Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
Given that we’re all just waiting to have a Hillary Clinton presidency foisted upon us and are bracing for the four years of utter ruination to follow, it’s easy to forget to take a moment and appreciate the fundamental adorability of the Left. This is partly due to the fact that the Left’s most prominent figure right now is a baleful harpy demon stuffed into an ill-fitting human shell but retained its hell-formed vocal cords. Fortunately, there’s Green Party Candidate Dr. Jill Stein.
The biggest problem the Greenies have had in some recent election cycles is they, a lot like the Libertarian Party, nominate candidates who don’t really embrace their platform. In the case of Dr. Stein, they’ve got themselves a true believer – and it’s hilarious.
Dr. Stein was interviewed on the Fox Business Network, August 18, and revealed that the high cost of education is due to “administrative bureaucracy and sports arenas.” Well, she’s half right. The Greenies have always been hostile toward sports or any other avenue that reveals individual exceptionalism and rewards it.
“We know from the GI Bill—because remember what happened after the Second World War? We actually paid for our vets to go to college and for every dollar we put in—and Congress was keeping track—we got back seven dollars in return in improved revenues and other public benefits,” Dr. Stein told Liz Claman on the network’s “Countdown to the Closing Bell.”
Of course, being a collectivist and someone willing to run as the candidate of the Green party, Dr. Stein actually doesn’t know anything at all about economics or how the world actually functions. “We” didn’t get anything back from the GI Bill. A Congressional Research Office study conducted in 1986 indicated that every dollar invested in the World War II GI Bill yielded $5 – $12 in income tax revenues. Of course, to a collectivist, that is “we” getting money back.
It bears mentioning that there were some 12 million active duty members of the US military in 1945, compared to just over 1 million today; naturally. Dr. Stein didn’t mention that. Instead, she doubled down, insisting that tuition-free public college education is an “investment that pays for itself by 700%.”
This isn’t even an apples-to-apples comparison. The people who benefitted from the World War II GI Bill were a group of highly motivated and disciplined young men who had just gotten done surviving and winning a world war. There is no comparing them to soft, coddled recent high school graduates in 2016. I’d love to see how many WWII vets used their GI Bill to get a degree in women’s studies, art history or music theory. Hell, the first one probably didn’t even exist yet in 1945.
From there, however, Dr. Stein completely left the realm of physical reality altogether.
“I’m the only candidate not poisoned by the money of lobbyists, super PACs and corporations, and this is what the American people want. They want an honest broker. They don’t want a candidate who’s actually in the pocket of the big-money special interests,” Dr. Stein said.
She’s right there, I think. Americans do want an “honest broker,” but, we also want one who knows what the hell they’re talking about.
“Right now we have an economy that can’t really sustain itself. It is stuck in a rut right now because we’ve lost our productive economy. We need to bring it back. That’s what our Green New Deal will do,” Dr. Stein said, indicating a profound disconnect from reality.
Let’s look at the “Green New Deal.”
The very first measure called for is “Government-led investment in energy and resource efficiency, as well as reusable energies and microgeneration.”
So, to get the economy out of a rut, the federal government is going to steal money from businesses that are actually making money right now, and then waste it on another Solyndra boondoggle. What could go wrong there, again?
Oh, but friends, it gets better. The very next proposal is for “Low-carbon infrastructure redevelopment in order to create jobs.”
Ah, yes, those “shovel-ready” infrastructure jobs Obama touted to get the economy rolling. Again, if the fundamental aspect of your “economic plan” involves putting a greater burden on the economy by taking money away from people who are actually being productive, you’re only ever going to end up with net losses. And what the hell is “low carbon infrastructure redevelopment?” Bridges, roads, water mains, sewer lines – infrastructure tends to be somewhat carbon-neutral. A lot of it needs improvement and maintenance and repair and all of that is expensive. Redevelopment, whatever that actually means, would be even more expensive. And, since a lot of heavy, diesel-burning equipment is needed to do that sort of infrastructure work, it sure as hell won’t be “low-carbon” in execution. And since the money must all be stolen from tax payers, it won’t be any sort of an economic boost either, regardless of the short-term jobs created to do the work.
The next plank gets a bit more specific and is classic statist arrogance.
“A directed tax on the profits of oil and gas companies with proceeds being invested in renewable energy and energy efficiency.”
Because only the most worshipful state can determine what’s good for us simple humans, those evil corporations doing bad work, pumping oil and gas, need to be punished. Using the fruits of said punishment, companies doing good work, like trying to develop wind and solar power, will be rewarded. It is simple, blatant corporatism viewed through sage-colored-glasses and thereby rationalized.
“Financial incentives for green investment and reduced energy usage, including low interest rates for green investment,” reads the next plank in the plan – more government sponsored social engineering.
At some point, the people who wrote this thing, people who are either evil, imbecilic, or both; seemed to realize everything they were proposing so far was ruinously expensive. So, the next plank says:
“Re-regulation of international finance, including capital controls, and increased scrutiny of financial derivatives – likely along the lines of Basel II;”
Did the United States ever regulate international finance? I don’t remember that, so I’m not sure how they’ll come to re-regulate it. Basel II is a UN plan, and hell knows the Green Party would have no qualms eroding American sovereignty in pursuit of their idiotic goals. The next plank sounds a bit more like something the federal government might be able to do:
“Curbing corporate tax evasion through compulsory financial reporting and by clamping down on tax havens.”
Again, so much violence is needed to make the most worshipful state operate. The only time aggressive words and phrases like “compulsory” and “clamping down” are bandied about by these overgrown hippies is when they’re leveled at the objects of their pathological hate: private companies. However, the need for such aggressive robbery of private companies and productive people becomes obvious when you get to the final plank; the masterstroke of the Green New Deal.
“A Global Marshall Plan Initiative using ‘green quantitative easing’ to create money to fund the ‘great transition’ to a society free of fossil fuels and other measures that aim to preserve the biosphere.”
I know, right? I’ll give you a moment to catch your breath. It’s hard to read when your eyes are brimming with tears of laughter, I know. A comedy writer trying to capture something naively hilarious that a hippy would say with all seriousness would have tossed that line out as being too cliché, too on-the-nose; yet, there it is, a nugget of pure, unexpected comedy gold.
At least they understand what quantitative easing does, in that it “creates money,” although I’m certain the troubling nuances that accompany such devaluation and inflation are lost on them. I’m not sure what distinguishes “green quantitative easing” from the regular old currency devaluation the FED has been doing since 2008, but I’m sure there’s some differences. Maybe the bills are printed in a carbon-neutral printing plant or something.
More insane than the proposed action, is the rationale behind it. Government has done nothing throughout history if not proven it is an ass-useless agent of change – unless you want that change done with high explosives. Yet, the U.S. Government is supposed to spearhead a global initiative to stop an entire planet and its 7 billion some inhabitants from using the primary fuel source humans have been using since the industrial revolution. Never mind that many of the nations’ on that planet – and their ruling families’ – entire fortunes are staked upon producing said fossil fuels.
The Green New Deal is just a hilarious symptom of a fundamentally diseased mindset – that of statism. Only someone who believes the individual should give up its rights to the state, only one who believes the state is inherently good and just and righteous, could have possibly produced the pile of drivel that is the Green New Deal. I could have written it, but only as satire. To believe in its nonsense with such passion requires the sort of disconnect from reality that Dr. Stein exhibits with her every utterance.
This is why Dr. Stein is quickly becoming my favorite figure on the Left. Sure she’s an idiot, but she is so in this sort of adorably naïve way. I’ll take that over the calculated evil of the Hildabeast any day.
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