What Will the 2016 Presidential Election Mean to Business, Investors, and the American Economy?
By P.J. O'Rourke
As if we didn't have enough to worry about...
With international markets in turmoil, it's time to start worrying about who will be the next president. Primary season is here. The real decision process has begun. Will the next president improve investment and income-growth opportunities – or destroy them?
Bernie Sanders is the scariest of the front-runners. Bernie is a socialist. These days, of course, all Democratic politicians are socialists. They promise to take money and property from people who earn money and have property and give them to people who don't earn money and have a feeling of entitlement.
However, for most Democrats, this is just politics as usual. They're promising more giveaways in return for more votes. The great political satirist H.L. Mencken called elections an "auction sale of stolen goods."
But Bernie is a real socialist. Bernie believes in stealing.
Bernie thinks that if he snatches an iPhone from an old lady, he's doing a good deed. (I mean that metaphorically. If Bernie actually tried to snatch an iPhone from an old lady, she'd beat him to a pulp with her handbag.)
It's easy to laugh at Bernie and his prospects of even being nominated for president. He's such a 1960s throwback that he sounds like the late Abbie Hoffman, if Abbie had had an operation to remove his sense of humor. But...
Although Hillary Clinton is the most likely Democratic nominee – with money, organization, and the backing of the Democratic National Convention powers that be – numerous pitfalls lie between Hillary and the nomination.
Hillary's State Department e-mail misdeeds could end in indictments of her aides, or possibly, of Hillary herself. The Benghazi catastrophe is now on screen at the local Cineplex. The Clinton Foundation exhibits conflicts of interest so large that they have to be weighed on a global political scale. And her rogue husband might, at any moment, slip his leash and get up to his old tricks.
As a candidate, Hillary is crossing the floor of a dark room full of bear traps. One misstep and Bernie is the Democratic candidate.
And the Republicans could nominate someone who infuriates so many Americans that all the people who voted for Barack Obama will "Feel the Bern."
Mitt Romney got only 47.2% of the popular vote in 2012. And Mitt was everybody's favorite uncle compared with some candidates in the current GOP race.
What would Bernie Sanders do as president – especially if, like Obama in 2008, he has a Democratic majority in Congress?
To really frighten yourself, visit Bernie's campaign website, go to "Issues," and click on "Income and Wealth Inequality." Here are 13 terrifying campaign planks. And the scariest thing about Bernie is that he means what he says...
1. Make the wealthy "pay their fair share in taxes." Americans earning $100,000 or more pay almost 78% of the federal income tax. Bernie's idea of taking a fair share of your income is like a shark's idea of taking a fair share of a surfer.
2. Increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour. There are 3.3 million U.S. jobs paying at or below the minimum wage. Multiply a $7.75 raise by 40 hours by 52 weeks by 3.3 million jobs. Bernie will add billions and billions of dollars to the cost of providing jobs for unskilled workers. Assuming those jobs continue to exist. (They won't.)
3. Invest $1 trillion in transportation infrastructure. Never mind the inevitable huge government construction project cost overruns like with Boston's "Big Dig." The notorious 16-year-long highway-construction project was estimated to cost $2.8 billion. The final bill: $14.6 billion. How about a Big Dig for every city?
4. Reverse free trade agreements. The one thing Bernie and Trump agree on, because they're both talking out of their... Under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) alone, intraregional trade has gone from $290 billion in 1993 to $1.1 trillion in 2012. But Bernie wants that trillion dollars to excavate an enormous trench through the middle of Fort Wayne, Indiana. (See point No. 3.)
5. "Invest" $5.5 billion in a "youth job program." America has plenty of savvy investors. They've already invested in creating 3.3 million jobs (see point No. 2) of the "youth job" variety – jobs Bernie will destroy.
6. Enforce "pay equity" because "women earn just 78 cents for every dollar a man earns." Give every woman a federally subsidized 22% raise? Will this be retroactive and include Carly Fiorina's stint as CEO of Hewlett-Packard while HP's stock fell more than 60%?
7. Make college tuition free. And worth it.
8. Lift the $250,000 Social Security tax income cap. Social Security's annual deficit is $39 billion. About 2.5 million American households have income over $250,000. To put Social Security in the black, we'd have to tax each high-income household $15,600 a year.
9. Single-payer government health care. In 1993, when Hillary proposed this, I wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal saying, "If you think health care is expensive now, wait and see what it costs when it's free."
10. Mandate a total of 15 weeks a year of paid family leave, sick days, and vacation. In most workplaces, nothing gets done between Memorial Day and Labor Day, or from the beginning of the Christmas shopping season until the New Year's Eve hangover has abated in mid-January. Then there's winter doldrums and March Madness devoted to filling out basketball brackets, followed by lackadaisical spring fever. Add Bernie's time-offs and you would have just one workday in 2016... and only because it's a leap year.
11. Universal childcare for all children ages 0-5. Between this and free tuition, we'll wave goodbye to our children in the delivery room and say hello to them again at college graduation. (Although we'll see a lot of them later because they'll be broke and living in our basements.)
12. "Make it easier for workers to join unions." Except everyone will be unemployed.
13. And let's not even think about what Bernie means by, "Breaking up huge financial institutions." Welcome to your new mortgage lender, 155th National Bank of Vermont, motto: "Cord Wood Delivered, Snowmobile 4 Sale."
My advice on Bernie Sanders: Take all the money you can scrape together and donate it to anybody else running for president.
Regards,
P.J. O'Rourke