Another powerful smack down by Mike Bski If you are not following him you should be. His detail, logic and analytics are impeccable.

mike bski (@BskiMike22802)

Bernie. Senator Sanders. My man.

This is the finest post you have ever written, and I mean that sincerely. You just published the single most devastating indictment of government economic intervention in modern American history, and you did it believing it was an argument FOR more government. You are living proof that God has a sense of humor.

Standing ovation. Truly. Now let me show you what you actually posted, because I do not think anybody on your staff ran it past a calculator. Or a person. Or a calculator operated by a person.

THE MATH YOU LEFT OUT

One 1973 dollar equals $7.52 today. That is BLS, not Bski. I know arithmetic is the enemy here, but ride with me.

Healthcare, $441 becomes $3,317. You listed $15,474. Real increase, 4.7x.

Home, $35,500 becomes $267,010. You listed $475,400. Real increase, 1.8x.

Rent, $133 becomes $1,000. You listed $2,017. Real increase, 2x.

Tuition, $514 becomes $3,866. You listed $11,950. Real increase, 3.1x.

Still bad. I am not pretending otherwise, and nobody is throwing a parade. But the gap between what you posted and what is true is wide enough to drive a bus through, and you were counting on nobody looking.

You posted raw nominal figures with no deflator, to an audience you assumed could not run the conversion. That is not economics, Senator. That is muddying the water to make it look deep.

YOUR CLOSING QUESTION, ANSWERED

"Has your income kept up?"

Median household income, 1973: $10,500. Census Bureau, report P60-96.

Median household income, latest: $83,730. Census Bureau.

That is a 697 percent increase. General prices rose 652 percent over the identical window. Income WON. By forty-five points. That number was one search away, which apparently was one search too many.

So the honest answer is YES. Median income slightly outran overall inflation. It simply failed to outrun the four categories you hand-picked, and you cling to those four the way a drunkard clings to a lamppost. For support, not for illumination.

THE QUESTION YOU CAREFULLY DID NOT ASK

What do healthcare, housing, rent, and college tuition have in common? Take your time. I have been grading freshman biology for a decade; I am comfortable with silence.

They are the four most subsidized, most regulated, most government-saturated markets in the United States. Every single one. Sometimes the majority just means all the fools are on the same side.

Meanwhile televisions, computers, toys, software, clothing, and cell service, the sectors Washington mostly left alone, collapsed in real price. Televisions are down roughly 97 percent since 2000. Funny how the stuff Congress never touched got cheaper. Almost like there is a pattern here, visible from space, waving a flag.

Government touches it, price explodes. Government keeps its hands off, price falls. Fifty-three years, same country, same currency, same workers. If your model cannot explain that, your model has a leak in the think tank.

That is not a talking point. That is a controlled experiment, and you are standing in the smoking crater of your own hypothesis requesting a larger appropriation. This is high-IQ stupid. Brilliant man. Not a lick of sense.

Quinn's First Law of Liberalism: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. You proved it with four data points and a rhetorical question. All foam, no beer.

AND WHY, EXACTLY, 1973?

Bold pick. Let me guess what Washington does next. Congress severs the dollar from gold entirely and hands itself an unlimited printing press... wait, I am being told they already did that. August fifteenth, 1971. Fully floating by March 1973. You chose the first clean year of the pure fiat dollar as your baseline, which is a bit like dating the fire from the moment somebody hid the extinguisher.

What is next, Senator? Congress rebuilds all of American medicine around third-party payment so that no patient ever sees a price again... wait, they already did THAT one too. Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973. Signed December 29, 1973. He is more confused than a chameleon in a bag of Skittles.

You picked the crime scene and labeled it the control group. Your thesis has more holes than a screen door on a submarine in a hurricane.

COLLEGE: YOU SUBSIDIZED IT INTO ORBIT

The Education Amendments of 1972 created the federal grant that became Pell. Federal aid expanded for fifty years afterward, and tuition followed it like a shadow. Faster than green grass through a goose.

Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Staff Report 733: every additional dollar of subsidized federal student loan capacity passed through into higher tuition at roughly SIXTY CENTS ON THE DOLLAR. That is the Fed. Not a podcast. Not me. And I am glad you are not letting education get in the way of your ignorance on it.

You handed colleges a blank check drawn on the signature of eighteen-year-olds, and colleges cashed it. Now the proposed fix is more of the exact thing that broke it, a solution ranking somewhere between an inflatable dartboard and a cordless extension cord.

Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until they speak.

HOUSING AND RENT: ALSO YOU

Single-family-only zoning. Minimum lot sizes. Parking minimums. Environmental review that turns a duplex into a six-year lawsuit. Then a decade of near-zero rates flooding a supply-starved market with cheap money. Every one of those was sold as help, and every one made it worse, which at this point is less a policy record than a magic trick performed by a man who cannot find his own shadow on a sunny day.

Also, median new home 1973: about 1,525 square feet. Today: over 2,200, with central air, multiple bathrooms, and an attached garage. You are comparing a Pinto to a Tahoe and billing the difference to greed. You can put lipstick on that pig. It is still a pig.

Want cheaper rent? Legalize building. That is the entire policy, it costs the taxpayer nothing, and that is precisely why it will never interest you. Clouds without rain. All promise, no delivery. Jude 12. Proverbs 25:14.

HEALTHCARE: SENATOR, YOU VOTED FOR THIS

Everybody reading, sit with this one, because it is the whole ballgame and they are counting on you skimming past it.

The ACA COVID subsidies were written as TEMPORARY in the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, then extended as TEMPORARY in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. NOT ONE Republican voted for either bill. You voted for BOTH, @BernieSanders. You set the expiration date yourself, with your own hand, which makes the outrage about as credible as a handshake agreement with a used-car salesman.

Then your party shut the government down for 43 days demanding them back, which was a public confession, on the record, that a law named the AFFORDABLE Care Act is not affordable without emergency pandemic cash. The new CR passed. The government is open. That confession is still sitting in the transcript, and no press release is going to sand it off. They lie like fish swim.

Translated into plain English: "Last December my boss gave me a $1,000 bonus. This December he did not. Therefore he cut my pay and he is heartless." Take that argument to an actual employer and report back. Whoever drafted it could not pour water out of a boot with the instructions printed on the heel, and as a policy position it is about as useful as a solar-powered flashlight.

And why are YOU the loudest defender of routing every American through a government-guaranteed insurance conglomerate, rather than Health Savings Accounts and real price transparency, where the patient holds the dollar and the provider competes for it? Your side lit candles for Luigi Mangione over his hatred of that industry. Now you are its most reliable revenue stream. Pick a lane. You have more positions than a yoga instructor and less spine than a jellyfish.

Trying to reason with this is like trying to baptize a cat.

WHAT HAVE YOU ACTUALLY DELIVERED?

Sworn in January 1991. Thirty-five years in Congress. Congresswebsitee lists over four hundred bills you led as primary sponsor. THREE became law. Two of them renamed post offices in Vermont. Four hundred swings, three contacts, two of them buildings that already existed.

He has been in Congress so long the only thing he has passed is gas.

The brain is an amazing organ. It starts working in the womb and does not stop until you get elected to Congress.

Thirty-five years of this exact post. Same slides, new dates. Delusions of adequacy dressed up as a movement. And every one of those four lines got WORSE on your watch, in a chamber you sat in, on votes you personally cast. At what point does the diagnosis become the prescription, Senator? At what point do we admit the fire marshal keeps showing up smelling like gasoline?
THE PART ABOUT YOUR HOUSES

You own three homes while lecturing me about housing prices. Some hogs have all four feet and their snout in the trough.

So here is my standing offer, and it applies to every millionaire in that chamber hollering about the rich. Before the next "tax the rich" post, voluntarily remit DOUBLE what the IRS says you owe. Standard deduction only. No itemizing. No carve-outs, no foundations, no trusts, no clever accountant in Burlington. Publish the return. Until somebody does that, the sermon is a gray sprinkle on a rainbow cupcake.

Lead by example and I will sit through the whole homily. Until then it is a snollygoster selling indulgences, and the people who wrote the loopholes are the same people using them. All hat and no cattle.

WHILE WE ARE COUNTING OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY

Every proposal you have ever floated arrives with the same page torn out. The one that says who pays. Medicare for All. Free college. Universal this, guaranteed that. Trillions in promises and never once a figure that survives contact with a calculator. If we discovered life on Mars, your caucus would try to send it money.

We have not had a real budget since Moby Dick was a minnow. There is always money for the next program and never a nickel to fix the last one, and somehow that is everyone's fault except the fault of the men who wrote it. Enough money to burn a wet mule, and not one dollar of accountability attached to any of it.

MY OWN MODEST PROPOSAL

Since price is apparently just a policy choice, allow me one. Mandatory GPA redistribution. Every student above a 3.5 surrenders points to every student below a 2.0. Everyone graduates. Nobody left behind. This is not a radical idea. It is just common sense, and I say that with a straight face, which is more than your last budget resolution managed.

While we are at it, free ice cream every Monday, and the store simply eats the cost. Also common sense. If stupidity were a renewable resource, this chamber would have solved the energy crisis in 1974.

We cannot run the greatest economy in human history on fairy dust and unicorn urine. Apparently we can run a gradebook on it. If that struck you as blatherskite, congratulations, you have now audited my entire objection to your economics.

CONGRESSIONAL RECORD, JANUARY 10, 1963

Rep. A.S. Herlong Jr. read 45 Communist Goals into the permanent record. Goal 17: get control of the schools and use them as transmission belts for socialism. Goal 32: support any socialist movement giving centralized control over education, social agencies, and welfare programs. Goal 40: discredit the family as an institution. Read that list, then read your platform, and tell me it is a coincidence with a straight face.

I am not asking anybody to believe in a conspiracy. I am asking them to grade the outcomes. That is what a science teacher does. A mountebank peddles the intention. A scientist checks the result.

Quinn's Sixth Law: facts are the enemy of liberalism. Quinn's Twenty-Fifth: liberals are great at giving away other people's money. Both were on full display in your original post, and neither one required a single assist from me. I just held up the mirror.

You speak an infinite deal of nothing, Senator. Shakespeare said it first, and he said it better.

ONE LAST THING, BECAUSE IT MATTERS

Wages are not decreed. They are agreed. Two free people shake hands. An employer offers, a worker accepts or walks, and if nobody accepts, the employer raises the offer or closes the doors. That is not exploitation, that is arithmetic, and treating it as villainy is a Billy-goat brain attached to a mockingbird mouth.

Price labor above what it produces and the least-skilled worker does not receive a raise. He receives a locked door. No first job, no resume, no rung one, and a lifetime of dependency he will vote to protect, because he is rational and you engineered his only rational choice. That is not compassion. That is a trap with a ribbon on it.

Every party that ever needed an underclass called it something noble. The antebellum South called it care. Jim Crow called it order. Yours calls it compassion. Same architecture, better branding, and in a battle of wits your economics would show up unarmed.

You cannot fix stupid. But you can vote it out of office.

But what do I know. I am only a high school science teacher, a medically retired Army combat medic, and a man who ran the deflator before he posted the chart.

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COMMENT below and name ONE of those four sectors that government does not control. Just one. I will wait right here.

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@BernieSanders @TPUSA @TPAction @JoJoFromJerz @atrupar

MAGA #Veterans #Trump

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