"Free" College and Health Care Starting Cost: $42 Trillion Dollars - Granite Grok

“Free” College and Health Care Starting Cost: $42 Trillion Dollars

“Nothing’s Free” is not a phrase in the budgetary lexicon of progressive liberal Democrats. We know this because they are constantly talking about Government-run programs to provide “social infrastructure” to the masses.

The latest “free” goodies to hit the narrative mill are Free College and Medicare for all. Medicare for all is single-payer healthcare. College professors are not giving up their paychecks. And a guaranteed government jobs program can’t pay someone with ‘free.’

The Urban Institute, a left-wing outfit (under) estimates that it will cost (meaning it is not free) someone (meaning you) forty-two trillion dollars to fund “free” for just the first ten years.

I’m no math wizard, but 42 trillion is awfully far from “free.” Converted to miles that is over seven light years (I think). Our solar system is only 7.4 billion miles across.

Forty-two trillion dollars is 42 trillion more dollars than free. And yet the Left persists in its advertising campaign. We can provide (blank) to (blank) where one is the name of the thing, and the other is the beneficiary, for free – never.

Look at Public K-12 education. That’s not just not free it is the single biggest budget item in almost every municipality. A number that grows regardless of shrinking enrollment. Now apply that sort of well-managed government stewardship to nationwide college education costs and health care.

Boom!

Sorry, it’s worse. Part of the education funding solution is tuition forgiveness. The terms are sketchy, but there will be snowflakes majoring in left-handed albino lesbian studies at some elite university who get part of the cost of that quality education paid for by taxpayers “free.”

But forty-two trillion over ten years is the number they came up with so as not to shock anyone into a knee-jerk reaction of “no.” I’m serious. That is their low-ball, get you in the door number.

Free!

Matt Palumbo, writing at Bongino.com, took the superficial nonsense and the Urban Institute data reporting at the Daily Wire and went a bit deeper. He took the recent remarks by She-Guevera (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) on how we’d fund all the free stuff and took it for a ride.

Cortez told [Treveror] Noah. “…if we reverse the [Trump] tax bill, raised our corporate tax rate to 28 percent … if we do those two things and also close some of those loopholes, that’s $2 trillion right there.” She also cited cuts to defense, which she estimates would save an extra trillion or two. All estimates are over a ten year period.

Medicare for all, Matt Notes, is ballparked at 32.6 Trillion over ten years but no one wants to share the other necessary realities that get that number anywhere near the ballpark.

  • Doctors, hospitals, drug companies and the like would face an immediate cut of 40 percent in their payments. A separate report by Health Affairs estimates that doctors would have to earn half their current salaries to make socialized medicine work, which is in line with Bernie’s proposal.
  • Bernie’s plan assumes that healthcare spending would decrease 11% if implemented. Given that over 30 million people would be insured under his plan, you’d have to assume that the newly insured use ZERO healthcare, while the previously insured use 11% less.

Quick, off the top-of-your-head name a “profession” that will never take a 40% pay cut!

Politicians! You nailed it.

But they are more than happy to use the law to force you to take one because that’s how they roll. So what bill will they pass to keep doctors from retiring en mass?

With regard to a “free” college education, Palumbo notes that,

“..the Bernie plan assumes that the Federal government would cover 2/3rds of the cost of “free” college, with the States covering the remaining 1/3rd. So in other words, the $807 billion figure is only 67% of the real cost (about $1.2 trillion).

As the federal costs skyrocket, an increasing portion of that will be off-loaded to the states. Federal taxes will rise. Local taxes will increase. But not to worry. It’s still “free.”

The third leg of the Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez Socialist program is a Guaranteed jobs program. The low-ball number is 450 billion a year. The reality is closer to 900 billion. Some advocates argue that this would or should replace all other welfare, but we know that ain’t gonna happen. So tack a trillion a year on the tab to pay,

“…six million unemployed, and five million “discouraged, marginally attached [to the workforce], or working part-time but looking for full-time work.” And to transition those people to their federally “guaranteed jobs.”

Doing what?

We’re going to take another trillion a year form productive activity, launder it through the government, and spend it on Joe Biden’s Three letter word, Jobs. In what will be a crashed economy that can’t afford the government it had before it added free college, free Medicare, and free jobs.

There are candidates running near you who are on board. Find them and make them define free. Ask how 42 trillion is free? Someone has to pay, and not just for ten years. And that’s a really quick way to run out of someone else’s money.

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