OPINION:
Another week and another step forward for the party of Bernie Sanders.
While Republicans were distracted by being bipartisan on infrastructure, Senator Sanders has been tearing pages out of the policy framework he wrote for the Biden campaign last year to form a $3.5 trillion welfare expansion. He’s now solidified his position as the driving force behind the one party that controls Washington.
Americans of all political stripes shouldn’t be fooled. A weak Joe Biden and an erratic Nancy Pelosi are sideshows to Mr. Sanders’ big play to forge ahead with turning America into a dystopian dependency society. What is billed as pro-health, anti-poverty, and saving the planet has but one purpose: Advancing an American version of ‘Basic Income.’
Inflation and, therefore, cost of living are up, erasing the wage gains of the Trump years and hitting the middle-class hard. While the President wanders on the White House lawn, the party of Sanders is ready to spend trillions on welfare despite little empirical evidence that it will help do anything but drive an agenda.
In the coming weeks, the old income inequality lie will be used in breathless pronouncements about society’s disparities to justify these giveaways. Democrats won’t tell you that those numbers are a fiction cooked up by bureaucrats to grow government. The government’s income disparity numbers intentionally count the taxes people pay in the earnings calculation but ignore the value of welfare benefits given to tens of millions.
The pandemic has been used by the left with great skill to experiment with direct payments, a scheme to give monthly checks to parents (even though people may have to pay that money back), and enhancements of existing assistance programs that disincentivize work and put millions more Americans on the government dole. Squishy Republicans supported a lot of this nonsense as well.
Last week House Speaker Nancy Pelosi raised the prospect of billions in more rental assistance to Americans, even though only 6 percent of the $46 billion already approved has been distributed. The only reason to double down on this absurdity is the furtherance of the Basic Income agenda.
“Free” preschool, “free” college, more government-sponsored health care programs, and the Green New Deal. It’s a veritable smorgasbord of government to create multi-generational dependency.
It may come as a shock to some, but the notion that we’re not entitled to free money or the exact job we want is, in fact, the American way. We’re not guaranteed anything but the freedom to work hard to build our own wealth.
There was a time in this country when people would sweep a floor, cut lawns, or waitress to ensure they had food on the table and money for rent. We lost our way when we became so entitled, so arrogant, so expectant of the hand-out that the kind of work ethic that sustained generations before us actually became objectionable.
In the 1930s, FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps put millions of Americans to work building infrastructure to earn a living and support their families during the Great Depression. Today, Mr. Sanders doesn’t even attempt to hide the fact that the goal is to just give money away for no work at all. To the party of Sanders, people aren’t people. They are the infrastructure - faceless automatons to be molded, built, and fueled by the government.
The cultural revolution in America isn’t just about Critical Race Theory, BLM Marxism, taxpayer-funded abortion, bisexual cartoons, and gender as a social construct. More than anything, it’s about creating an entitlement society where people work less, earn less, have less, and the government, therefore, has more control.
Whether this bill ends up being $3.5 trillion or something else, unless there is bi-partisan courage, the momentum suggests another big win for the party of Sanders and the cause of remaking America.
• Tom Basile, host of Newsmax Television’s “America Right Now,” is an author and adjunct professor at Fordham University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where he teaches earned media strategy.
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