At a broader level, I personally have serious reservations about the policy proposals that call for taxing the wealthy into oblivion. Aside from the fact that such plans have next to zero chance of making their way through the Senate (and their chances in the House are similarly unclear), I can’t help but wonder whether their numbers really add up.

They don’t, but then they don’t really have to. Contrary to popular belief, money doesn’t grow on rich people. It is, especially since we dumped that whole gold fetish absurdity, a product of law, and the law is a product of government. Businesses and banks can only shuffle it around, but they too often get to create winners and losers in the process.

Losing at capitalism shouldn’t be a death sentence for anyone and that is where the government must fulfill its primary purpose of protecting its citizens and their Constitutional rights. The sheer absurdity of a democratically elected government that allows 30,000 of its citizens to die horrible deaths each year because they aren’t good at capitalism is beyond the imagination of most in the world who weren’t indoctrinated to this systemic cruelty we seem to believe is the “best” way to organize an economy.

There’s no question that proposals like the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and free college are popular at first blush, drilling down into the mechanics of it all, at least for Medicare for all, reveals a more mixed message. No matter how many billionaires you tax, sometimes it just doesn’t add up to the trillions that would be required to get these programs off the ground, let alone to allow them to function in future.

Unlike war funding which just appears from nowhere as needed, with no “pay for” questions asked and provides nothing to the economy??

It’s also disingenuous to frame the debate as if those items were currently “free” for all and any cost to the government would be added expense. We are paying for them already, and considerably more than Bernie’s programs would cost, except we are not fully benefiting from them. This is especially true of Medicare 4 All, which many studies have already confirmed not to mention the undeniable comparisons easily made with all other advanced economies.

There’s no question that the wealthy have played their own outsize part in the damaging of our democracy, and I don’t want to underplay that fact. However, for better or worse they are still a key part of our political and economic landscape, and we have to be very careful about how we go about making them pay their fair share.

The best way to deal with the wealthy, as Bernie understands, is to make them, and their money, irrelevant. The monopoly issuer of our nation’s currency, Congress, never “needs” to get money from any source to facilitate spending for the public purpose. It can afford anything that is available and for sale denominated in US dollars. Its spending doesn’t drain demand from the economy as private healthcare does, instead, driving economic activity.

If you ask Bernie who, or what, he would tax more to improve the lot of workers, and society in general, you would likely get the same answer as you would asking him how he would pay for his agenda. He’s far too good a politician to be goaded into turning his campaign into an econ course, so he offers up those who no progressive voter cares much about anyway as sacrificial lambs to his agenda.

Unfortunately, as is so often the case, the left tends to act as if the world that they want is going to magically appear just because they wish it were so. Thus, they seem to think that if they demand that their candidates adhere to this “no money from billionaires” pledge that somehow this will translate into money disappearing from politics by some sort of strange alchemy.

The voters will supply the alchemy needed to nullify Citizens United. They have the power to simply make corporate money the kiss of death for any progressive candidate. If they don’t, they don’t deserve a democratic process and will not retain it. They just needed a Bernie to remind them who has the power, if they can keep it.