Socialism & Scorn: The 2020 Candidates

As we watched the two sets of recent Democrat debates, there were two unmistakable themes embraced by a majority of the candidates. Former Congressman John Delany of Maryland summed up one of these themes perfectly during the July 30^th debate in his response to Bernie Sanders on the Medicare-for-All plan: “I’m starting to think this is not about healthcare. This is an anti-private sector strategy.” If you watched the debate you might not have heard this line because the CNN moderators were talking over Delany at the end of his statement.

The second theme was not directly articulated by anyone but was clearly evident whenever any of the candidates spoke about President Trump. Each candidate displayed a visceral dislike of the President that goes far beyond just policy disagreement or distaste for a personality type. From most, this came across as being just plain hateful – the very characteristic they want to attach to the president.

Anti-Private Sector –

Most of the candidates expressed a baseline belief that the private sector is filled with greed and ill-intent driven by a desire for profit. This is most evident when they speak of the health insurance and energy industries, as well as any other corporate entity resistant to investing in climate change mitigation. Their simplistic remedy for this is to have government either regulate or completely take over these critical services. The theory is that government would be devoid of greed since it operates as a non-profit entity and could deliver these services at a lesser overall cost and to a much wider segment of the population. In the purest technical sense, this is correct. The problem is that none of these candidates are advocating a “purist” approach. They are all insistent on including aggressive wealth re-distribution measures at the same time. This is where any theoretical “savings” or advantage of efficiency melts away.

Let’s take the Medicare-for-All plan articulated best by Bernie Sanders. His plan is usually criticized because of its extreme cost. Sanders believes this cost is actually much less than the overall amount of money being spent on health care today. This is because his plan doesn’t need to include the operating costs and profits of the insurance industry. The government would pay providers directly for all healthcare services, much like Medicare does today for those 65 and older. All else being equal, Sanders is correct. There is an undeniable efficiency achieved in the transaction of a healthcare service without having the insurance “middleman” in the picture.

However, all else is not equal in Sanders’ plan:

1. He also wants to reduce the rates paid to healthcare providers and drug companies.
2. Care providers and drug companies are currently paid by insurance companies or directly by patients. In Sanders’ plan the government pays those bills instead. Rather than spread the cost of his proposal across the entire population via something akin to a higher Medicare payroll tax, Sanders wants only high-income earners and corporations to foot this massive bill.
3. He also assumes that the new government healthcare administration would be competent and efficient in operating the country’s vast healthcare machine – something it has thus far not demonstrated in the relative microcosms of Medicare, ObamaCare, and the Veterans Administration.

The consequences of these three factors completely nullify any of the hoped-for economic benefit. Healthcare providers, drug manufacturers, high income earners, and insurance corporations will not simply stand still while all this happens. From their point of view, their assets were hard earned. As such, they will use litigation, legal loopholes, re-location, and tax shelters to protect their assets and income. The government will then have to respond to all of this, which will be costly. It will also insert delays at various points in the implementation plan which invariably starts a chain reaction of other unanticipated delays and additional costs. This is exactly what happened with the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. ObamaCare).

By portraying health insurance companies as evil for competing and earning profits within the traditional boundaries of capitalism, Sanders, Warren, Harris et al. unveil themselves as plainly attacking the private sector and free market economy. Their originally stated “goal” of gaining efficiency and reducing costs in the health care industry is exposed as a facade. The certainty of a vigorous resistance to any “Medicare for all” plan has nothing to do with greed as these candidates would like you to believe. It has everything to do with the preservation of capitalism and a free market for private sector competition. This will compel many Americans to vote for Trump again if for no other reason than to protect such a core element of the foundation of our Country.

“Hate” and the President –

The 2020 candidates, the media, and Democrats in general, have trapped themselves into a shrinking lexicon of invective they can use publicly against the President. “Racist” and “misogynist” have been so overworked they no longer evoke the desired passion their users intend. This, of course, leads to the search for different words that will maintain the mania at a high level and still convey the same baleful personal characteristics. But even this practice has now become transparent and tired. We seemed to have reached the point where the finite number of hateful (but printable) words and concepts has been exhausted and now they can only be recycled.

In the aftermath of the horrific shootings last week in both El Paso and Dayton, it only took hours for the term “white supremacist” and references to Hitler to emerge among the 2020 candidates as they strove to connect President Trump to the massacres. Any such association is patently absurd and much more reflects the shallowness of accusers who possesses limited wit and vocabulary. Projecting all the barbarity of the actual killers onto the President allows them to magnify their verbal assault on the President and appear justified in doing so. This is predictable and thuggish behavior. More than anything else, it proves the real “hate” these candidates so easily assign to the President and his supporters lies mostly within themselves.

What if the use of hate in this way is a nothing more than a campaign strategy? If so, it means one of two things to us (or maybe both):

1. These candidates have little or no confidence that their policy positions can stand on their own to capture enough voters to win. They must convince you that the hateful ways of the President are so injurious that any alternative, even their own socialist platforms, would be better.
2. They are now so wedded to the monikers  they and the media have attached to Trump (racist, misogynist, supremacist, neo-Nazi, etc.), they must reinforce and advance the rhetoric every time they speak. If they don’t, and their competitors do, they will be instantly accused of not being liberal enough. The middle ground political position of “moderate”, once respected as sensibly accommodating a wider swath of voters, is now the new dirty word in Democrat politics and is to be avoided at all costs.

Either way, they’re now trapped. This is a precarious point to have already reached with such a long way to go before the primaries and the election. In an age where every utterance by a candidate is caught on video, none of this hateful or socialist hyperbole will be forgotten as the election gets closer. Most of the candidates have already provided copious amounts of potent ammunition to be used against themselves later.

We also still strongly believe all the Democrat candidates have made a grave miscalculation in their perception of the electorate. In much the same manner that the Dems believe the Russians influenced the minds of voters to elect Trump, the minds of the Dem candidates themselves appear to have been infected by the relentless media claim that a massive Trump resistance exists. We don’t think it does. Quite the opposite in fact. All objective measures of our country’s condition are better now than before Trump took office. Most of these measures are economic, and that improvement is plainly obvious to those who were worse off 2+ years ago. The Democrat candidates either try to deny this has actually happened or attribute any improvements to a “delayed” effect from Obama. That leaves the open question in most minds: why did Obama wait until the last days of his Presidency to initiate actions that would cause a recovery two years hence? Why didn’t he do it much earlier so he could have more justifiably taken credit? Their logic suggests that Obama needed eight years of effort to produce this miracle we are currently experiencing. Really? And speaking of Obama’s efforts, not a single candidate, including Biden, has proposed leaving ObamaCare intact. The leading socialist candidates want to scrap it entirely and the rest want major changes or additions. Not a ringing endorsement for Obama’s supposedly “signature” achievement.

None of this bodes well for the Democrat candidates. When Joe Biden entered the race, his more moderate platform most likely reflected the vast majority of Democrat voters. But even Biden has now largely given up his original position and moved further to the left, although he does not completely embrace socialism like his main competitors. The reduced field of candidates for the next debate puts Biden on an island by himself since, apart from him, it includes only those with socialist style platforms. We don’t believe Biden can survive this, especially when combined with his gaffe-prone oratory.

For now, the best odds favor a Trump 2^nd term.