The Left spends a lot of time and energy acting like they know what they are talking about, but there are just too many glaring problems with their politics. When we look at their political agendas, such as ObamaCare, climate change policy, and even minimum wage laws, it’s clear to anyone that’s paying any attention at all that their policy not only fails to achieve what they claim it will, but it often backfires entirely. Here are 5 major Leftist policy points that prove the Left has absolutely no idea how economies actually work.

(1) Even if forcing people to participate in health insurance markets minimized aggregate prices as low as possible (they don’t), it simply isn’t sustainable.

Per the Kaiser Family Foundation, 1 out of every 5 of enrollees will have just one choice for private coverage through ObamaCare exchanges in 2017, from 1 in 50 in 2016. The percentage of people looking for insurance in 2017 that will have only 2 choices increased from 12% to 22%, while those lucky enough to have at least three choices in 2016 decreased from 85% to only 57% in 2017. Meanwhile, the cost of even Silver Plan premiums have continued to increase, year after year. By every objective measure, The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has failed to achieve its stated goals, and only the most desperately self deluding leftists deny this.

However, even if the rare clear eyed Leftist grudgingly admits ObamaCare’s opponents were right all along, he still tries to blame the right for the failure of his utopianism, because the states where the exchanges are performing the worst were those where Medicaid was not expanded. Sadly, they don’t even realize that by saying this, they tacitly admit ObamaCare exchanges are guaranteed to fail without the injection of hundreds of billions of federal dollars to sustain them. There’s a word for the injection of federal dollars to sustain an industry: bailouts, and any industry that’s dependent on bailouts is, by definition, not sustainable.

(2) Even if Reagan’s Economic polices failed to reduce individual poverty rates (it wasn’t supposed to), family poverty rates dropped under Reagan.

Ronald Reagan’s supply side economics policy reduced family poverty from 12.3% in 1983 (right after the 1982 recession) to 10.3% in 1989, because households were able to establish second and third streams of incomes. Thanks largely to a Republican controlled Congress and a moderate Clinton administration, Reagan’s economic policies remained largely intact throughout the 1990’s, and, after the 1991 recession, this number improved to 8.7% in 2000. By every objective measure, Reagan’s policies reduced family poverty.

Since the 1990’s, the go to punching bag for the Left’s propaganda media has been “Trickle Down Economics“. However, always fans of strawman propaganda arguments, the Left claim Reagan’s tax cut policies didn’t reduce individual poverty rates among low skilled employed workers, but they do so while ignoring that (a) the tax cut policy wasn’t supposed to do this (and no government policy can) and (b) labor force participation rate improved in the 1980’s because millions of women and minorities entered the workforce thanks to an expanding economy. So they claim that Reagan’s Supply Side economics policies didn’t help the poor, except, objectively, yes, they clearly did.

(3) Even if saving the climate from people is realistic (it isn’t), it would be far more economically and scientifically effective to just have everyone plant a tree.

According to some estimates, humans account for about 40 billion tons of CO2 emissions per year, this includes everything from driving to breathing. In the United States, we produce about 6,870,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent greenhouse gases a year. That seems like a lot of CO2, and it is, but this is the scary numbers provided to us by the Left. What they don’t tell you is that an average tree can take 48 pounds of CO2 out of the atmosphere a year. So if every American planted a tree every year, that would take an average of 7,401,360 metric tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere every year.

Not only would planting trees or bushes significantly completely negate all of the excess CO2 emitted in the United States, it would potentially remove an additional 531,360 metric tons of CO2 produced by the rest of the world. Not only would a “plant a tree, save the planet” campaign not require the expansion of government, it wouldn’t slow down the economy by imposing taxes and regulations on American companies. Yet the Left doesn’t push this 100% “green“, inexpensive, and totally voluntary solution. It’s almost as if they don’t actually care about reducing CO2…

(4) Even if governments fed the poor, halted climate change, reduced inequality, and lowered sea levels (they don’t), it is still grossly inefficient.

The Left in America is well aware that very little of what is spent on welfare actually goes to alleviating the suffering of the poor or reducing income inequality. The US Department of Health and Human Services 2017 budget was $1,144,801,000,000. The Left also knows that vast sums spent on “climate change research” meant ostensibly to save us from rising sea levels doesn’t actually do this, yet spending on such fruitless research has increased from $1.5 billion to almost $8 billion a year since 1993.

For a little perspective, we could take all that money spent on just these two programs and simply write a check for $22,541 (the federal poverty line) and then give these checks to 51,142,407 poor Americans (15% of the population), though, to save money, it would probably be better to just give this amount to poor households. In one fell swoop, we could solve household poverty overnight, at a fraction of the cost of government agencies, but the Left would rather spend trillions on government than billions on market solutions. And this would still leave $2,000,000,000 spent annually on scientific climate research untouched.

(5) Even if there were such a thing as a sustainable “living wage” (there isn’t), their push to increase the minimum wage dooms millions to desperate poverty.

Since 1965, the Federal Minimum Wage has been raised from $1.25 an hour to $7.25 an hour. Though many different factors impact Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR), including Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, when we pile these three data points together, we can see stark differences between the rate of growth of LFPR during years with positive GDP, such as in the 1980’s, when minimum wage was $3.35 an hour and the much less steady growth of LFPR in the 1990’s, when minimum wage increased to $4.25 an hour and then to $5.15 an hour, despite strong GDP growth.

 

Even during years with positive GDP growth in the first decade of the 21st Century, LFPR decreased until the recession of 2007, then collapsed from 2008 through 2015, even after years of positive GDP growth, when minimum wages were at $7.25 an hour. There are even strong correlations between periods when the minimum wage was increasing and GDP growth rates decreasing. Correlation isn’t always causation, because, again, there are many factors that can theoretically impact LFPR, but this looks like causation to me. And now the Left wants to more than double the Federal Minimum Wage.

“The heights of popularity and patriotism are
still the beaten road to power and tyranny.”
-David Hume-

The broad take away of these five points is that we live in an age of general delusion, where more than half of Americans believe in an ideological framework that is totally divorced from reality. The Left is convinced that their good intentions are enough reason to continue to shove policy that has objectively failed down the throats of their countrymen by shear numerical and political superiority. This is the “Rule by the Mob” that the Founding Fathers feared most, because, sadly, most of these people simply will not or, worse, can not grasp these concepts.

We face an uphill battle of overcoming the general ignorance of the populace, the entrenched political influence of wealthy and influential power brokers who benefit from the ignorant populace, and the total betrayal by our own political and pundit classes who have claimed to represent our interests for decades now. The battle for restoring sanity to government and liberating our economy from the incompetence of the Left is a battle measured in years, not months. Until articles like the one you are reading now are mainstream, that change isn’t going to happen.

Lucky for you, dear reader, that is in your power to do something about. Please share this message on social media. There are easy buttons provided below. And if it’s in your power, please consider becoming a patron by clicking the Support link above. I can’t do this without you.

 

---

Liberty is For The Win!