What Bernie Wants to Do

For those wishing to learn more about the policies proposed by Democratic frontrunner Bernie Sanders there's a piece at The Federalist by Emily Jashinsky and Madeline Osburn in which they list and give a brief explanation of 19 of the senator's proposals.

One thing about Sanders: unlike a lot of politicians if he says this is what he wants to do then it's what he really wants to do. He is the most radical member of the senate and the left-most candidate since WWII. Indeed, the senator is so radical that even the Democratic party leadership is beginning to panic over the prospect of a Sanders candidacy for president.

Here are a few of the 19 things a President Sanders would strive to accomplish. You're referred to the original article for explanations and links:

1. Implement a $34 trillion socialized health insurance overhaul which would cost triple what the U.S. currently spends on the military and diminish the quality of health care currently available.
2. Implement a mass bailout of student loan debt. Those who worked to pay off their loans would not benefit. Only those currently in debt would have their debt forgiven at a cost to taxpayers, many of whom either didn't go to college or worked to pay their loans off, of $1.6 trillion.
3. Implement a moratorium on deportations of illegal immigrants and grant citizenship to the 11 million who illegally jumped ahead of all those who are seeking to come here legally.
4. Abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as well as Customs and Border Protection (CBE), the two agencies that protect our country’s sovereign borders and which are the only impediment to the mass migration of not only much of the population of Central America and indeed the world into the U.S. but also of the same thugs, rapists and murderers who've been responsible for the slaughter of tens of thousands of Mexican citizens in the past year alone.
5. Enacting a Green New Deal which would ban all fossil fuel energy production, such as oil and gas, as well as cars, meat, and air travel, while also promising to provide all Americans education, healthy food, housing, and government-guaranteed jobs. Sanders puts the cost to taxpayers at $16.3 trillion.
6. Allow convicted felons, even terrorists, to vote.
7. Ban hydraulic fracking, a move which would not only kill the technology that has made us energy independent of the Middle East for the first time in the modern era, but it would also cripple our economy and cost up to 14.8 million jobs by 2022.

Jashinsky and Osburn note that,

Sanders has long admired and praised tyrannical dictators such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro and the USSR’s Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1985, Sanders visited Managua to celebrate the anniversary of Nicaragua’s authoritarian Marxist regime....Last year, footage of Sanders from the 1980s surfaced, in which he praised socialist countries such as the Soviet Union and claimed bread lines in communist countries are a “good thing.”

“It’s funny sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food. That’s a good thing,” he said. “In other countries, people don’t line up for food, rich people get the food and poor people starve to death.”

This is an absurd response, of course. The fact is that in capitalist countries everyone eats. It's only in third world Marxist countries of the sort admired by Sanders that people starve.

Some of what Sanders would do as president may sound superficially attractive, but each one would either eliminate freedom, diminish our quality of life or balloon the national debt, or all three. A Sanders presidency would soon do to the United States what a Chavez/Maduro presidency did to Venezuela.