Hillary Clinton may have won the primary, but Bernie Sanders’s vision on economics seems to be the future of the Democratic Party.
While it would be overblown to say that everything the Vermont senator says is wrong, he misses the mark on several key issues that millennials seem to overwhelmingly support, including the minimum wage, a green economy, and the idea that government creates the conditions for success.
Here are three big Bernie Sanders fallacies:
Sanders’s call to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour will push many companies to automate low-skilled jobs. This will be especially devastating for workers without a college degree, immigrants, and students. Store clerks will be replaced with self-checkout overnight, and so will their jobs.
Liberal Democrats love saying this line, from Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) insisting that the government created the iPhone to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) telling business owners that they didn’t build their company because the government built the roads that people took to go to the store.
Well, besides the fact that the private sector does build roads, building a road doesn’t create prosperity. Plenty of nations have roads but without capitalism, they lead to nowhere. Places with a free market will always find a way to create prosperity, even without roads.
The promise of a green economy has excited people on the left — especially millennials — but it’s been tried and has proven to be a total disaster.
Spain’s left-wing government put together a green economy plan in 2008, and it destroyed 2.2 jobs for every one job it created. This was especially devastating to millennials, who saw the youth unemployment rate grow to more than 50 percent and stay there for three years.
