@PadresDisciple@TooMuchMortons_ Assuming Joe took Mize’s spot on the roster, who would you leave off for Randy? I like him, and Randy had been pretty consistent. I have to wonder if his start against the cubs this season, also at home, plays into the decision.
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
Hypothetically…….. I’m being taxed on money I never made. Let that sink in.
If I bought my property outright for $60,000 in 2009
Now the county says it’s worth $246,000.
Did I sell it? No.
Did I make a profit? No.
Did I get a check for $246,000? No.
But my taxes jumped like I did.
That’s the problem.
This isn’t income.
This isn’t cash.
This is a number someone decided on paper — and now I’m being billed for it.
If my stock portfolio doubles, I don’t pay taxes until I sell.
If my income doesn’t increase, I don’t magically owe more income tax.
So why does owning a home work differently?
Why am I being taxed on unrealized gains?
A house isn’t just an investment — it’s where people live. And this system means you can do everything right, pay off your home, and still get squeezed harder every year because of a number you never turned into money.
You don’t truly own something if you can be taxed out of it.
This isn’t about “services” or “inflation.”
It’s about being charged for value you never received.
And people are starting to notice.
This needs to be on everyone’s mind✔️
This is probably the best answer I've ever heard to the question, "Why did God create evil?"
A professor at the university asked his students the following question:
“Everything that exists was created by God?”
One student bravely answered:
“Yes, it was created by God.”
The professor asked :
“If God created everything, then God created evil, since it exists. And according to the principle that our deeds define ourselves, then God is evil.”
The student became silent after hearing such an answer. The professor was very pleased with himself. He boasted to students for proving once again that faith in God is a myth.
Another student raised his hand and said:
“Can I ask you a question, professor?”
"Of course," replied the professor.
“Professor, is cold a thing?”
“What kind of question is this? Of course it exists. Have you ever been cold?”
Students laughed at the young man's question.
The young man answered:
“Actually, sir, cold doesn't exist. According to the laws of physics, what we consider cold is actually the absence of heat. A person or object can be studied on whether it has or transmits energy.
Absolute zero (-460 degrees Fahrenheit) is a complete absence of heat. All matter becomes inert and unable to react at this temperature. Cold does not exist. We created this word to describe what we feel in the absence of heat.”
The student continued:
“Professor, does darkness exist?”
“Of course it exists.” said the professor.
“You're wrong again, sir. Darkness also does not exist. Darkness is actually the absence of light. We can study the light but not the darkness. We can use Newton's prism to spread white light across multiple colors and explore the different wavelengths of each color. You can't measure darkness. A simple ray of light can break into the world of darkness and illuminate it. How can you tell how dark a certain space is? You measure how much light is presented. Isn't it so? Darkness is a term man uses to describe what happens in the absence of light.”
In the end, the young man asked the professor:
“Sir, does evil exist?”
This time it was uncertain, the professor answered:
“Of course, as I said before. We see him every day. Cruelty, numerous crimes and violence throughout the world. These examples are nothing but a manifestation of evil.”
To this, the student answered:
“Evil does not exist, sir, or at least it does not exist for itself. Evil is simply the absence of God. It is like darkness and cold—a man-made word to describe the absence of God. God did not create evil. Evil is not faith or love, which exist as light and warmth. Evil is the result of the absence of Divine love in the human heart. It’s the kind of cold that comes when there is no heat, or the kind of darkness that comes when there’s no light.”
🙏🏻❤️🙏🏻
You could buy a grocery store for 2 million
You could build a grocery store for 3 million
And yet somehow, when the socialist government does it, it won’t open until 2029 and cost 30 million.
Thank you for the perfect example why socialism is always an object failure
The sound bytes around the Pretti story evade both context and personal responsibility.
No one has the right to charge into a law enforcement operation and confront officers. It's a crime. Carrying a gun while doing so makes it more volatile.
@VP 10 million recovered from COVID and 40% of the jobs you “created” were government jobs. We don’t want more government, which is why Trump won and you lost. 🤷🏻♂️
@TheDemocrats All this proves is that democrats only care about style…there is no substance, which invites the chaos we’ve seen for the past four years.
They blamed it on a "Stutter."
They blamed it on "Russian Disinfo."
They blamed it on "Cheap-Fakes."
They hid him at every opportunity.
They scripted every public event.
They denied the Hur Report findings.
They sent him on vacation for 570 days.
They brazenly lied to you FOR YEARS.
This could be the biggest Presidential cover-up in American history.
And the media defended it all.
Until they got exposed at the debate.
Don't let the media gaslight you.
This story existed FOR YEARS.
And they avoided it ON PURPOSE.
@IAMThePublisher@POTUS@JoeBiden After the publishing of the pic with you, Hunter and Hunter’s Chinese business partners, did you actually mean to say, “here’s to all THE lies ahead in 2025….”?