Bernie Sanders, for example, now wants to forgive college loans. This is a great applause line for the younger set and also for the wealthy and privileged. It primarily comes at the expense of those who paid off their loans or had to make their own way without college.

Elizabeth Warren wants to create a universal government child care program — universal, as in, not based on income. Its most common beneficiaries will be professional couples with a six-figure income; those with incomes greater than six times the poverty rate are twice as likely to pay for child care as those making less than twice the poverty level. And of course, we daren’t breach the subject of who’s going to pay for all this.

Joe Biden, who for years understood that taxpayers should not have to fund other people’s elective abortions, has now changed his tune twice. Now every single one of the Democrats wants us to pay for your abortion. And if you don’t want to have one, or you believe it’s wrong, too bad. It’s coming at your expense.

All of the 2020 Democrats have come down in favor of a single-payer government healthcare system. Medicare is already going bankrupt just caring for the elderly, and that despite its stingy reimbursement rates. Yet they envision a program that will cover the ballooning costs of care that Obamacare failed to fix while also making doctors accept enormous pay cuts. The whole thing, conservatively estimated, will cost just $32 trillion over ten years.

And if the Democrats want to put us all on Medicare, why not put us all on Social Security as well? Andrew Yang wants to pay everyone a universal basic income of $1,000 a month. Of course, Medicare and Social Security have remained afloat because young people pay into them without receiving anything in return. Will that still work once they become beneficiaries as well? Can it be that we all get to ride the train, and no one even has to pull it? Just think how rich we’ll all be.

Nearly all of the 2020 Democrats (at least all of the those currently in the Senate) want to give America a “Green New Deal,” to fix the environment and guarantee full employment and income even for those who don’t want to work. But it will take a lot of tough decisions to find the $93 trillion that this plan will cost, and that’s a lot to expect from senators who are too chicken even to vote for their own plan on the Senate floor.

We could go on, but we feel we’ve made our point. If Democrats want to govern, they have to do something besides just promising free stuff.

For example, they need a plan to deal with the ongoing crisis at the border. The mass-scale abuse of our asylum laws, along with their own failure to compromise on funding border security in Congress, is creating a humanitarian disaster. “Gone are the reasonable Democrats,” Rep. Chip Roy of Texas recently told the Washington Examiner in an interview, citing Rep. Silvestre Reyes of Texas, “who pushed Operation Hold the Line and was supporting of a fence in El Paso.”

Democrats’ answer to the border crisis is simply to blame Trump

Democrats have, to date, expressed no interest at all in addressing the looming crisis in entitlements — not even in the program they imagine will somehow cover everyone’s healthcare in the coming decades. They are going to have to address this.

Democrats also need to lay out serious plans for containing Russia (beyond just spouting conspiracy theories about the 2016 election) and Iran. And they need to come up with something intelligent to say about China.

Every president who has ever taken office, including the current one and his predecessor, has learned with some degree of difficulty that governing is harder than making a bunch of pie-in-the-sky promises. We haven’t seen evidence yet that any of the 2020 hopefuls understands the challenges of the job, but we’re ready to be pleasantly surprised over the next two nights.