The current democrat frontrunner, Joe Biden was born November 20, 1942. He is currently 76 years old. The month of the next presidential election, he’ll be 78. If he were elected and ran for a second term in 2024, he’d be 82. If he were re-elected and served out two terms he’d be leaving office at 86.
Another prominent contender, Bernie Sanders, was born September 8, 1941. Bernie was born before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor! He’s a year older than Biden. In 2020, Bernie will be 79, in 2024, 83. He’d leave office, after two terms, aged 87(!)
Now, bear in mind, that Donald Trump, born June 14, 1946, set a new record as the oldest man, at age 70, elected president in History.
Ronald Reagan was considered remarkably well-preserved and was constantly mocked for his age by his opponents and accused of being senile and of napping through meetings and so on. Reagan, born February 6, 1911, was 69 when elected in 1980. He left office at age 78, the same age Joe Biden would be when entering. Ronald Reagan was, indubitably, an extraordinarily vigorous and physically gifted man, but he was widely recognized as slowing down and showing his age in the last couple of years of his presidency. Ronald Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at age 83.
Obviously rich men and big cheese public officials live longer, but the average life expectancy of male Americans is only 76.9.
What are the odds that either of these two, if elected, would even live out two terms? Not great, I’d say.
And even assuming President Joe or Bernie lives through nearly an entire decade from now, think about it, what are the odds that he will remain healthy and lucid enough to cope with the stresses, responsibilities, and long hours of the Presidency?
Most people in their 80s, if not already “shaking hands with the groundhog,” as Leo Hobbs used to put it, are nodding away their days, napping in their rocking chairs, not in the White House, but in some assisted living facility.
All this shows, I’d argue, that people younger than 60 have no clear idea what old age is really like, and just how many things can go wrong for you. And, it shows, too, just how feckless and irresponsible democrats really are.
George Will marvels at the recent surge of popularity for the new angrier Socialism.
Two-thirds of the federal budget (and 14 percent of GDP) goes to transfer payments, mostly to the non-poor. The U.S. economy’s health-care sector (about 18 percent of the economy) is larger than the economies of all but three nations, and is permeated by government money and mandates. Before the Affordable Care Act was enacted, 40 cents of every health-care dollar was government’s 40 cents. The sturdy yeomanry who till America’s soil? Last year’s 529-page Agriculture Improvement Act will be administered by the Agriculture Department, which has about one employee for every 20 American farms.
Socialists favor a steeply progressive income tax, as did those who created today’s: The top 1 percent pay 40 percent of taxes; the bottom 50 percent pay only 3 percent; 50 percent of households pay either no income tax or 10 percent or less of their income. Law professor Richard Epstein notes that in the last 35 years the fraction of total taxes paid by the lower 90 percent has shrunk from more than 50 percent to about 35 percent.
In his volume in the Oxford History of the United States (The Republic for Which It Stands) covering 1865–1896, Stanford’s Richard White says that John Bates Clark, the leading economist of that era, said “true socialism†is “economic republicanism,†which meant more cooperation and less individualism. Others saw socialism as “a system of social ethics.†All was vagueness.
Today’s angrier socialists rail, with specificity and some justification, against today’s “rigged†system of government in the service of the strong. But as the Hoover Institution’s John H. Cochrane (a.k.a. the Grumpy Economist) says, “If the central problem is rent-seeking, abuse of the power of the state, to deliver economic goods to the wealthy and politically powerful, how in the world is more government the answer?â€
President Donald Trump slams socialism: "America was founded on liberty and Independence and not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free and we will stay free."
There’s been a certain amount of complaining about my insulting people by referring to them as “low-information-voters.” The problem is: I’m right. That’s exactly what they are, as Ilya Somin explains at some length.
A specter is haunting this year’s presidential election: political ignorance. Both Democrats and Republicans love to accuse the other party’s supporters of that sin. Sadly, both are often right.
The presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump has raised exploitation of ignorance to new heights. Many of the main themes of his campaign prey on it. Trump’s campaign first took off when he claimed we are being inundated with Mexican immigrants, who increase the crime rate because many are “criminals” and “rapists.” In reality, net migration from Mexico has been close to zero for the last 10 years. Yet few Americans seem to know that. And while studies consistently find that immigrants have lower crime rates than native-born Americans, a 2015 Pew Research Center study found that 50% of Americans (and 71% of Republicans) believe immigration is making crime “worse.”
Trump’s claim that nations such as China, Mexico and Japan are “killing us on trade” because we have trade deficits with them also relies on ignorance. As economists across the political spectrum recognize, free trade benefits the economy, and a bilateral trade deficit between two nations is no more an indicator of economic failure than is my trade deficit with my local supermarket. Unfortunately, studies show that trade is one of the areas where there is the greatest gap between general public opinion and informed opinion.
Trump is far from the only candidate to exploit ignorance this year, merely the most successful. Bernie Sanders, the “democratic socialist” who has mounted an unexpectedly strong challenge for the Democratic nomination, shares some of Trump’s demagoguery on trade.
Like Trump, Sanders has also put forward budget projections that most experts, even in his own party, regard as fantastical. Surveys consistently show that most Americans greatly underestimate the percentage of federal spending devoted to big entitlement programs, such as Medicare and Social Security, which are among the largest areas of federal spending. As a result, many voters accept Trump and Sanders’ claims that we can not only deal with our serious fiscal problems without reforming them, but also pile on enormous spending increases (Sanders) or tax cuts (Trump). A survey of Sanders supporters by Vox found that the vast majority are unwilling to pay more than a fraction of the tax increases that even Sanders’ own projections say would be required to fund the new health care and education programs he proposes. Most likely do not realize the true cost.
The problem of ill-informed voters is certainly not confined to Trump and Sanders, or to the 2016 election; more conventional politicians often manipulate ignorance, as well. It is also not limited to specific issues, instead extending to the basic structure of government.
David Goodman aka Spengler finds plenty of cause for gloom in this year’s international election season.
Marx was wrong when he quipped that great history appears twice, first as tragedy and again as farce. He forgot surrealism.
Who would have expected the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to present them themselves in the personages of a billionaire reality-show star, an aging Vermont hippy, a Glock-toting Austrian rightist and a British-born Pakistani who “sucked up to extremist Muslims†through most of his career. I refer to the presumptive Republican nominee for president, the second-place candidate for the Democratic nomination, the likely next president of Austria and the just-elected Mayor of London. These are portents of the future, like comets or two-headed calves.
The lives of perhaps two billion people around the world are going pear-shaped, and the great battles of our time are not about the allocation of scarce resources, but of abundant misery. …
The Trump voters and the Sanders voters have a common view of the world, which is that someone else must suffer for them to benefit; they differ on who should pay (Chinese and Mexicans vs. the wealthy). No-one will tell the American Millennials that they were sold a trillion-dollar fraud in the form of university education, and no-one will tell their aging parents that never again will Americans be paid for being Americans. No-one will tell the Europeans that it doesn’t really matter what immigration policy they choose: if they do not have children, soon enough their lands will belong to migrants from Africa and the Middle East. In politics, it doesn’t pay to be the bearer of evil tidings, as in Robert Frost’s poem: “As for his evil tidings, Belshazzar’s overthrow,/Why hurry to tell Belshazzar What soon enough he would know?â€
New York Times reporter Yamiche Alcindor yesterday tweeted the menu of the bill of fare on Bernie Sanders private chartered plane wafting the man-of-the-people back home from his meeting with the Pope.
Those champions of the common man certainly know how to live.
