@WarClandestine 4th and 5th bullet point I just don’t see happening. All that is going to happen, unfortunately, is each side is just going to become more entrenched in what they already believe in. Call me negative but Trump just laid out election fraud and what i just said has already happened
@mazemoore Actors and politicians really say things and believe what they say just disappears, not to be referenced again. They just say things that will get them the biggest audience and praise bc they are shallow and that is all they have. D.C. is Hollywood for ugly and untalented people
"A guy looked at my airplane the other day and said I wonder how many people I could have fed for the price of that airplane...
I replied I am not sure, it fed a lot of families at the Dassault factory where it was built. I’m sure it fed a bunch of families that rolled the aluminum at the Alcoa factory. It surely fed a lot of people at the Honeywell factory where the experts built the turbines. It fed a whole company for a few weeks when I had them build me a new interior. It feeds the families of the linemen that fuel it.
That’s the difference between capitalism and a welfare mentality. When you buy something, you put money in people's pockets, and give them dignity for their skills.
When you give someone something for nothing, you rob them of their dignity and self worth.
Capitalism is freely giving your money in exchange for something of value.
Socialism is taking your money against your will and shoving something down your throat that you never asked for."
Bernie. Bernie, Bernie, Bernie.
Let me get this straight, because I want to make sure I am reading your economics homework correctly, and I did not eat a bowl of alphabet soup this morning so bear with me. You just listed UnitedHealth's $5.48 billion quarterly profit as proof of corporate greed. Cute. Except that profit happened WHILE the Affordable Care Act — the law that guarantees these insurers a captive, subsidized, taxpayer-fed customer base — has been the law of the land for fifteen years. You are not exposing corporate greed, Senator. You are reading me the receipt for your own bill. The ACA did not shrink the insurance industry. It turned it into a government-guaranteed cash cow, and now you are shocked, SHOCKED, that the cow got fat. Eats soup with a fork, this one.
And here is the part that should really sting. Your own party just finished a 43-day shutdown demanding MORE money be poured into that exact system, because the temporary COVID subsidies YOUR PARTY wrote into the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — zero Republican votes on either bill, by the way — expired right on schedule, exactly as YOU designed them to. Not a single Republican voted to end those subsidies. You did. Then you shut down the government to admit, out loud, on the record, that a law literally named the AFFORDABLE Care Act cannot survive without emergency pandemic cash. That is not an insult from me. That is a confession from you.
So now the solution is Medicare for All. Naturally. Because when a fifteen-year-old government program made the insurance companies richer, the answer is obviously MORE government program, just bigger. If ignorance is bliss you must be the happiest man in the Senate. Independent estimates put full single-payer implementation at somewhere between forty and sixty percent of the ENTIRE federal budget. Forty to sixty percent, Senator. Larger than Social Security. Larger than defense. You want me to hand over half the country's checkbook to the same apparatus that just admitted its last healthcare experiment doesn't work without a subsidy IV drip.
Let's talk about who's asking. You have served in the United States government for something like forty years between the House and Senate, and by my count the bills you personally got across the finish line as lead sponsor could be counted on one hand, mostly involving the naming of federal buildings. Somewhere out there is a tree tirelessly producing oxygen for you, Senator, and it owes itself an apology for the return on investment. This is also the same man who, as a young idealist, tried out communal living on a hippie commune and did not exactly stick around long enough to collect a pension from it. Now you want the reins to fifty percent of the national budget. I keep hearing "tax the rich" out of a man worth several million dollars who charters private jets on his "Fighting Oligarchy" tour because, in his own words, he isn't waiting in line at United with the rest of us peasants. Bless your heart. That is rich even by Congressional standards. Couldn't pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel, but sure, hand him the checkbook.
And before you tell me capitalism failed and it's finally socialism's turn — how's that working out for your ideological younger brother in New York? Zohran Mamdani just announced a THIRTY MILLION DOLLAR government grocery store in a city his own comptroller says is worse than broke. Kansas City tried this. Erie, Kansas tried this. That is not a hunch, Senator, that is a lab result, and I am a science teacher, so let me walk you through the peer review.
An experiment only counts as science if it has been REPLICATED. Not run once. Run again. And again. Under different conditions, different continents, different decades, different "well THIS time we'll do it right" true believers standing at the podium. So let's replicate it together, shall we, because apparently nobody handed you the lab notes.
Trial one: the USSR, 1920s and 1930s. Stalin seized the farms, collectivized the kulaks, and centrally planned the harvest. Result: the Holodomor, a man-made famine in Ukraine that starved somewhere between five and ten million people to death while grain was actively being EXPORTED past their starving bodies. That is not a rounding error. That is a control group that died.
Trial two: Cuba, 1959 onward. Castro nationalized every business, every farm, every bank on the island. Sugar production, once the envy of the hemisphere, collapsed. The economy shrank thirty-five percent in a single decade when the Soviet training wheels came off. Extreme poverty today sits near eighty-eight percent. Same experiment. Same result.
Trial three: Venezuela, sitting on some of the largest oil reserves on the PLANET, nationalized its oil industry and ran the socialist playbook to the letter. Production collapsed from three and a half million barrels a day to under one million. Hyperinflation peaked past sixty-three THOUSAND percent. Nine million people fled. You cannot bribe your way out of the results with oil money. We tried. It's in the data.
Trial four, and this one should make every teacher in America wince: China's Great Leap Forward, 1958 to 1962. Mao abolished private farming, herded peasants into communes, melted down their pots and pans for backyard steel that was too low-grade to use for anything. Somewhere between fifteen and forty-five million people starved. Some regions saw cannibalism. That is not a typo. That is what happens when central planners replace the price system with a five-year plan and a slogan.
Trial five: North Korea, present day, running the same command economy with the Juche twist. Famine in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands to over a million. Markets are technically illegal and thrive anyway in the shadows, because human beings will trade even when their government threatens to shoot them for it.
Trial six is my personal favorite because it is the cleanest natural experiment in the history of economics: East versus West Germany. Same people. Same language. Same culture. Same starting point in 1945. One half got markets, one half got the Stasi and collectivized industry. East German productivity settled at roughly thirty to seventy-five percent of the West's, and the population had to build a WALL to stop its own citizens from swimming, tunneling, and hot-air-ballooning their way out. Nobody builds a wall to keep people from fleeing prosperity, Senator.
Trial seven: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975 to 1979. They abolished money entirely. No markets. No private property. Total state control, straight out of the textbook you apparently keep on your nightstand. One point seven to three million people, roughly a quarter of the country, died of starvation, overwork, and execution in FOUR YEARS.
And for the extra credit column: Ethiopia's Derg collectivization, Tanzania's Ujamaa villages, Yugoslavia's market-socialism ceiling, Vietnam before it finally abandoned the model, India's decades of License Raj stagnation, and Poland and the rest of the Eastern Bloc running factories that burned three times the steel per unit of output compared to the free market next door. Every single trial, same hypothesis, same result. I have seen middle schoolers design better controlled experiments during a volcano science fair.
That is not one anecdote, Bernie. That is a stack of peer-reviewed, historically documented, independently verified trials spanning four continents and a full century, and the conclusion section reads the same every time: shortages, queues, corruption, and a body count north of a hundred million people once you tally every collectivized farm, every purged kulak, and every commune that ran out of rice. If an experiment fails this many times in this many labs, a real scientist stops blaming the equipment and starts questioning the hypothesis. You, apparently, would rather run trial number eight on 340 million Americans and call it "finally getting it right." Trying to reason with some folks really is like trying to baptize a cat.
Quinn's First Law of Liberalism: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. You want cheaper healthcare, you get record insurer profits. You want affordable food, you get a thirty-million-dollar failed grocery store. You want to fight the oligarchy, you fly private. Every single time. Set your watch by it.
I keep asking Democrats this question and I never get an answer: what have YOU actually done to help people, versus just handing out someone else's money? Because handouts without a ladder out is not compassion. It is a leash. And I think deep down you know that, Senator, or you wouldn't need the private jet to get away from the people you claim to be fighting for. You're about as useful as a screen door on a submarine when it comes to actually running anything, but boy can you point fingers.
You are the human version of period cramps on this topic, Bernie, and I mean that with the utmost respect for a man who has spent forty years discovering new ways to spend money he didn't earn. Has a leak in the think tank if he genuinely believes THIS is the moment socialism finally works. Unless your name is Google, Senator, you need to stop acting like you know everything about running an economy you have personally never had to run.
But what do I know. I am only a medically retired Army combat medic and a science teacher who actually reads the Congressional Budget Office numbers before I open my mouth about a trillion-dollar healthcare takeover.
@JoJoFromJerz@atrupar@TheYoungTurks #MAGA #Veterans #Trump
@gunpolicy “Shootings have declined in the last 3 years”. Coincidence that timeframe coincides with the permit to carry ban being abolished? I think not.
@gunpolicy Bla bla bla bla, trots out "military experience" disregards the constitution, in particular the second ammendment. Pay no attention to the facts that more people can now carry legally in that communist state....coincidence? I think not.
When you see vote counts go backwards, live, on air....
When you see suitcases pulled out from under tables...
When you see videos of ballot boxes being stuffed...
When you go to sleep and wake up to a different result, to the tune of one-way mathematical impossibilities...
When you watch hearings of Reps, Dems, and Independents alike testifying about fraud...
When you watch videos of obstruction (windows being covered)...
When you watch demonstrations of multiple ways the systems are hacked...
When states fight not to clean voter rolls...
When states break their own election laws...
That doesn't even cover what we've seen subsequent elections.
Whoever doesn't get it, chooses as much.
Praying The Republic shows up for the mid-terms even stronger than in 2024.🙏
God bless America!🇺🇸
@AndyBeshearKY There is healthcare fraud, bank fraud, mortgage fraud, Somali daycare fraud, EBT fraud, etc.
Even you’re a fraud.
So much fraud in the country and you seriously believe there is no election fraud?
What an absolute clown show we are living through
@seebee119@Oldglorycries Haha yeah bad wording on my part in my post. But yeah I kinda know why, was thinking the same thing. There are just so many foreigners in the middle of farmland here in south jersey
@brianstelter Once again the media decided they wanted to be in control. They rather have the power to tell ‘A’ story and not ‘THE’ story
Refusing to air a Presidential speech to the nation about election fraud seems like a horrible way to convince people you weren't in on the election fraud
@PeteButtigieg Politicians always say the useless platitudes, but Buttigeg, you really use the most useless of the useless platitudes. My goodness it’s getting old
Would you look at that. New saying for ‘Pack the Supreme Court’ just dropped. Now it’s ‘Reform the Supreme Court’.
I’ve said this before. Politicians really think they can say something and it’ll just disappear never to be referenced again. We still know this means to pack it
Fix Congress. Reform the Supreme Court. End money in politics. We cannot be afraid to fight for big reforms.
Whether it’s paying more at the pump or struggling to afford a mortgage, kitchen-table problems will only be solvable when we deliver more accountability in government.
@Big_Black_Blam@adammocklerr I understand it’s not illegal. Not the premise I was making. He is classifying one side as not being American, fine I get it. However I’ve never seen him or his ilk claim the people flying foreign flags while burning American flags as not American.
@SenSanders Bernie really thinks he could just be able to walk free throughout the area no questions asked just bc he’s a US Representative? Seriously?
Politicians truly think they are untouchable. But it makes sense to why they always act like brats
Listen here you Drill Bit @JamieBonkiewicz , don’t you think maybe all these disease outbreaks are the result of your lord and savior Kamala the Border Czar letting in millions upon millions of 3rd world disease infested illegals?
Weird. Why would the Mexican government think these people are still under their jurisdiction?
If they think that way maybe the Mexican government should bring them all home so they feel safe then?
JUST IN - Mexico's government to file criminal complaints in U.S. over Mexican citizens who died in immigration custody or while being targeted for detention — Reuters