Bernie Sanders Economic Agenda Is....

Townhall

Economic Professor: 

Bernie Sanders’ Economic Agenda Is Unconstitutional and Very Bad Policy

Matt Vespa

We all know Sen. Bernie Sanders is a democratic socialist. He’s peddling the same tired 2016 talking points. 'Socialists of the world' unite is the war cry. And being that Sanders wants to pretty much destroy the country with his agenda, he found a nice ally in Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) who decided to endorse him over the weekend; AOC’s Green New Deal is also a recipe for economic catastrophe. We’ve long said that progressives and far-leftists hate the U.S. Constitution. It has mechanisms that prevent their agenda from being fully implemented. So, it shouldn’t be shocking that when you analyze Sanders' economic agenda, not only are the ideas bad—they could be illegal. InsideSources spoke with a couple of economics professors who admit that they’re very much in-line with what Democrats have proposed in the past and even they said the Sanders plan is trash and unconstitutional (via InsideSources):

The notable points in his plan include:

All publicly-traded companies, and private companies with at least $100 million in revenue, must be at least 20 percent owned by their employees;

45 percent of the board of directors at these companies must be directly elected by the company’s workers;

A ban on stock buybacks;

Companies that lay off workers to move operations overseas must share some of the “gains” with the laid-off American workers;

Company boards will be required to maintain representation from “historically marginalized groups” (like women, LGBTQ individuals, African-Americans and others) and submit reports on the racial and sexual orientation makeup of their boards and employees to the federal government;

A ban on mandatory arbitration and non-compete clauses;

And the elimination of offshore tax havens and a corporate tax rate hike from 21 to 35 percent.

According to the Sanders campaign estimates, under his plan Amazon would have paid $3.8 billion in taxes last year.

Ralph Sonenshine, assistant professor of economics at American University, thinks Sanders’ plan will “create a lot of inefficiencies and black markets where companies try to get around [his policies].”

“As somebody that supports a lot of Democratic agenda items, most of this would not be one of them,” he told InsideSources. “I don’t believe in forcing corporations to do certain things, like banning stock buybacks, I think that’s not good at all.”

Sonenshine thinks Sanders could fix a lot of the economic inequalities he discusses with existing reform ideas that both progressives, neoliberals and conservatives agree on, like campaign finance reform, or minimum wage laws, which progressives and neoliberals (but not conservatives) generally agree on.  

[…]

Conservatives and progressives alike often talk about closing tax loopholes to ensure a fairer, more just tax system. Sonenshine and Lawrence White, a professor of economics at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business who describes himself as “markets-oriented,” approve of eliminating offshore tax havens and raising the corporate tax rate a little bit — not quite to 35 percent, but maybe around 25 percent, they said.

“As far as profit-sharing arrangements, I think that’s a mistake,” White said. “I know it works in Germany, I’m less convinced it would work here. We had experiments with worker shareholding arrangements, one of the major airlines had this 15 or 20 years ago. It didn’t work very well.

The publication noted that Sanders probably knows that, but he’s okay with it because he wants a left-wing revolution. As does AOC and the rest of their ilk. They already can’t stand the way we elect our president, so why should we be surprised that they’re promoting policies that would continue to undermine the vision of our Founding Fathers.