Bernie Sanders’ bad ideas

When Bernie Sanders has a bad policy to sell, he comes to California.

In 2017, the socialist firebrand, fresh from his defeat in the Democratic presidential primary the year before, rallied nurses for “Medicare for All” at a large demonstration in San Francisco.

Never mind that Sanders’ home state of Vermont abandoned its own version of “Medicare for All.” In 2011, when Vermont launched its single-payer system, called “Green Mountain Care,” it had strong political support from the state’s elected officials, including Sanders.

What it didn’t have was money — or public support for the massive tax increases that would have been necessary to fund socialized medicine, even in a small state like Vermont.

Things weren’t much different for California, the most populous and wealthiest state in the Union. In 2024, Gov. Gavin Newsom expanded Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program, to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants. This was a form of “Medicare for All.”

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Within a year, the extra cost was not only too much to maintain, but also threatened to bring down the entire Medi-Cal system. Newsom canceled new enrollments for illegal immigrants in May last year.

Now Bernie Sanders has returned to support a ballot measure to create a “billionaire tax,” through which California would seize 5% of the wealth of its richest residents.

Already, many of them have started to flee the state — including, most recently, Steven Spielberg. He says he left for high-tax New York for family reasons, not financial ones. But other billionaires are making no secret of their desire to avoid communist-style expropriation.

Simply by talking about a “billionaire tax,” California has already lost an estimated $1 trillion in wealth. That, in turn, reduces the revenue that a wealth tax would bring in, if it were enacted.

So Sanders and the unions that are pushing for the “billionaire tax” have already made the state poorer. That means less money for the health services they say they want to fund.

Socialism has failed every time it has been tried. Socialist policies are luxury goods: You can believe in them only if you are wealthy enough to avoid them, like the fleeing billionaires — many of whom funded “progressive” politics in California until it came looking for them.

Sanders, too, will leave California — and retreat to one of his three homes, perhaps his vacation home on Lake Champlain. He used to rail against “millionaires and billionaires,” until he became a multimillionaire himself. Now the millionaires are off the hook, it seems.

But the reality is that California will never stop with billionaires. Once the state can confiscate the wealth of billionaires, it will use the same power to confiscate the wealth of millionaires, and then middle- and working-class Californians.

That’s not a “slippery slope” argument; it’s an observation about how socialism has always operated, everywhere it has been tried.

Look at New York City’s Zohran Mamdani, threatening property tax hikes that will eventually be passed on to renters, after running on “affordability.”

Bernie Sanders endorsed him, too.