First, there is simply no way to prove a direct causal line from any individual company’s production of oil or gas to specific “damages” in New York or anywhere else. We still cannot reliably separate man-made emissions from the natural warming that has been underway for centuries. Assigning precise liability percentages based on estimated global emissions since 2000 is pure political accounting, not science or law.

Second—and this is the show-stopper—are these states seriously claiming that fossil-fuel companies should not exist and that we should stop using oil and gas? Of course not. They know full well that without these fuels the modern economy collapses. Yet they still demand the companies pay massive penalties for producing the very energy the states cannot live without. That is having it both ways: demanding the product while treating its lawful production as a tort. It is economic illiteracy dressed up as moral virtue, and it turns every such lawsuit into an exercise in extortion rather than justice. Even if such a scheme were accepted, since everyone will still demand fossil fuels, the penalties and the accompanying legal fees would simply be built into the price of oil and gasoline, making energy far more expensive for no actual benefit.

Property rights and basic causation still matter. Until plaintiffs can show direct, measurable harm from a specific actor—and stop pretending they can ban the product while relying on it—these climate damage suits remain non-starters.

This is textbook socialism and economic illiteracy. When the government owns a piece of a private business, it distorts every incentive: capital is no longer allocated by profit-and-loss signals but by political favoritism and bureaucratic priorities. Efficient private operators will rationally pull back rather than risk competing with an entity that can lean on taxpayers, preferential regulations, and state power. Property rights get shredded, risk is socialized, and the result is slower growth, higher costs, and crony deals instead of genuine wealth creation. We’ve seen this movie before—every time government “partners” with private firms it crowds out the very companies that make the best, most disciplined investments. For example, after the government took an interest in US Steel, promising to be a passive investor, it immediately prevented the company from closing an inefficient steel plant for fear of the politics of the workers losing their jobs.

The principle is simple and non-negotiable: the U.S. government has no business owning private enterprises. Markets work when private owners bear the full consequences of their decisions. Anything less is theft of opportunity and a direct assault on the economic freedom that built this country.

There are only three things Congress can do to make Social Security viable for the long term, and realistically, some combination of all three will be necessary.

First, raise the retirement age. Americans are living longer, and a retirement system designed around earlier life expectancies cannot simply pretend that nothing has changed.

Second, determine what level of benefits the country can actually afford, including addressing the way annual increases are calculated. Benefit levels were raised for political reasons over the years to levels far in excess of what people’s contributions should have entitled them to. It is presently politically untenable to actually cut those existing benefit levels. What can be done is to address the way annual increases are calculated. Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment is based on the CPI-W, which is an index that reflects annual increases greater than the rate of inflation. There is no justification for deliberately providing increases greater than inflation at the expense of younger workers who must finance the system.

Third, raise taxes. That means asking workers and employers to contribute more to a system that already consumes an enormous share of federal resources. None of these choices is pleasant. But pretending there is some fourth option called “do nothing” is simply dishonest.

The problem Congress is trying to outsource is the very tough decision of to what extent and in what proportions those three approaches will be used to fix the system. There are no magic tricks here. The basic choices are a higher retirement age, slower growth in benefits, and higher taxes, or some combination of all three. The Journal reports that one bipartisan proposal would create a commission whose recommendations could receive expedited consideration if they produced a plan extending solvency for 75 years. Fine. But who appoints the commission? Who decides what assumptions it uses? Who determines whether retirement age goes from 67 to 68, 70 or something more substantial? How much higher do payroll taxes go? How much do future benefits grow? These aren’t technical footnotes. They are the entire debate. Congress knows perfectly well that every serious solution will require somebody to give something up. Democrats generally don’t want benefit reductions or a higher retirement age; Republicans have historically resisted tax increases but currently lack a unified position. The Journal notes that even the conservative position has fractured, with Republicans having “no unified position” on Social Security. A commission doesn’t solve that political cowardice. It merely gives Congress somebody else to blame when the recommendations arrive.

Congress should stop commissioning studies about problems it already understands and start legislating. Elected representatives—not an unelected panel—should decide when Americans retire, what they can reasonably be expected to receive, and how much they should pay. That’s called governing.

Since they have absolutely no case that the wealthy are not paying their fair share, they scramble for all kinds of irrational excuses to justify making them pay still more. One way they do that is by demanding taxes on the paper appreciation of assets—unrealized gains—before a single dollar of cash hits anyone’s bank account. That is pure economic nonsense. It is the equivalent of demanding income tax on next month’s paycheck before the employer has paid you, or forcing retirees to hand over taxes on the paper value of their 401(k)s every year whether or not they withdraw a cent. Unrealized gains are not income; they can vanish overnight, create crushing liquidity problems, force asset sales, and require the IRS to value everything from private businesses to illiquid real estate—an administrative nightmare.

European countries have tried similar wealth taxes and have utterly failed—to the point that the taxes have been almost uniformly eliminated. Governments watched people and capital flee their countries to avoid the levies, revenues never hit the promised targets because of that flight and the sheer complications (and outright evasion) of trying to implement the schemes, and the experiments collapsed. No rational tax system treats phantom wealth as taxable income; doing so is simply a Hail Mary grab for revenue to paper over reckless new spending. Cut the spending instead and more capital stays in private hands—capital that gets invested in businesses, creates jobs, and raises wages. Seize it through unrealized-gains taxation and you shrink the very economy that pays everyone’s salaries.

Property rights and economic reality are not optional. You do not owe the government a cut of money you have not yet received, and pretending otherwise is just an attempt to distract from the real problem: politicians who refuse to control their own spending addiction.

On top of that, Social Security and Medicare are heading for bankruptcy around 2032. As we get closer, the only political solution will be to throw more money at the entitlement programs, which would otherwise go bankrupt without additional funds—meaning even more debt. Anything Bessent does to tweak the market is pure insanity—like facing a flood and trying to bail it out with a thimble. It’s throwing good money after bad.

This is textbook symptom-chasing while the disease runs rampant. It’s posturing. It’s the appearance of doing something while doing exactly the wrong thing. Until the deficits and the entitlement train wreck are confronted, every buyback and market gimmick is just expensive theater that makes the eventual reckoning worse for every taxpayer.

The Inflation Reduction Act’s Medicare Part D redesign capped seniors’ annual out-of-pocket drug spending shifted more liability onto plans and taxpayers and overhauled the benefit structure. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) originally scored those drug provisions as a modest cost or even a net saver—claiming roughly $129 billion in deficit reduction. Reality arrived with a vengeance. CBO has since jacked its Part D projections by roughly $600–700 billion over the coming decade. Per-beneficiary spending is racing past $4,000, plan bids have soared, and the promised “savings” have evaporated into higher taxpayer subsidies. No forecasting error, this is the standard operating procedure for growing the welfare state.

In private industry, if a project comes in far over the approved budget, management does not simply shrug and keep spending. The overruns force a hard stop: redesign the program, cut elsewhere, or get new authorization. Congress should impose the same discipline. When official scores understate the true cost of an entitlement expansion, the law should not automatically continue at the higher price. It must be redesigned or re-budgeted. Knowing that ballooning costs will trigger automatic accountability—and that popular benefits could be curtailed—would make the people who write and score these bills far more careful. Temporary premium subsidies layered on top merely delayed the reckoning and hid the damage from voters.

Entitlements sold on fantasy numbers are theft dressed up as policy. The only way to demand realistic accounting is to make the overruns blow back on the very people who produced the bad numbers in the first place.

Making money on a shortage is just the opposite of losing money during an oversupply. It is simply supply and demand working. Profits that accrue when prices are high attract more production, which increases supply, removes the shortage, and brings prices down. This is just the reverse of what happens when prices are low, as they have been for long stretches in the oil and gas industry. When prices are low, people don’t explore for new supply; the supply contracts, and demand ultimately forces prices up, which then encourages new investment. His remarks amount to advocating price controls that would block the market from reducing high prices—Economics 101 that he flunks completely. He then claimed “I’m a big free enterprise guy, nobody bigger,” making the entire performance even more ludicrous, because a genuine free-enterprise advocate would have recognized the laughability of everything he had just said. Instead of focusing on real problems where presidential leadership could actually matter, he wastes energy demonizing companies that are simply responding to market signals. That makes Trump look uneducated, narcissistic, and frankly cringeworthy in the process.

Oil companies do not set world prices; supply and demand do. High prices signal scarcity, which induces more exploration and production—exactly the mechanism that eventually increases supply and brings prices back down. Blaming firms for earning profits under those conditions, or trying to strong-arm them into artificial price cuts, interferes with the very process that addresses shortages. This is Economics 101, and interfering with it only prolongs the pain by discouraging the investment needed to expand supply.

Free markets work when participants are free to respond to incentives, not when politicians treat profits as a crime and property rights as optional. Trump’s assault on oil companies for doing precisely what the market demands is economically illiterate theater that undermines the principles that keep the economy humming.

When the man who controls regulations, contracts, tariffs, and enforcement personally monitors the donor list and offers special access in return, the line between legitimate fundraising and outright extortion vanishes. Corporations are rational actors. They will write the checks to protect their property and operations, just as they would under any protection racket. The result is pure cronyism: capital flows not to its highest economic use but to whoever holds political power. Shareholders’ money is diverted, markets are distorted, and the principle of equal treatment under the law is discarded. History shows that once government starts extracting tribute this way, the demands only grow and the economy pays the price in inefficiency and lost trust.

This is not out of character for someone who insists on having his name on currency, on the Kennedy Center, and a $1.78 billion slush fund. But property rights and free markets cannot survive when the presidency becomes a toll booth. Voluntary donations are one thing; pressure from the commander-in-chief is another. This practice must end.

Let’s call this what it is—cronyism at its ugliest. GM and the UAW want to hamstring a rival building cars in non-union Southern plants while they bleed market share and demand taxpayer bailouts and EV mandates to survive. The bill also layers on restrictions targeting Chinese-supplied software and battery components with even lower ownership thresholds. Yet it conveniently carves out exemptions and waivers for the politically connected. For example, Volvo was given an exemption while Polestar was not, even though they have the same Chinese majority owners. In addition, there is a process for manufacturers to appeal the ban for which cronyism and favoritism will clearly motivate any decisions.

It has drawn 32 co-sponsors, including 25 Republicans. As the Wall Street Journal noted, even Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz questioned why Republicans are so eager to harm jobs in GOP-led states just to carry water for a union that funnels nearly all its political money to Democrats.

Republicans who back this rent-seeking should explain themselves to the Alabama and South Carolina workers whose jobs they’re volunteering to sacrifice. It’s not surprising that RINOs like Bernie Moreno, Josh Hawley, and Tom Cotton would be on board, but it’s disappointing that right-thinking senators like Marsha Blackburn, Pete Ricketts, Shelley Moore Capito, Ted Budd, Tim Sheehy, Joni Ernst, Jon Husted, Rick Scott, Cindy Hyde-Smith, and John Cornyn would be on board.

This is exactly how the Beltway corrupts free-market principles: wrap protectionism in an anti-China flag, hand regulators arbitrary power to pick winners, and watch American workers and consumers pay the price through higher costs, fewer choices, and lost investment. National security deserves serious tools like CFIUS review based on actual control—not equity thresholds designed to settle union scores. Economic reality doesn’t care about election-year posturing. Property rights, open competition, and limited government do.

Mamdani ran explicitly on freezing rents. He knew the statutory requirement, stacked the RGB with sympathetic appointees, stepped back, and let the predetermined outcome unfold. The result was a 7-1 vote for 0% increases on both one- and two-year leases. This is regulatory extortion and potential criminality dressed up as tenant relief.

The real criminals here are the board members on the RGB who betrayed their duty.

These board members on the RGB did not get dragged into their seats — they actively agreed to serve and undertook a legal obligation to follow the law and the evidence on costs. They reviewed the data showing operating expenses rising over 5%, then deliberately voted to impose a total freeze anyway. This confiscates legitimate returns on property, discourages maintenance on aging buildings, and accelerates housing deterioration across the city. Small landlords will cut corners or exit. Supply will shrink. Unregulated rents will rise. The behavioral responses to these perverse incentives are entirely predictable.

Their names must be called out:

• Chantella Mitchell, Chair

• Sina Sinai

• Lauren Melodia

• Brandon Mancilla

• Maksim Wynn (owner representative who went along)

• Adán Soltren

• Sagar Sharma

These people undertook a legal obligation which they are now violating. They have demonstrated they have no integrity and should not be employed in any position of responsibility anywhere — and perhaps shouldn’t be employed by any responsible employer at all. Their actions harm property rights, individual landlords trying to stay solvent, and ultimately the tenants who will live with worse housing conditions in the years ahead.

This rent freeze exemplifies government overreach at its most destructive: short-term political pandering that creates long-term economic pain. Property rights aren’t optional — they align incentives for investment, upkeep, and new supply. Violating them through regulatory fiat doesn’t solve affordability; it guarantees scarcity and decay.

The lawsuits coming will test whether the law still means anything in New York. In the meantime, these RGB board members should face relentless public scrutiny for agreeing to serve and then deliberately undermining the rules. The public has a right to know exactly who sold out economic reality and their sworn obligations for applause.

The principle is straightforward and non-negotiable: public officials and board members who take an oath have a duty to uphold the law and follow the evidence — not deliver campaign promises at the expense of property rights and sound policy. Those who refuse belong out of office.

Section 338 lets the President hammer countries up to 50% tariffs for discriminating against U.S. commerce. Trump is using it not against genuine adversaries, but to punish Canada for the predictable retaliation against his own 25% duties on motor vehicles and parts. Canadian counter-tariffs, provincial restrictions on U.S. alcohol, and adjustments favoring other nations have already cut U.S. auto exports by 22% and spirits flows dramatically. According to a March 2026 study by economists André Kurmann, Étienne Lalé, and Julien Martin published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), the resulting decline in Canadian tourism has cost between 14,000 and 42,000 jobs in exposed U.S. border markets. Cross-border supply chains are fracturing, American businesses—from auto makers to hospitality—are paying the price in higher costs and uncertainty. The White House complains about dairy and cheese access while American consumers and producers foot the bill for this escalating madness.

This tariff addiction reveals a deeper flaw in treating trade like a zero-sum game where the President plays king. Trump’s crowd will claim this is tough negotiation, but the reality is, this is economically illiterate policy that violates every lesson from the last century. Governments don’t create wealth by erecting barriers and then punishing partners for mirroring the folly—they destroy it through distorted incentives, disruption of supply chains, crony favoritism for protected industries, and violation of the property rights that underpin genuine commerce. Americans are already feeling the pain in jobs, prices, and disrupted supply chains. The only sane path is mutual reduction of barriers, not endless escalation.

World Liberty Financial (WLFI), co-founded by Trump family members and associates, has directed more than $1.4 billion to the family from governance token sales, with the family entitled to 75% of net proceeds according to company disclosures. This leaves only 25% of those proceeds remaining as substance for WLFI. It is no surprise that those token sales seriously underperform.

Governance tokens like WLFI typically give holders limited voting rights on platform decisions but no claim on profits. In this case, however, Trump has taken a big claim on profits. The Trump-linked entity benefits heavily from initial sales and allocations common in crypto launches, where founders and sponsors receive large portions of the supply at low or zero cost before public promotion drives up early prices.

Separate and aside from WLFI, the Trump Organization has issued the $TRUMP meme coin, launched days before the inauguration, which added hundreds of millions more for Trump entities. While many crypto projects follow similar structures—founders and promoters securing early allocations that allow them to profit from hype-driven pops—the difference here is the implication of presidential backing and support.

Investors knew crypto carries risk, but the high-profile promotion from the president suggested substance and potential official favor that never materialized, leading to steep declines of over 95% from peaks and heavy losses for retail buyers. Top holders gained exclusive perks like Mar-a-Lago dinners and access; average participants faced wipeouts.

As we have highlighted, Trump’s opportunistic actions are pure cronyism that distort markets, erodes trust in institutions, and profits at the expense of the ordinary guy. It’s appalling that a president would monetize his office in this way; it violates every standard of fiduciary duty and respect for the office of the presidency that limited government demands. Instead of draining the swamp like he promised, President Trump is bathing in it for personal gain.

Only after Canada bent would he allow the project to proceed. The result? Canada got strong-armed into redirecting a chunk of future toll revenues into a U.S. government fund for 15 years, plus giving Uncle Sam veto power over major toll changes. This after Canada already footed the entire construction bill. Michigan was supposed to share revenues post-construction. Instead, Trump turned a bilateral infrastructure project into a federal cash grab and political trophy. This isn’t smart deal-making. It’s the predictable behavior of a politician who views every interaction as a zero-sum power play.

The Real Costs of Bully Tactics

• Economic distortion: Delaying a critical trade link hurts auto manufacturing, supply chains, and workers on both sides of the border. Commerce doesn’t wait for photo-ops.

• Crony undertones: Reports of Ambassador Bridge interests (the existing private crossing) hovering in the mix raise the familiar stench of protecting entrenched players at the expense of new competition and efficiency.

• Precedent for more waste: Once government inserts itself this way, expect endless fights over tolls, “funds,” and who gets the skim. Taxpayers and businesses pay either way—through higher costs, delays, diverted revenues, and the inability to plan for the future with any certainty.

The deeper damage from Trump’s approach is far more insidious. Everybody knows that dealing with him is so impossibly unfair, laced with bully tactics, that the vast majority of positive deals that could be done never see the light of day. Only the most compelling opportunities proceed despite the nonsense he injects into negotiations. In the free market and world of business, no CEO with executive responsibility would operate this way, because they know it ultimately hurts their own constituents. Rational actors understand that deals must be win-win; if a deal is not win-win, it is a bad deal. When Trump boasts that he “wins” his deals, by definition he reveals ignorance—such outcomes mean the overall pie is smaller than it should be, possible only because one side wields overwhelming power to force suboptimal terms on the other. Property rights and voluntary agreements built this bridge. Political bullying undermines them. Free markets and clear contracts, not threats from Washington, should govern cross-border infrastructure.

Trump’s approach here exemplifies the worst of government overreach: using regulatory leverage as a club instead of letting projects serve their purpose. America doesn’t need more strongman theater that raises costs and breeds resentment with trading partners. We need policies rooted in economic reality, respect for agreements, and restraint on federal power. The Gordie Howe saga is a textbook case.

They don’t even hide the sleight of hand. The Genocide Convention demands specific intent to destroy a group “as such.” Israel warns civilians, facilitates aid, and targets Hamas terrorists — the exact opposite of genocidal policy. Amnesty understands full well that there is nothing even remotely recognizable as genocide occurring, yet they make these inflammatory claims anyway. So they simply changed the definition and lowered the evidentiary bar, a move legal observers slammed as moving the goalposts away from ICJ standards to reach their predetermined verdict. As the American Jewish Committee noted right after the report dropped, Amnesty “distorts the definition of the constituent acts of genocide and the legal standard for establishing genocidal intent to avoid... inconvenient facts.” This is part of a “troubling pattern of distortion and bias,” building on their flawed 2022 apartheid smear that delegitimized Israel’s very founding. David Adesnik of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies rightly calls the use of the term “genocide” “an extension of [Amnesty International’s] bias” and a glaring “double standard.”

It’s not a one-off. Amnesty has long singled out Israel with disproportionate reports compared to true horrors in North Korea or Venezuela. They’ve downplayed antisemitism as a priority while pushing narratives that fuel real-world Jew-hatred. Continuing to support them doesn’t make you compassionate — it makes you complicit in their moral bankruptcy and antisemitic double standards. Real charity demands integrity, not funding organizations that punish the victim and reward the aggressor.

Yet this impressive record is badly tainted by Trump’s eagerness to substitute one form of intervention for another:

• He has implemented a substantial and broad array of tariffs, which function as hidden taxes on American importers and, by extension, American consumers and businesses. These taxes raise costs across supply chains and act as rule-equivalents that never even appear in the Federal Register.

• Industrial policy—government using subsidies, priorities, and directives to favor certain industries over others—represents a misguided effort to override the free market and steer capital where political calculations, not productivity, dictate.

• Demands for government equity stakes in private companies amount to outright cronyism and partial nationalization, the very antithesis of free markets, limited government, and property rights. Once the government owns a piece of Intel or U.S. Steel, the distortions multiply. Why would competitors invest or expand when they know a favored rival enjoys the full weight of federal power behind it? Customers, especially business customers, will naturally gravitate toward the government-backed player—either to curry favor with the administration or out of fear that buying from the “wrong” supplier could invite regulatory disadvantage or retaliation. The result is a tilted playing field that punishes innovation, entrenches inefficiency, and signals that private enterprise now serves at the pleasure of the executive branch. Given that zero-government ownership is free market, and 100%-ownership is communism, why would Trump want to slide down that slippery slope?

The lesson is clear and timeless. True economic freedom requires consistent principle, not selective restraint paired with authoritarian impulses in trade and industrial planning. Partial victories on regulation are welcome, but they cannot excuse a broader disregard for individual rights and sound economics. Americans deserve leaders who cut red tape and then step back—not ones who tear it up only to weave new ropes of their own design.

These DSA socialists promise “solutions” that are guaranteed to make problems worse:

• Rent caps and rent freezes reduce landlords’ willingness to maintain or upgrade properties and kneecap new construction, shrinking supply and driving existing rents higher through scarcity. When landlords cannot recover costs, they skip improvements. This often results in pulling units off the market, as they cannot charge sufficient rents to recover the cost of the improvements. History proves that rent controls destroy real estate markets, raise rents long-term (being forced to pull units off the market reduces supply while demand remains the same), and devastate property values. As the Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck famously asserted “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.”

• Government takeover of rental property via massive new public housing and community land trusts leads to disrepair and decay because there’s no market discipline or personal stake in keeping buildings livable, while funding limitations and wasteful spending driven by political considerations assure failure. The city already owns a large number of properties because rent controls have made them so unprofitable that the city had to take them over for nonpayment of taxes. And since the city also lacks the money and incentive to make investments, these properties are horribly neglected themselves.

• Confiscatory taxation to fund expansive entitlements treats productive citizens as milk cows and accelerates the flight of businesses and families already fleeing high taxes and regulation. History proves what should be obvious: high earners invest in businesses and assets that provide jobs and economic growth for all. Targeting these high earners with punitive taxation is therefore a detriment to job creation and economic growth for everyone.

• Education monopoly is controlled by teachers unions and the political class. Mamdani and his allies return the favor by protecting failing public schools and opposing charter and private options. The statistics are irrefutable: union-controlled public schools produce horrible levels of competency in math and English. In contrast, the charter and private schools they fight deliver far better results for kids.

• Anti-Israel extremism and grievance politics signal deeper moral confusion. It is the height of immorality that when Hezbollah attacks, Israel responds, and Israel is portrayed as the bad guy.

New Yorkers who voted for these candidates acted directly against their own interests and those of their children and grandchildren. Decades of one-party rule, failing schools, and normalized economic illiteracy produced voters unable to see that socialism doesn’t work—it just gives bureaucrats and politicians more power over your life and wallet, as it has failed everywhere it’s been tried. Taxpayers and families deserve better than these experiments in economic punishment and cultural division. People are already packing up for greener pastures, and the exodus will only accelerate. The principles of individual liberty, property rights, limited government, and personal responsibility remain the only foundation for real opportunity and progress.

By contrast, Israel goes out of its way to target only the terrorists while warning civilians and allowing aid. There is not one scintilla of evidence that Israel has any policy, either by words or action, to exterminate Palestinians as a people. This leads to the inescapable conclusion about the bad faith and intentions of those making the claim.

This isn’t a close call or a matter of opinion. Hamas embeds itself in hospitals and schools, uses civilians as shields, and sacrifice and exploit the lives of its own people for propaganda value. Israel faces an enemy that wants to finish what Hitler started. Yet the same voices who ignore Hamas’s explicit genocidal program slap the label on the Jewish state defending itself. This inversion doesn’t just distort facts. It gives moral cover to the actual proponents of genocide and strips the word "genocide" of any credibility. Once someone abuses it this badly, nobody should listen to anything else they say on the subject.

This linguistic fraud is dangerous. It erodes honest debate, fuels real antisemitism, and weakens our ability to call out genuine atrocities in the future. We must insist on precise language and basic moral clarity. Israel has every right to destroy the terrorists trying to murder its citizens. Pretending otherwise is complicity in the next massacre.

Key moment around 5:20–5:50) where Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaks with total conviction about climate change as an existential threat. He warned that without drastic action in roughly five years, the world would essentially end up underwater. The furthest thing from careful analysis grounded in data or peer-reviewed models, this was pure alarmism delivered as gospel truth by a guy who has shown zero interest in doing his own homework on the actual science, economics, or engineering realities. Sanders routinely pushes massive government spending plans like his $16 trillion Green New Deal proposal without explaining trade-offs, costs to working families, or proven results from similar top-down schemes tried elsewhere.

His approach ignores basic economic reasoning: heavy-handed central planning distorts markets, raises energy prices, and hurts the very people he claims to help. Real progress on environmental issues has come more from innovation, technology, and market incentives than from sweeping mandates and trillion-dollar bureaucracies. Sanders' track record shows he prefers government overreach over individual liberty and fiscal responsibility every single time. The clip reveals not just factual overreach but a deeper problem—politicians who lecture with absolute authority while skipping basic research and honest debate.

Senator Sanders deserves to be ignored at all costs. His brand of socialist nonsense threatens limited government, separation of powers, and sound policy by replacing facts with hysteria. It’s absolutely cringeworthy that a senior member of our Senate regurgitates this doomsday rhetoric designed to justify bigger government and less freedom.

Although they are considered by some to be serious academic economists, everything they write shows a basic lack of understanding of basic economics — plus a habit of misstating their numeric analysis of economic results. For years they have pushed wealth taxes and massive redistribution. Now they have gone further with their Global Justice Report. They want to cap U.S. GDP per capita at about $69,000 — below current levels — while limiting annual growth in rich nations to roughly 0.1 percent. Their scheme includes pushing average working hours down toward 1,000 per year (a three-day work week equivalent), big cuts in construction and manufacturing output, and a new Global Justice Fund run by an international bureaucracy. This fund would spend more than 10 percent of world GDP every year, paid for by global wealth taxes as high as 20 percent on billionaires and top income tax rates up to 90 percent.

It is very clear — and agreed upon by mainstream economists — that economic growth is what pulls people out of poverty. Free markets have done exactly that, lifting billions and driving global between-country inequality to near 150-year lows. Yet Piketty and Saez ignore this reality. They confuse inequality with poverty and prescribe making everyone poorer to close the gap. Their data work routinely looks at gross pre-tax numbers without subtracting taxes the rich actually pay, making it appear that they have more income than they actually have. They also do not include transfer payments to lower income individuals that make them much better off than Piketty and Saez indicate. This approach intentionally distorts economic reality.

It is also clear that inequality is not a bad thing. Consider a simple example: a low income person earning $10,000 a year and one wealthy innovator earning $100,000. If growth and innovation triple everyone’s income, the lower earner now makes $30,000 and the top earner $300,000. Inequality increased, but the poor are far better off. Piketty and Saez’s method would make everyone poorer to reduce the gap — a disastrous trade-off nobody wants. Their punitive global levies would trigger capital flight and destroy the investment that creates real opportunity.

History shows enforced equality always requires coercion on a massive scale. Free people naturally create different outcomes through talent, effort, and risk-taking. Reagan-era tax cuts proved the right approach: lower marginal rates, stronger growth, and rising living standards across income groups. Recent analyses show the U.S. middle class has shrunk largely because many families moved into the upper-middle class thanks to innovation and wealth created at the top.

Piketty and Saez focus on top income shares but refuse to acknowledge how those high earners have driven broad progress. Their ideas treat individual liberty and private property as obstacles instead of the foundations of progress. Economic freedom is a core constitutional protection that should never be sacrificed to socialist fantasies. The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality should stop giving these flawed notions any prestige. Platforming such economically unsound work is indefensible.

Policymakers and serious institutions must reject this managed decline. Americans need to demand real growth policies based on free markets, fiscal responsibility, and limited government. Equality of outcome always comes at the deadly cost of freedom. Shared prosperity comes through liberty, not through levelers and their global bureaucracies.