mr. Limbaugh said the Vermont Democrat and his colleagues are counting on Americans to ignore financial reality when they head to the polls next year.
“Look at Crazy Bernie’s climate change plan,” he told a caller who said modern Democrats are less eloquent than their peers decades ago. “It’s $16 trillion! This is after he’s granted health care — free health care — to every illegal immigrant paid for with a middle tax increase. The federal budget every year, $4 trillion to $4.5 trillion. His climate change plan is four times that. We don’t have that money. We don’t even have the money we spend now, technically. So they’re reduced now to literally admitting that they’re Santa Claus. Who can announce that they’re going to give away the most?”
Mr. Sanders, a supporter of the Green New Deal, announced a $16.3 trillion blueprint for addressing climate change earlier in the week.
The Democrat said his plan, which allocates $200 billion to poorer nations, would “pay for itself” within 15 years.
The New York Times noted its “eye-popping price tag” on Thursday, particularly compared with a $1.7 trillion plan by former Vice President Joe Biden and a $2 trillion plan by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
“Mr. Sanders’s plan would be funded in part by imposing new fees and taxes on the fossil fuel industry,” the newspaper reported. “He described the proposal as putting ’meat on the bones’ of the Green New Deal resolution and laying the groundwork for a rapid energy transformation.”
Mr. Limbaugh told listeners not to expect a full examination of Democrats’ plans because “a friendly media” is more interested in “running cover for them.”
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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