Confiscation

I found the editors’ of the Wall Street Journal’s take on the various spending plans that the Congressional Democrats have teed up amusing:

If Mr. Sanders were to confiscate every asset of every American billionaire— Jeff Bezos’s rockets; Elon Musk’s bitcoin; Larry Ellison’s boats; Oprah Winfrey’s houses; Ted Turner’s ranches; Jay-Z’s car collection; even the starched shirt off the back of poor Larry Fink, who tied for last place on the Forbes list, at $1 billion—it still wouldn’t cover the cost of Democrats’ next two legislative plans.

That’s to say nothing of funding the government’s regular operations, a baseline budget that’s expected to be roughly $4 trillion a year. And we haven’t allocated a dime yet to Mr. Sanders’s larger ambitions, including Medicare for All. The point is that he talks abstractly about the “billionaire class,” but at the scale of the U.S. government, Jeff Bezos is a minnow.

Bernie’s shtick is always “us versus them.” The reality is that there aren’t enough of “them,” which is why the tax man will be coming back sooner rather than later for the rest of “us.”

It will also be amusing to see Gallup’s update to their annual poll on American trust in the federal government. Last year trust in the legislative branch was at an all-time low.

There is a little truism I wish more people understood: today’s savings is tomorrow’s consumption. There’s a corollary: today’s borrowing borrows against tomorrow’s consumption. Federal borrowing makes the most sense when it will contribute fairly directly to increases in future GDP.