Christmas is eight months away, but from the sound of their rhetoric, the current batch of liberal presidential hopefuls have one thing in common: If one is elected, we’ll all hop on the sleigh to Santa Land where it’s Christmas every day.
There, as we dance around a Christmas tree that never loses its needles, we will find brightly wrapped packages of healthcare, wonderful bundles of college education, and even a benevolent government to forgive our college loans. How about that!
The 2020 candidates emphasize how to slice and properly shape the economic pie, not how to make more of it. There’s little mention of hard work, thrift, or sacrifice as being part of the recipe. It’s all about wealth redistribution.
But there’s always another blatantly obvious facet to political chatter: buying our votes. Free healthcare? Debt-free education? As some might say, “It sure beats working for a living.”
Although there’s little comment on how to produce more pie, the Santa Land promises do include some mention of how jolly old Saint Nick might be funded. Some candidates speak in terms of taking away funds from some of the thriftiest, luckiest, and most diligent past savers and doing so every year.
Punishing savers doesn’t seem like something Santa Claus should do. In fact, it sounds more like Grinch talk to me.
Redistribution means a smaller pie. Once more annual confiscation becomes the new normal, it won’t take long for people to catch on and reduce their tax exposure.
There’s also no mention of how it affects financial markets. After all, people with high net worth don’t keep their wealth in cash. They will have to disinvest in order to pay the wealth tax, taking with the action a negative shot of gross domestic product growth.
Still other candidates say not to worry. Santa will be funded the way we’ve come to fund much of government: with debt. We will just issue lots of Santa Claus bonds. After all, interest rates are low and there’s no sign of inflation. Santa’s workshop will be equipped with a printing press to print more money. To their credit, even some of the most devout progressives question this election cycle fantasy.
Visions of political sugar plums might appeal to enough voters to turn the electoral tide, but the progressive candidates pay no heed to how many elves might be needed in Santa’s workshop to produce each day’s Christmas offering.
After all, some elves will have to decide what exactly “free” healthcare means, how to package it, and who’s been naughty and nice when the time comes to deliver it. Other elves will be needed to define how much college education will be free — whether for any major, for how many years, and how to monitor thousands of providers.
And then there is the even larger question: When, in a sober moment, voters consider government’s dismal record for managing other industries (think rail transportation), will they be optimistic about the future of healthcare and higher education?
Of course, it’s crazy season in America, that marvelous time when presidential candidates engage in making bombastic, almost insane promises. It’s a time when otherwise intelligent people can make absurd statements without bursting out with laughter.
Yes, Santa Claus may be coming to town in April, but some of us are still more interested in how this great country can produce more wealth, not less.
So please forgive us if we’re the ones who are still laughing when told we’re taking a trip to the land of free healthcare, free education, and debt forgiveness. At least you’ll know that someone is actually listening.
Bruce Yandle is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a distinguished adjunct fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and dean emeritus of the Clemson University College of Business and Behavioral Science. He developed the “Bootleggers and Baptists” political model.
