Bernie Sanders: “Impossible to Know” How Much My Plans Will Cost

Cranky, Crazy Bernie Sanders was on CBS Friday night touting his socialist revolution with Evening News reporter Norah O’Donnell when he was asked point-blank about the estimated price tag of his slate of progressive programs. Instead of being up front about the enormous burden these programs would put on the backs of the American taxpayers, Sanders told O’Donnell that even he did not have any clue about how much his socialist platform would cost.

“Your agenda has promised free health care for everybody, free college tuition, and to pay off peoples’ college loans. The price tag for that is estimated to be $60 trillion dollars over ten years. Is that correct?” asked O’Donnell.

“Well look, we have political opponents–” Sanders started.

“You don’t know how much your plan costs?” O’Donnell interjected.

“You don’t know. Nobody knows. This is impossible to predict,” Sanders griped.

“You’re going to  propose a plan to the American people and you’re not going to tell them how much it costs?” O’Donnell asked.

Well, you know, the shine on a socialist takeover starts to fade when you start talking dollars and cents, Norah. Far better to just keep the price tag vague and convince young leftists that…oh, we’ll find the money somewhere…you know…if you really believe in something with all of your heart the money just kinda…appears.

Thankfully, we don’t really have to wait for Sanders to come up with a price tag; we have sturdy independent economic analysts who have done an excellent job pushing out the numbers. And while Sanders is right in saying that it’s impossible to get a sum that is correct down to the penny, we don’t need an exact total to know that his campaign is built on an invitation to catastrophe.

According to Larry Summers, an economic adviser to both of the previous Democrat presidents (so spare us the bull about your “political opponents,” Bernie), these programs would represent an unprecedented expansion of the federal government.

“On the spending side, this is far more radical than all previous presidencies, on either the right or the left,” Summers told CNN. “The Sanders spending increase is roughly 2.5 times the size of the New Deal and the estimated fiscal impact of George McGovern’s campaign proposals. This is six times as large of a growth of government than any of the Ronald Reagan dismemberments. We are in a kind of new era of radical proposal.”

The fact is, Sanders is right: Neither he, nor we, nor anyone can say what this would do to our country. And that’s exactly the problem. These propositions are so radical and extreme that they could literally spin us into a global depression of untold disaster. They could so weaken the U.S. that we are left powerless in the face of Chinese expansion. They could put the nail in the coffin for the middle class and open to the door to true, unvarnished communism.

And sadly, we’re not convinced that Sanders would be sad to see these dark futures materialize.