The Socialism Survival Guide Copyright © 2020 by Stansberry Research. All Rights Reserved. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review. Edited by Steven Longenecker Designed by Lauren Thorsen Cover photo credit: iStock/btgbtg Stansberry Research Visit our website at www.StansberryResearch.com First Edition: April 2020 ISBN: 978-1-7338773-3-6 About Stansberry Research

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Stansberry Research has nearly two dozen analysts and researchers – including former hedge-fund managers and buy-side financial experts. They produce a steady stream of timely research on value investing, income generation, resources, biotech, financials, short- selling, macroeconomic analysis, options trading, and more.

The company’s unrelenting and uncompromised insight has made it one of the most respected and sought-after research organizations in the financial sector. It has nearly 200 employees and serves 240,000-plus customers in more than 120 countries. Praise for The Socialism Survival Guide

“Buck Sexton tells the truth about ‘democratic socialism’ – that there’s no truth in it. Democratic socialism is all lies.

“There’s nothing ‘democratic’ about having the government run your whole life. There’s nothing capital-D Democratic about it either. No sane Democrat – however liberal – believes in socialism. There’s nothing ‘social’ about socialism’s promise to politicize all of society.

“Democratic socialism isn’t even ‘socialistic’ in the ideological sense of workers owning the means of production. Democratic socialism is just a grab bag of fanatics trying to grab power from we the people.”

– P.J. O’Rourke, No. 1 New York Times bestselling author and editor in chief of American Consequences magazine

“When Buck came to me with his idea of writing a clear, concise, and actionable survival manual for Americans in the face of what’s coming next in our nation – I was confident the resulting book would be good.

“I was wrong. This book is exceptional. It should be required reading for every American who thinks they know a lick about politics, financial markets, and the state of the country today. Whether the subject is health care, government bureaucracy, or our out-of-control national debt, Buck takes no prisoners. Nor should he.”

– Porter Stansberry, founder of Stansberry Research who predicted the 2008 financial crisis Table of Contents

Forward: Dr. Ron Paul...... i

Introduction: Why I Wrote This Book...... v

Socialism Is Winning in America...... 1

Health Care Delusions: “Medicare for All” Is a Disaster...... 23

Open Borders: Sovereignty Is for Suckers...... 39

Green Extremes: Climate Change Is Total Control...... 63

Free College: Somebody’s Gotta Pay...... 91

The Debt Bomb: Nobody Wants to Defuse it...... 109

The Bureaucracy: Our Slothful Overlords...... 133

Taxes: Your Property Is Their Plunder...... 163

The Battle for 2020 and Beyond...... 189

Foreword

Foreward By Dr. Ron Paul

Never before have I seen such danger in America as I do today.

When I left Congress in 2012, I warned that big government, fiat money, ignoring liberty, central economic planning, welfarism, and warfarism caused our prior crisis... and that if folks in Washington didn’t wake up and realize it, then we could expect an even more dangerous crisis in the future.

That’s exactly the world we face today.

The ultimate consequences will be severe. The presidential election of 2020 is just the latest salvo – and it could well be the final one. Because the coming battle for the future of America will devastate the nation.

If you believe, as I do, that the folks in Washington, D.C., are playing with fire – then I urge you to read this book from Buck Sexton.

He’s one of the brightest minds to come out of New York City in years. I spoke extensively with him about four years ago at a private financial conference in Las Vegas. And since then, I’ve followed his work with great interest.

So if you’re concerned about the direction of our nation – we both are likely bringing you bad news in this book. It’s going to get much, much worse.

We’re no longer participating in a free market economy. And we’re no longer using sound money. Asset prices move up and down at the whim of the Federal Reserve.

i The Socialism Survival Guide

Since the creation of the Federal Reserve, the U.S. dollar has lost over 96% of its value. This stealth tax hurts every American citizen, particularly middle- and working-class Americans.

And the Federal Reserve has facilitated the growth of government by printing money since its creation. It is no coincidence the birth of the Federal Reserve was immediately followed by the rise of the welfare- warfare state.

I hope you seek to neutralize the threats that our dangerous monetary system has created. What you do will determine the fate of your family’s financial future.

For your sake and the sake of our nation, I hope you choose to act. I hope you save this copy of Buck Sexton’s book, The Socialism Survival Guide.

The topics that Buck writes about here – from the unstoppable rise in government bureaucracy, our national $23 trillion and growing debt bomb, and the outright theft of personal liberties – will only grow worse.

Take the so-called “Green New Deal.” Like all forms of socialism, the Green New Deal suffers from what Ludwig von Mises identified as the “calculation problem.” That is, knowledge of the most efficient use of resources is conveyed by prices set in a free market. And those prices reflect individuals’ subjective preferences regarding the best use of resources.

Yet when government uses force to remove resources from the marketplace, it makes it impossible for the price system to function. And the No. 1 reason why the price system fails is the absence of the market rate of interest... causing insidious malinvestment and maldistribution of wealth and leaving government officials and private citizens unable to determine the most efficient use of resources. That is why every attempt at government management of the economy inevitably reduces the people’s standard of living.

The ultimate result of these socialist policies will be disaster for our nation.

ii Foreword

When the economic crisis that both Buck and I are warning about comes, vast swathes of the nation will no longer be able to afford next month’s rent, gas for their car, or food for their children.

The good news is that there are a few simple things you can do to protect yourself and your family. That’s why Buck has also included “Survive & Profit” advice at the end of each chapter from America’s preeminent financial publisher, Stansberry Research.

The financial analysts at Stansberry Research have helped hundreds of thousands of investors see the truth about what is happening in America today. And they can help you, too.

The Socialism Survival Guide will help you protect yourself from the coming catastrophe. I urge you to read it closely.

This book tells the story of how we got here... why folks across the nation are losing faith in America... and exactly how to prepare for the dangerous times ahead.

I hope you take this message seriously.

Best regards,

Dr. Ron Paul

iii

Introduction

Introduction

Dear reader,

The most devastating attack is the one you aren’t expecting – the big surprise or shot out of the dark.

And learning how to avoid those shock events – through preparation and foresight – is the greatest informational advantage of all.

There are two events of global significance that changed the course of my life – and that ultimately brought me to write this book.

The first was the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

I was born and raised in New York. Evil came for my city and my country that day, and I wanted to go and join the fight.

After graduating college, I joined the CIA. Within a few years, I would find myself in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, making whatever contribution I could to what was then known as the “Global War on Terror.” There were some heady moments. Before my 30th birthday, I ran two Oval Office briefings for the president of the United States, giving him analyses on issues of critical importance to the nation. It definitely wasn’t the midtown Manhattan finance job most of my friends ended up doing.

The second event that dramatically changed things for me, and in a very different way, was the Great Recession of 2008.

After years of chasing terrorists (and writing a lot of memos), I began to wonder about what life would be like in the private sector. The allure of more freedom – and let’s be honest, more money – was too much to ignore. I had served my government, but knew I wasn’t a

v The Socialism Survival Guide lifer. And just as I began to look outside the walls of Langley for my next gig, the financial world suddenly stood on the brink of ruin.

I’ll never forget when an old friend of mine called from Lehman Brothers in mid-September, right as the bank was finding out its fate, to tell me that “this is not a drill. We are at DEFCON 1 over here.” He was right – Lehman Brothers was toast, as everyone would soon find out. And by the time the other banks recovered and the economy began to gather some steam, I had already taken a job at startup media company “The Blaze,” writing about politics and national security.

Major terrorist attacks and financial crashes have one thing in common: They are massively destructive events that catch almost everyone unaware.

As a CIA analyst, it was my job to look at information of all kinds to assess patterns, risks, and opportunities. But the overall mission and reason for the founding of the organization back in 1947 was to prevent enormously costly surprises.

As I mentioned, that catastrophic surprise for me was 9/11. And in response, I joined the fight and became a highly skilled – and more importantly, highly accurate – national security analyst. My work for the government is all still classified, but I was known as the young guy in the cubicle who was always right on the things that mattered.

Finance, on the other hand was not an area of expertise for me. When the 2008 crash came, I was such a stock market novice that I hadn’t even taken the time to allocate the money in my 401(k) plan. (That was a happy accident for me, as it turned out Treasury bonds were a great place to be.)

The one thing I did recognize, though, was that the “experts” overwhelmingly looked like fools, and it was the average, everyday folks who were left holding the bag while Uncle Sam bailed out the banks. Somehow the finance wizards inside and outside government drove us into the iceberg of the mortgage meltdown.

Fast-forward to 2016... I had spent six years working in conservative media writing, hosting nationally syndicated radio and TV shows with millions of viewers, and building a rolodex of contacts running

vi Introduction all the way up the corridors of power to Capitol Hill and the White House. I became a sought-after guest for cable news channels on national security issues as well as the biggest domestic policy matters.

And some of those appearances on Fox News and CNN led to an invitation to speak on the 2016 election for a financial publisher called Stansberry Research.

That fall in Las Vegas, I sat onstage for a panel with Stansberry Research founder Porter Stansberry. With us was one of the most well-known critics of the Fed and government monetary policy of all time, former Congressman Ron Paul. We had a spirited exchange on a range of political and economic issues – so much so that I was later asked to co-host a podcast with Porter Stansberry himself.

This was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. Instead of having to be an expert in my field, I got to be a student once again. I soaked up all that I could about how to invest from Porter, who had built a world-class business teaching people how to do just that. I became a voracious consumer of Stansberry Research products – from gold to cryptocurrencies to “trophy asset” stocks.

As a result, for the first time in my life, I began to successfully invest my own money... because I had acquired the basic knowledge necessary to build wealth.

With that in mind, I approached Porter Stansberry with an ambitious proposal for 2020: What if I wrote a book on the upcoming election that combined my political analysis expertise with the best of Stansberry’s experts on the financial side?

Politically, America is heading for socialism. I’ve seen it coming for years. Among other things, this will have a profound impact on the wealth of this country. Everyone will be affected by this surge toward socialism in ways that are palpable, frustrating, and damaging. We are in the midst of a 2020 election where America will be deciding – for the first time in its history – whether a candidate running on what is essentially a socialist platform will win the White House for the Democrats.

vii The Socialism Survival Guide

That’s where I see the country heading. But what to do about it? While it is necessary to understand why and how the American Left is dragging us toward a political and economic system that destroys wealth and freedom, it’s not enough to merely sound the alarm about it.

That’s where the expertise of Stansberry Research comes in. Stansberry’s analysts have looked at my predictions – for the 2020 election and beyond – and come up with real-life advice and strategies to prepare for what’s coming – including the chance of a financial reset that could be the biggest destruction of wealth since the Great Depression.

And now, added to all this, there is another massive challenge. It could be the one that immediately leads to this plunge of wealth and prosperity – or a precursor to the statist takeover to come.

As we go to publication, the country is at the height of a global pandemic. The COVID-19 virus is wreaking havoc around the world. The country is in the midst of an unprecedented lockdown. The economy has been frozen, and trillions of additional dollars are being added to the debt while U.S. gross domestic product (“GDP”) is cratering at a rate not seen in more than 50 years.

Right now, I cannot tell you what the full human toll of the virus will be. All of the government projections suggest tens of thousands will perish from this disease over the coming months – perhaps hundreds of thousands. The American people are scared, and government is taking unprecedented power for itself in the name of saving lives.

All the experts do agree on one thing, however: As horrific as it is, this too shall pass. The virus will become less of a threat over time, as herd immunity, improved treatment options, or a vaccine will emerge (though that will take over a year from now). We will get through this. The American people will endure.

But in the near future, we will also face a country with a crushed economy, previously unimaginable government authority, and a stronger push for our leadership to take care of us than ever before – whatever the cost...

viii Introduction

Which brings us back to our main thesis.

America is on a collision course with socialism. Your investments, bank accounts, all that you own and the work that you do will be affected.

This book will tell you why this is happening – and more importantly, what to do about it.

Don’t let the coming big surprise crush your wealth or your aspirations.

Read, learn, and prepare – with the Socialism Survival Guide.

Regards,

Buck Sexton

ix

Socialism Is Winning in America

— Chapter 1 — Socialism Is Winning in America

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

– Frederic Bastiat, “The Law”

America is closer than ever to going socialist.

There are already many ways in which Americans are socialists. For more than a century, we’ve just used different words for it. Or we’ve ignored the reality of what we have become.

But we are about to cross the collectivist Rubicon.

You see, the Democratic Party is now a socialist party in all but name.

Party members can argue over the terminology, but their beliefs are well in line with socialism as it is understood in Europe. In some ways, they’re even more extreme.

The political Left in this country is ideologically – perhaps even more so, spiritually – committed to a course of greater socialism. And it plans to drag us all with it into disaster.

It doesn’t matter if it results in misery and poverty for millions of Americans.

It doesn’t matter if it erodes the freedoms of future generations.

1 The Socialism Survival Guide

The Left wants us to be socialists because it believes that socialism is, as former President Barack Obama once described raising taxes even if it hurt the economy, “the right thing to do.”

This is our future as a country, and we need to face it now.

Maybe this crash into collectivism will only last one or two election cycles. Or maybe it will lead to a long, dark economic, political, and cultural descent from which America can never fully recover.

Either way, this much has become abundantly clear: The Left is positioning itself to fundamentally transform our country through a great leap forward into socialism.

If – and perhaps likely when – the Left succeeds, it will lead us down a dramatically different course for America. And that will also mean a very different global economy takes hold in the 21st century.

Those are the stakes. And the battle is raging as you read this.

We need to act accordingly and do everything we can to stop the Left from achieving its goal.

The truth is, the Left barely hides its ultimate plans anymore.

It believes the end goal is in sight.

The ultimate opportunity for a socialist takeover is the next big economic crisis... That could present itself in the 2020 election. Or it could be the next major economic reversal, a crashing stock market and real estate market, a painful inflation, or the collapse of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

A crisis of one kind or another will be its opportunity. And it may be upon us already with the COVID-19 pandemic. Either way, it will be here eventually.

The Left smells blood in the water. It knows it is closer than it has ever been before to the control it needs for a “socialist utopia.”

Sure, Leftists quibble over terminology. They generally don’t like being called “socialists,” for one – at least, not in America.

2 Socialism Is Winning in America

Occasionally, they make some head-fake at moderation. That’s how they have settled on Joe Biden, a lifelong politician who often seems like he doesn’t know where he is. There is nothing impressive about him as a leader, but he also isn’t promising to eliminate the health insurance of 180 million Americans like Senator Bernie Sanders was.

“See, we aren’t socialists!” the Left will say. The switch from Bernie to Biden, however, is one more rooted in optics than political philosophy.

It’s all a façade, meant to lull us into a false sense of complacency while we are still too fat and happy as a country to see what’s coming. No fair-minded observer who is paying attention should be fooled.

Open socialists now increasingly drive a Democratic party that embraces government control of all aspects of our economy and even the day-to-day lives of every American.

That is the essence of what we could call the “New American Socialist Project” – control. The New American Socialist Project

The economic mechanisms of redistribution are an excuse for the exercise of unfettered government power through central planning.

The elites in D.C. want to tell you what to do because they think they know better than you.

Unfortunately for America, the liberal agitators and social justice demagogues have many rich targets... It’s true that economic inequality is widening, the national debt is heading well beyond $23 trillion, and privately held debt has ballooned.

Class warfare resonates because class separation is increasing.

The risks of a major economic downturn – or catastrophe – are real and growing. Everyone thinks the crash can happen. The wiser among us expect it will happen.

But we generally go about our day-to-day lives like nothing will ever change.

3 The Socialism Survival Guide

Make no mistake about it, the downturn will come. The music will stop, and there won’t be enough chairs. Once that happens, extreme disruptions can – and will – come to our politics... and with it, our country’s future.

Given the incredibly ambitious – some will argue reckless – plan of the Trump administration right now to shut down all economic activity until we get past the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we may already be at the start of the great disruption.

We know millions of businesses are going under. Tens of millions of people will be unemployed – all at the government’s mandate. The pandemic of 2020 is an unprecedented situation in modern America, and the government’s response at all levels has been to seize the authority to shut down any businesses and tell people to stay in their homes for weeks – perhaps even months.

There will be desperation that rises from this. There will be class warfare, rage, and losses that are incalculable for millions of people. And for many, in the aftermath of this virus, there will only be one answer the Left wants to offer...

Socialism: The answer that the Democrat party will offer for all our problems.

It will be the cure-all, the magic fix from the bureaucrats in D.C. to keep us feeling safe and warm at night after this terrifying ordeal. Somewhat ironically, while it will take away our freedom, it will almost all be promised to us under the rubric of “free.”

Free health care. Free college. Free housing. Free passage into the U.S. Free everything...

That is, except for the “rich,” who will be told it’s time to pay up... or else.

After all, as Obama also once told us, the rich “didn’t build that.” It’s only fair the government takes what’s yours and spreads it around.

Today, liberals (or “libs,” in my preferred shorthand) are finally emboldened to take class warfare further than at any time in the post-World War II era.

4 Socialism Is Winning in America

This country is heading for a political and financial reckoning, courtesy of the Chinese Communist Party lying about the COVID-19 virus, then followed with some very bad ideas that Karl Marx and his buddy Friedrich Engels scribbled down more than 150 years ago. Under the broad umbrella of socialism, their ideas led to the murder of millions and the enslavement of billions of people in the 20th century.

Now, socialist liberals here in America figure, “Hey, let’s give that another shot.” They’re going to do it the “right way,” you see. Every socialist always thinks he will. And they will claim, opportunistically, it was the capitalist, free market inclinations of Trump, and his lack of respect for “the system” in D.C., that led to a Chinese virus spreading around the world and crushing the world economy.

Meanwhile, multimillionaires in the lib media cheer on this lurch toward socialism. After all, they already have their houses in the Hamptons and Nantucket to retreat to if things get really ugly – as we have seen already from their response to COVID-19. “We are all in this together” quickly is followed by “gas up the chopper, I’m outta here” for those libs who can afford it.

You don’t have to take my word for it about this socialism surge. It’s not a secret. One of the major Democratic candidates for president, Senator Bernie Sanders, has proclaimed his intentions in national media all along...

“What seems radical today will seem mainstream tomorrow if we stand together.” – Bernie Sanders, June 11, 2016

“I think what we have to do, and I will be doing it, is to do a better job maybe in explaining what we mean by socialism – Democratic socialism.” – Bernie Sanders, March 18, 2019

Don’t be fooled by the term “democratic socialist.”

It’s easy to look at Sanders and see a “cuddly commie”... a Ben-and- Jerry’s-eating, geriatric Senator from Vermont who will make sure you get a great college education and see fantastic doctors without ever worrying about the cost.

5 The Socialism Survival Guide

But the true costs will be much higher than even Bernie imagines.

If I told you 10 years ago that an open socialist would be a frontrunner for the Democrat presidential nomination in 2020, you might have laughed.

Now, it couldn’t be more serious.

Socialism is no longer some boogeyman. It’s not just a conversation piece for self-styled anarchist baristas with too many tattoos. Instead, millions of Democrats – millennials in particular – sincerely believe that the future of America should be socialist.

For the first time in the past decade, Gallup’s polls on socialism versus capitalism in 2018 found that a majority of Democrats prefer socialism.

Ah, but the Democrats and the mainstream media (I repeat myself) would no doubt point to the rest of the Democratic field and claim that Bernie is an outlier... along with the rising liberal star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (better known as “AOC”).

The truth is, Bernie and AOC aren’t outliers among Democrats – they are the ideological vanguard. The whole Democratic party has been moving in their direction.

Take Senator Elizabeth Warren, who labels herself a “capitalist with serious rules.” She also thinks that being 1/1,024th Cherokee qualifies one as a “Native American,” so we know her judgment is solid. However, Warren wants a government that places social justice over free enterprise, and a Leviathan-like bureaucracy in D.C. to enforce her commerce-crushing diktats. She has the charm of Hillary Clinton, with the class warfare instincts of Lenin.

Don’t look to these modern Jacobins to walk the socialist walk themselves. Warren herself is a millionaire. So is Bernie Sanders, a socialist who owns three houses. And despite eight years of President Obama hammering the rich and scapegoating Wall Street, that didn’t stop him and his wife Michelle receiving a reported $60 million deal with Netflix. They pay no price among their party faithful for this hypocrisy.

6 Socialism Is Winning in America

Meanwhile, the rest of us will need to learn to be happy with less while the government turns us upside down to shake out our pockets.

The 2020 election was the first time in American history that one of the two major political parties had numerous candidates who ran on what was undeniably a socialist platform. They can call it “progressive,” “equity based,” or “social-justice focused”... There is no shortage of euphemisms and misdirection they will deploy.

But it’s socialism. It has always been socialism.

This is what I mean when I say these folks are members of the New American Socialist Project. The Point of No Return

Even though it looks like none of the furthest-Left candidates will officially win the Democratic primary, the Left has moved American politics toward levels of statist control and wealth redistribution that will affect your quality of life, financial prosperity, and the prospects of your children (and their children).

It doesn’t really matter which candidate wins among the Democrats in 2020. Their party has abandoned the center.

The new mainstream is now extreme.

And in America, we are rapidly approaching the socialism point of no return...

The vortex of social-justice-based economics is sucking our way of life down into the Marxist depths.

The bloated federal bureaucracy is another indicator of how much closer we are to a turnkey socialist state than many Americans realize. We already have a welfare system in this country that costs more than $1 trillion a year. We have entitlement programs that, despite being on the road to financial collapse, are embedded in every Congressional budgetary measure as “mandatory spending.”

We already have massive government indebtedness, a sclerotic bureaucracy, and a welfare state that isn’t far from those of more 7 The Socialism Survival Guide fully socialist countries. About 60% of all health care spending in America is government spending, topping a trillion dollars in 2018. US. government spending is estimated at more than 35% of GDP.

All of this was before we had a once-in-a-century pandemic sweeping across the country that the progressives – from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Governor Gavin Newsom of California – have told us will be used as an opportunity to push the most radical left-wing policies imaginable.

The virus is a crisis, and the Left will not, in the immortal words of Obama’s former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, let a crisis go to waste.

Many of the biggest expansions of government currently underway will be almost impossible to roll back.

Once we have a government in place that dominates and dictates economic activity, the nature of the relationship between citizen and state will be forever changed.

And here’s the bad news: Socialism is already the path we are on. Unless we act, it is also our destination. Socialism was where our policy momentum was taking us. Now, the COVID-19 crisis could create the political surge the Left needs for an all-out takeover. It’s just a matter of time.

Make no mistake about it... America isn’t just in danger of going socialist if a far-Left Democrat gets elected. That would greatly accelerate the process, but the overall trend in this country is toward more redistribution of wealth and more government control. The government’s response – still underway as I write this – to COVID-19 is almost certain to accelerate that process.

To put it in epidemiological terms, we are suffering from various socialist infections, but the germs have not taken over the host.

Not yet.

All we need is one last, firm shove... And the Left is standing behind us right now, arms cocked and at the ready.

8 Socialism Is Winning in America

A Smokescreen of Semantics

With their platform heading into the 2020 elections, the Democrats have given us their socialism road map. Single-payer health care is the most obvious – and important – of all the next steps, but it is by no means the only one.

On every issue of policy importance, the Democratic party has moved to the Left, usually to the far Left.

But “America will never become a socialist country!” President Trump has told us, repeatedly.

That mantra may be comforting to hear, and Trump certainly seems to believe it. But he can’t be president forever. The facts are that in the most important areas of governance and economics, the state is getting bigger, freedom is receding, and our national debt is out of control.

If I’m right about where all this is heading (and my radio audience will tell you, I usually am at least close to right), what kind of socialism will America have? That’s a question nobody can truly answer yet. It would no doubt be correct to call it “American socialism,” but what would that mean? How far would it go?

This is where the Left creates a smokescreen of semantics to prevent the rest of us from catching onto what’s happening.

“Socialism is state control of the means of production and the distribution of goods!’ they will bleat in unison, like the propagandized livestock of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

That’s a dictionary definition of socialism, sure. It’s also almost never what we refer to as socialism, and under that strict definition, has only existed in a handful of countries ever. This sort of “pure socialism” definition is a distraction in place of an argument. It’s like saying we don’t have to worry about socialism in America, because we aren’t going to be 100% pure socialists.

9 The Socialism Survival Guide

I’m not predicting that in 2020, or 2022, or 2040, the new government of (heaven forbid!) President Warren or Ocasio-Cortez will nationalize all American industries and abolish all private property.

That would be full socialism.

The Soviet Union tried that. And except for the looniest of HuffPost readers in deep-blue cities, few think we should trade the stars and stripes for the hammer and sickle.

Likewise, North Korea is a true socialist “worker’s paradise,” in that workers live in a totalitarian dystopia where mass internment and starvation are the price they are forced to pay for the motherland. That’s not a realistic concern for us today, no matter how many times Mayor Bill DeBlasio threatens to “tax the hell out of the rich.”

Nor is it possible that America will turn into Venezuela overnight.

Venezuela is a warning for our future, perhaps a decade or two away if everything goes bad. But shouting “Venezuela” during a debate over socialism is not, as many of my conservative media colleagues think, a mic-drop argument ender. The catastrophic government there is more inept and more extreme than anything we are likely to see in America anytime soon. Still, it is a cautionary tale worth understanding today. We, too, could one day end up in a similar financial abyss.

Depending on how well our economy “restarts” after the COVID-19 crisis, we could be a closer to it than we think.

Meanwhile, Leftists love to point to the Nordic countries as socialist models for America to follow. Yes, Northern European people are enviably tall, healthy, and seem to bicycle everywhere. Unfortunately for their lib superfans, Scandinavian life is nowhere near the hardcore Marxist model of progressive blog talking points.

If Democrats here in America are going to quibble over the definition of socialism when it’s convenient for them, then Denmark and Sweden have to come off the list, too. These are largely free market economies with very high taxes on everyone – including the middle

10 Socialism Is Winning in America class – and large social safety nets. Both are generally ranked higher than the United States in terms of a regulatory climate that is favorable to business.

The China model is another hybrid economic system that some proponents of socialism here bring up. But China’s system is more aptly described as authoritarian capitalism. Elite liberals in America have been longing for a more China-like approach to things like infrastructure and manufacturing of solar technology for many years now.

Indeed, it would be so much easier to create suitable environmental protections for the Delta Smelt fish in California if you could just kick all the farmers off their land, Beijing-style. Liberals salivate at the statist powers that Xi Jinping wields.

He commands the comrades with even more unquestioned authority than Jeff Zucker at CNN.

Fortunately for us, the top-down approach of the Central Committee in Beijing – one of the powerful bodies of the Communist Party of China (“CCP”) – is not yet feasible for Democrats. We still have a functioning, if imperfect, legal system based in individual rights, and our separation of powers has not been fully erased.

China also will have much bigger problems to face in the months ahead, as the world rightly points a finger at the CCP for its cover-up attempts with COVID-19, and its very damaging lies about the overall casualties the disease caused within its borders.

Compared with the average Chinese citizen, Americans are generally much less obedient to state authority. And if things ever get really rough here in the U.S., about 60 million of us have guns.

America’s version will be a different socialist folly. What Kind of Socialism Will America Have?

The different blends of socialism are not solely the result of cultural and historic differences, although those factors are important. One must also observe the distinction between a socialist system and a socialist sector.

11 The Socialism Survival Guide

The Soviet Union was a socialist country. Britain’s National Health Service is socialist health care. The former describes the central planning and public provision of private goods as the organizing principle of the entire economy. The latter applies the same principles to one sector of a national economy, albeit a large component.

I know what some of you are thinking. And it’s true that in many ways, America already has plenty of socialism running through its veins.

Our public school system, Social Security program, and a host of other major programs are, to varying degrees, accurately described as socialist.

What I want to raise the alarm about in this book is the degree and scope to which America will soon be deeply socialist. We are transitioning from sectors of socialism within a capitalist framework to a socialist framework with capitalist sectors.

Our progression toward socialism has been a long time in the making. Ever since Karl Marx first concocted his pseudoscientific theories about class warfare and the need for a “dictatorship of the proletariat” in the mid-19th century, the struggle between economic freedom and collectivist tyranny has been underway around the world.

It has been a closer-fought struggle than most Americans realize. Despite the unprecedented increases in living standards here at home and around the globe over the past 100 years, some still cling to Marx’s failed economic ideology.

In this country, we generally call those people Democrats. We should start to call them socialists, because that is what they are.

To be fair, not every Democrat deserves that designation. There are certainly still some old-school Dems on the scene who are more JFK than AOC. But they are fewer with each passing year. More important, their influence is limited. They aren’t pushing the agenda of their party anymore. They don’t get the media attention needed

12 Socialism Is Winning in America to move the needle on national policy discussion. It’s radicals like Sanders, Warren, and AOC who move the news cycle. They push major DNC platform changes. The far Left of the Democratic Party isn’t the fringe anymore – it’s the vanguard.

Case in point: do you know who John Delaney is? He was part of the initial 23-person scrum running for the Democrat 2020 presidential nomination. He’s a Congressman from Maryland.

I’ve interviewed him, and he’s pleasant enough. Seems pretty normal, even reasonable at times. He’s a capitalist, a self-made multimillionaire. I disagree with him on many things, but if he were elected president, I wouldn’t lose sleep at night.

His support in the polls for the 2020 Democratic nomination never got above 1%.

What we know in America is this: Not all Democrats are socialists, but all socialists are Democrats.

When I write names like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or Ocasio-Cortez, everyone knows exactly who I’m talking about – and what they stand for. This is also true of radical-left Congresswomen like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.

All these progressive and socialist politicians are making waves – and increasingly controlling the Democratic Party’s direction.

Crazy is calling the shots.

And this progressive takeover is accelerating... From Obamacare to Illegalcare

A decade ago, in the opening years of the Obama administration, there were some hardcore Lefties who wanted to jump straight to a single-payer health care system. Essentially, everyone in America could go into a doctor’s office assuming the government would be paying the bill.

The problem is, that would have meant saying goodbye to employer- provided health insurance for 180 million Americans... a vast 13 The Socialism Survival Guide majority of whom liked their existing health care. In addition, the federal government would have become the one major entity writing checks for our health care, with all the inevitable rationing and crushing bureaucracy this would have created.

For all these reasons, single payer was a political nonstarter back in 2010. Obamacare had to be sold to the public using a friendly name of “The Affordable Care Act,” upfront inducements (“no more pre-existing conditions”), and lies (“If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor”). When Obama’s White House and the Pelosi-led Congress were challenged on the hyper-partisan passage of their health care monstrosity, they claimed it was all based on conservative plans from the Heritage Foundation, and relied on free-market principles.

When conservatives said during Obama’s first term that Obamacare (AKA “The Affordable Care Act”) was a massive step towards truly socialized medicine, the Democrats and the media shouted them down. It was preposterous, their argument went, to think that Democrats wanted government to seize control of a big piece of the health care market so that eventually the government could seize it all.

For good measure, Democrats even went with the obvious smear that opposition to Obamacare was rooted in racism against President Obama himself – as if Hillarycare back in the 1990s wasn’t a hated policy that conservatives trashed.

Fast-forward 10 years. Now, it is an article of faith in Democrat circles that we will get some form of “public option” or single payer.

They call it “Medicare for All,” which is a sleight of hand. Medicare includes a lot of cost-sharing mechanisms, including state budgets and individual co-pays. It also doesn’t truly cover everything. True single payer is exactly that... only one entity, the federal government, pays for all the health care that the state deems necessary.

This is the “mask drop” moment. Democrats argue over what exactly to call it, and how fast the transition should occur, but the major players in Democrat Party politics all want a massive expansion of government control of your health care.

14 Socialism Is Winning in America

See conservatives, we were right about Obamacare! But the Left has already moved on to a bigger goal: single payer.

A similar progression has occurred on the immigration issue. It wasn’t long ago that Left-wing immigration activists criticized President Obama as the “deporter in chief.”

When the first spike of unaccompanied minors arrived at the U.S.- Mexico border in 2014, Obama took the reasonable, obvious position that we did not want illegal alien youths massing at our border as an end run on immigration laws. He stated in no uncertain terms that border security was a desirable thing, and those who tried to violate U.S. sovereignty would be detained and sent home.

What a difference a few years makes...

Now many in the Democrat Party are for open borders in all but name. The mask hasn’t fully dropped yet. You won’t yet find the words “open borders” on the major candidates’ policy sheet, but consider the facts...

Sanders seeks to repeal criminal penalties for anyone apprehended crossing the border. Sanctuary cities are sacrosanct to nearly all Democrats, despite the flagrant lawlessness they encourage. The Left reflexively opposes any enforcement of any immigration laws. AOC has referred to migration detention facilities as “concentration camps.” And AOC and other Democrats routinely call for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) altogether.

There was a single moment in the two-part, opening Democratic debate of 2019 that really hammered home just how insane the Left has become on immigration... When the candidates on stage were asked if they would cover the health care of illegal aliens (“undocumented immigrants” is the politically correct term they use rather than the legally precise term of “illegal alien”), every single hand on stage went up.

Your taxes would pay for the health care of illegal aliens from all over the world!

15 The Socialism Survival Guide

That’s right, America. Health care costs have skyrocketed over the past 30 years, and receiving quality care is a constant struggle. The Democratic Party’s response to this is to raise your taxes dramatically so that, in part, they can pay the medical bills of those who have no legal right to be in America.

This is a massive political gamble. Democrats won’t easily be able to walk away from it, even if they wanted to. The debate question and their answer to it is practically an in-kind donation to the Trump 2020 campaign.

There’s a method to their madness. Democrats are banking on increased minority, suburban women, and millennial turnout to deliver them the White House. Playing to identity politics and virtue signaling of their base is a tactical move, with game-changing implications.

While Republicans try to figure out how to stop the deluge of illegals coming across the border, Democrats recognize this inflow as a source of new voters, whether through an amnesty process or activation of Latino communities who will feel solidarity with Spanish-speaking new arrivals.

All of this would have been completely outside the range of acceptable policies of mainstream voters known as the Overton window of American politics even 10 years ago. Now, with its overtures to illegal immigrants, the Democratic Party is positioning itself not just to win in 2020, but to turn America into a one-party state... much as Mexico was for more than 70 years.

And this newly dominant Democratic Party, infused with people from developing countries who are overwhelmingly going to desire (and require) substantial government support, will be able to take us all much further down the road to serfdom, as Friedrich Hayek called it.

Authoritarian socialism is the end of the road. Our 2020 Roadmap The good news is, we don’t have to accept this road as our future.

There are still patriots in this nation who believe in the free market and the individual freedoms upon which America was built. We are the

16 Socialism Is Winning in America greatest power in the history of the world because the Founders created a system of governance that brings out the best and most useful human traits while suppressing the evils and destructive forces of collectivism.

We can halt America’s progression into full socialism. We might even be able to turn back some of its more recent victories.

But I won’t lie to you: It will be a tough fight. The Left is dedicated and organized, and they fight dirty.

No matter what the after-action reports show, the Left is going to blame President Trump for the COVID-19 pandemic in every way that they can. They will say they he has “blood on his hands.” And they will claim that the recession – or even depression – that results from it is entirely and only Trump’s fault.

They will do everything they can to make sure the incredible prosperity of Trump’s first three years in office will be forgotten. Everything that goes wrong in 2020 will be his fault. And his opponents will use our suffering from the virus and the bad economy it caused to seize even more power.

Commies don’t care about what you think is good for you. They demand the power to make you do whatever they think is for the common good. Time and time again, this has led to misery and disaster throughout history.

What follows is a warning assessment of the socialist threats we face heading into the 2020 election, and how we can prepare for the collectivism that’s coming.

We’re also going to make predictions about how this trend toward full socialism will manifest in our day-to-day lives. At the end of each chapter on a specific area of socialism, we will outline where we think all of this is going. Some predictions are low-probability, high- impact. Others are almost certain to happen at some point in the future. But all of them deserve your attention and preparation now.

With that in mind, here’s our first take at an analysis of what is coming:

17 The Socialism Survival Guide

PREDICTION 1: Trump will win reelection in 2020, but socialism will still win in America within two election cycles.

First let’s start with Trump’s reelection prospects: Unless the pandemic drags deep into the fall, Donald Trump is going to be president of the United States for four more years. In the roughly eight battleground states that will determine the winner of the election, the election is setting up to be a replay of 2016.

(Bonus prediction: Democrats will win the popular vote – again – but will lose the electoral college to Trump by a similar margin to the 2016 election).

There’s simply not a compelling enough narrative behind any of the Democrat candidates for undecided voters to roll the dice on even a relatively “safe” establishment pick like former Vice President Joe Biden.

Despite Democrat blather about how bad Trump has been for the middle class, the facts before the pandemic say otherwise... Going into 2020, all the major economic metrics were in Trump’s favor. Unemployment was at a 50-year low, the stock market has hit multiple all-time highs, and wages are rising at the fastest clip in a decade.

That’s a tough record for any Democrat to run against without the once-in-a-century situation of mass-casualty disease sweeping the country.

The 2020 debate will be whether Biden is better equipped to handle major challenges than Donald Trump. And if Trump even begins to right the economic ship after the COVID-19 disaster, Joe Biden is going to win the same voters Hillary did in 2016. It won’t be enough.

But even a Trump reelection doesn’t mean we won’t get more socialism. Ultimately, America will have to learn some of the lessons of collectivism and central planning the hard way.

Many Americans don’t understand the cost of such bad decisions...

18 Socialism Is Winning in America

If you look at the long-term trend over the last hundred years, America has been moving decidedly away from free markets and limited government toward a political and economic reality that is socialist in all but name. The last 20 years in particular have shown an acceleration in this trend – coinciding with a massive spike in the wealth of the wealthiest 0.1% of Americans.

In material terms, before the virus we were better off than we had ever been. Unfortunately, for a lot of people this means that policy ideas that are far too expensive and impractical now sound feasible. We should be taking a look at what has worked well – rewarding individuals, the free-market determination of pricing, and minimal government interference – and doubling down on it. But instead, the socialists pounce on destruction of the pandemic to take us in exactly the wrong direction.

President Trump has stalled much of the socialist agenda, but he didn’t stop it. Even his reelection won’t be enough to turn the political momentum against the Left. Despite all their complaints about deregulation and tax cuts under Trump, the socialists are closer than ever to realizing some of their most important goals.

On every major policy front, the Democratic Party has pulled further to the Left, and deeper into the socialist camp. The pretense of any bipartisan compromise or consensus has been abandoned. The Democrat-Socialist Left has embraced the politics of absolutism. They will gladly ram through transformative legislation, judicial or executive order on the thinnest partisan margin or pretext – and shame the other side for their opposition and even failure to participate.

When you step back and look at the trajectory, this much becomes clear: The socialists’ victories have been permanent. Efforts to thwart them are temporary. Once a massive entitlement program is created, it is politically impossible to take it away. There is no undoing a mass amnesty for illegal aliens. Once trillions are piled onto the national debt, there is no easy or fast way to undo that damage. The list goes on.

Assuming I’m right, and Trump wins in 2020, perhaps he will be able to turn the tide, though he would need strong Republican majorities 19 The Socialism Survival Guide in the House and the Senate for that. But eventually, the pendulum will swing back. There will be Democrats in power, and they will drag this country into a series of major socialist programs that will have an impact on you, your children, and perhaps their children.

Part of our task today is to understand why they are wrong so we can fight against their schemes.

But we also must be prepared for what will happen if they get their way. How to Survive & Profit

As I mentioned early in this book, I’ve partnered with financial publisher Stansberry Research to provide the economic and investment insight to go along with my critical warnings of the coming political turmoil.

Stansberry Research is the largest independent source of financial insight in the world.

I’ve interviewed and spoken with several experts there while researching this book and finding answers to the serious problems I see coming for America. And at the end of each chapter I’ll summarize our conversation and provide action items to undertake now.

When President Trump gets us past the worst of the pandemic’s effect on the economy and wins reelection, that’s your “starting gun” to make as much money as you can and enjoy the best economy that you’re likely to get for the next 12 to 20 years.

So please, if you do nothing else, make sure that that the people who you trust to help guide your decisions about money and wealth are worthy of your trust.

I’ve learned from the experts at Stansberry Research that there are a lot of ways to make money in the markets. You can buy stocks, bonds, or funds. You can be an investor or a trader. And you can even speculate in riskier assets with a small portion of your portfolio.

But if you follow the wrong advice – whether an investment broker more interested in siphoning off fees from your portfolio than your 20 Socialism Is Winning in America performance, or a financial pundit on TV who gets paid to promote one of the show’s advertisers – it can mean disaster.

Stansberry Research founder Porter Stansberry put it this way:

The financial industry does not exist because it enriches its clients. The clients provide all the wealth required to maintain the financial industry.

The profits that power the branding and the marketing of mutual-fund companies and big investment banks came out of the pockets of their clients. Think about that. Think about it carefully the next time you consider following any financial institution’s advice about what to do with your savings.

But you also cannot let fear ruin your financial future.

According to online banking news aggregator Bankrate, more than half of Americans are not invested in the stock market – including in their retirement accounts.

As American retirement expert Dr. David Eifrig pointed out to me when we talked:

Some of those folks probably have great excuses. Maybe they lost a job... Or they don’t trust Wall Street... Probably, money is tight. Or it’s just “too hard” to figure out the brokerage forms to get started.

These excuses are all based on fear. When it comes to investing, fear prevents most people from starting. Whether it’s fear of losing money or fear stemming from ignorance.

So make sure that fear doesn’t keep your from benefiting from American capitalism – the greatest wealth creator that the world has ever seen. I cannot emphasize this enough... You must act. You must learn how to invest. You must understand how it can help you provide financial security for your family.

And if you’re uncertain about investing or wonder where to begin, I’ve partnered with Stansberry Research to provide my book readers

21 The Socialism Survival Guide with an exclusive digital book titled, The Money Manifesto. In it, you’ll learn:

• The top three things every investor must know in order to succeed. (p. 2)

• A four-step test that you can apply to any investment before you risk a dime. (p. 19)

• How you can teach your children to be millionaires by the time they’re 40 years old. (p. 30)

• A certain type of stock that will go up – even if you’re wrong. (p. 14)

• A beginner’s guide to opening a brokerage account. (p. 37)

• Why the only right person to look after your money is you. (p. 47)

And much, much more.

You can access The Money Manifesto at www.StansberryResearch.com after you log in with the credentials you were provided with when you bought The Socialism Survival Guide.

22 Health Care Delusions: “Medicare for All” Is a Disaster

— Chapter 2 — Health Care Delusions: Medicare for All Is a Disaster for All

“If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.”

– P.J. O’Rourke

When it comes to health care, Democrats never learn.

Maybe they don’t want to, or are incapable of it. But here we are, 10 years after the last major fight over health care, and despite everything that this country has experienced, very little has improved in this massive sector. Despite all their screaming about what an unfair accusation it was back in 2010, it turns out the Left wants what conservatives said all along they did.

Socialized medicine.

Of course, they’re not entirely honest about it. They aren’t willing to jump to all-out socialized medicine right away. No, the Left understands that incrementalism is the key to their eventual government takeover of the health care market.

Instead, the Left is building upon the underperforming, legal, and constitutional mess called “Obamacare” (the Affordable Care Act). Now that the ACA has established a massive expansion of Medicaid and control of the individual market (as opposed to employer- provided insurance), the next step is to just expand the government’s reach even more into the health care market.

23 The Socialism Survival Guide

This is why Bernie Sanders said in June 2019 about Obamacare: “We should be building on it. It took us a long time to get it to where it is now.” Indeed, progressives in America have been dreaming about universal government health care for over 100 years.

Now, they are closer than ever.

The Left has a fever, baby – and the only prescription is more government health care.

Democrats are calling it “Medicare for All,” which in itself is a misnomer. Putting aside for a moment the astronomical costs, anyone who has a passing familiarity with Medicare will be appalled at the results if it becomes an enacted policy for everyone.

What the Democrat-Left is proposing will be much, much worse than Medicare. For anyone who has had good experiences with Medicare, it will profane the very word.

There is simply no way that Medicare can be expanded to cover all 330 million Americans without massive cost overruns and severe rationing. The system is already far too expensive and suffering from lack of providers... It would collapse under the weight of tens of millions more Americans added onto the rolls. The math alone portends disaster.

Medicare spending out of the federal budget was $582 billion in 2018. About one-fifth of all health spending in the United States, Medicare also accounts for 40% of all at-home health spending. And given current projections for Baby Boomers retiring, that number is expected to double by 2050.

Don’t fall for the myth that we pay for Medicare right up front with payroll and other taxes throughout our lives. The funding mechanisms for Medicare only pick up slightly more than half the cost. The rest of it comes out of the federal budget – which is why Medicare is the primary driver of our $23 trillion in national debt.

And again, these numbers are our current Medicare system, which services about 44 million retirees, and is expected to reach around 80 million by 2030.

24 Health Care Delusions: “Medicare for All” Is a Disaster

What happens when the Left decides to magnify the scope, scale, and cost of Medicare by a factor of eight?

Based purely on the numbers, it will be a medical, financial, and economic disaster. Ask Your Doctor What He Thinks

Aren’t convinced yet?

Let’s look at this through the lens of an individual American trying to get routine health care services in the Medicare system.

Next time you to go to your doctor’s office, ask if they take Medicare. There’s a good chance that they do, provided they take insurance (not a given these days because of all the red tape and low reimbursements). However, if it’s a nice office with a reputable and in-demand doctor, the chances that the practice will also take Medicaid are markedly lower.

This should be unsurprising. Medicaid reimbursements are much lower than Medicare. Docs who do a procedure for Medicare get paid one thing... The same procedure for a Medicaid patient gets another – and it’s less.

Even though most Medicare beneficiaries take out twice what they pay in over the course of their lives, it is still an earned entitlement.

Medicaid, on the other hand, is health care welfare. It’s what the government provides to low-income people because of a sense of obligation to fellow Americans. The political clout behind the program is far lower as a result (though certainly not insignificant, especially if illegal aliens are added to the rolls).

Now imagine, for a moment, that every doctor who was taking Medicare was forced – as a matter of law, to take Medicaid as well. The effects would be immediate, and obvious. Suddenly, you would either no longer be able to see your favorite doctors in a timely fashion or you wouldn’t be able to see them at all under your coverage plan.

25 The Socialism Survival Guide

A little 101 Econ for the Left: This is called scarcity. It’s when you have too little of something. In real-life terms, whatever waiting room you’re used to being in with other Medicare beneficiaries now will also have Medicaid recipients waiting to see the same doctors. It’s going to get crowded.

And keep in mind, Medicaid does not have copays for a whole host of services. There’s almost no “skin in the game,” so to speak, for anyone using a Medicaid card for emergency room visits, family planning, or child preventive care. And when there is cost sharing, it is nominal. This means that doctor usage inherently goes up in those areas. Continuing with our scenario, imagine that instead of this being just Medicaid recipients, you had literally every person in the country (including illegal immigrants) choosing or pushed by their employer onto your same plan. That’s what “Medicare for All” would become.

Usage of care would skyrocket. Quality of care would plummet. Doctors would try to get through as many patients as quickly as possible, all the while knowing that their patient outcomes and reputations would be of minimal importance. If all doctors are being paid the same, excellent care is instantly de-incentivized.

Think what it will be like trying to get the same appointments at the same doctors you do now – when a huge swath of America no longer has to pay a dime out of pocket for the same visits.

When it comes to receiving medical care, this is the future of a “Medicare for All” program. You will have a massive spike in doctor usage, without any corresponding increase in the supply of doctors and other health care services.

Instead, the supply of doctors is likely to go down. Many M.D.s near retirement would probably hang up their stethoscopes for good, as has already been happening in recent years due to red tape and financial reality. Practices that are struggling to pay their bills would close or be forced to provide rapid-fire care at rock-bottom reimbursement rates.

The demands on the health care system would skyrocket based on government fiat.

26 Health Care Delusions: “Medicare for All” Is a Disaster

That’s Only the First Step

At this moment of catastrophe, would the Left wing in American politics say “you were right, this was a really bad idea?” Of course not!

If they have the political power to do so, they would then move on to their ultimate aim all along: fully socialized medicine. That means a total government takeover, similar to what the British have with the National Health Service.

That’s right, once the Democrats create a full-fledged crisis in the health care system, destroy private insurance, and make a generation of would-be doctors switch to veterinary school – they will triumphantly proclaim that the time for full government control of the health care system has arrived.

The arsonists of American health care will insist that now they are the firefighters.

Then, to borrow from Winston Churchill, socialism’s virtuous “equal sharing of misery” would begin. To deal with the shortages of actual health care (as opposed to “coverage,” which is just a promise of care at some point), the Socialist Democrats will establish rules for what doctors you can see, with what frequency, and in what time frame.

They will likely also promise to address the supply of health care problem with massively expensive government training programs, medical school debt forgiveness, and other forms of state intrusion into the rapidly evaporating market.

Yes, the same government that has spent $640 on airplane toilet seats and by some studies wastes around $125 billion annually will assure you that they can crank out an assembly line of Doogie Howsers and Sigmund Freuds on the cheap.

It won’t work.

We know it won’t work.

These are the predictable effects of central planning. Central planning is the heart of all socialist schemes. It is also their fatal flaw.

27 The Socialism Survival Guide

It’s even more disastrous in the context of running a massive machine like the American health care industry. Bureaucrats in D.C. and demagogues in Congress who have the faith of one third of the American people will effectively be in charge of one sixth of the American economy. Socialized Medicine Elsewhere

You can infer a lot about an economy when you look at the health care system of a given country where the government controls both the provision of medical services and the distribution of those services.

If the government is calling all the shots, it’s generally not good.

At first glance, there seem to be exceptions... There are indeed Western European states that seem to have achieved near-universal coverage, and there are neither breadlines nor mass shortages. Dentistry problems aside, the Brits have fully socialized medicine and their country isn’t a Mad Max dystopia.

However, each comparison case between health care in other countries and the U.S. needs a drilldown. Generalities of “they do it over there so well” leave far too much wiggle room. That’s on purpose.

Most of Western Europe and Canada have some form of single- payer health care. Those countries also tend to have very long wait times for specialists and surgeries, their cancer survival rates are lower than the American average, and all earners in those societies pay a higher percentage of their wages than their socioeconomic equivalents here in the States.

Add to that another unpleasant but important fact in this discussion: Americans are overall less healthy than Europeans. In the struggle between pungent Brie and Big Macs, the stinky cheese is winning. Our love affair with soda and other efficient sugar-delivery platforms apparently comes with consequences. Other than diseases of old age, the biggest drivers of health care costs in America are lifestyle – influenced afflictions like heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

28 Health Care Delusions: “Medicare for All” Is a Disaster

We aren’t just bigger in America – there are also a lot more of us.

The European national health care systems have far fewer patients to attend to than we do on this side of the Atlantic. Sweden, for example, has a population of 10 million – about as many as North Carolina. Even Germany only has a total of about 80 million. America has about 330 million inhabitants... The sheer size of our population puts additional strain on whatever medical system we have.

To think that the wizards of the D.C. swamp would be able to come up with a centrally planned health care system that wouldn’t collapse like a gelatin piñata is delusional. Pushing Granny Off a Cliff

Health care is not and cannot be a “human right.” You cannot have a right to someone else’s goods and services.

But I admit this emotional argument of the socialists is tough to beat. After all, if health care is a human right, then all the arguments about freedom and the free market can get shouted down.

You will endure no end of caterwauling and moral blackmailing if you dare argue that the profit motive and market signals like price overall improve health care delivery and service.

Remember the infamous ad during the 2012 presidential election where an actor playing Paul Ryan, then running as a vice presidential candidate for Mitt Romney, was shown pushing granny off a cliff?

That’s essentially the liberal counter-argument to a more free market in health care. If you make the case that the same capitalism system has placed supercomputers called “iPhone” into the pockets of everyday Americans could maybe bring down the cost of an MRI that relies on technology from the 1970s, they yell at you for being heartless.

What about granny?

What about the poor?

29 The Socialism Survival Guide

What about the illegals (“undocumented” they would say)?

Why are you such a heartless monster!

The last one isn’t a question. It’s an accusation. And that’s generally what the health care debate turns into now. Many socialists believe that evil capitalists don’t care if children die in the streets. And the rest of the Democratic field are happy to play along with this slander of their political opponents, knowing that the only alternative to the market is more government control.

This is why health care is a great place for the collectivist Left to dig under the walls of capitalism. Much of Marxist theory is dependent upon feelings instead of economic realities.

What’s “fair” becomes more important than what is true.

That’s particularly true when it comes to the sometimes life-and- death issues of our health care system.

Nobody should bleed out on the street after a car accident because they can’t afford medical care. In America, we have already made that decision as a matter of policy, and it’s why emergency rooms cannot deny anyone care.

But those same ERs are where costs have exploded the most – at least for those who have insurance or the means to pay. At hospitals, there is a built-in cost shifting that seeks to reward those who have no resources at the expense of those who do.

Even Medicare is part of this problem. It forces hospitals to take constant losses. If all hospitals had to take Medicare reimbursement rates for all their procedures, many of them would have to cease all operations.

Ultimately, the health care argument turns into economics vs. emotions. And the emotional appeal of “universal health care” and “health care as a human right” is powerful.

30 Health Care Delusions: “Medicare for All” Is a Disaster

The ‘Public Option’ Is the Next Step

In America today, we have developed a psychological attachment to health care as something other than a service that has finite supply and that is subject to market effects one way or another.

This is why polling shows a continued creep up in public support for “single payer” health care. As of July 2019, polling showed that 79% of Democrats support such a system, as did 44% of overall registered voters.

All it would take to put that number solidly over 50% is one financial downturn and a Democrat-socialist political wave. The president who tells worried Americans that they will never have to worry about their health care costs again – a source of continuing anxiety for the electorate for decades – will be in a powerful position to remake the health care market, and with it the broader economy.

It won’t matter that we have ample historical and anecdotal evidence that this is a terrible idea. A majority will not care that the numbers don’t add up and our foray into single-payer health care will be catastrophically expensive.

Enough Americans are on a Crusade (or is it a Jihad? #diversity) for government paying for everyone’s health care that a misadventure into single payer seems inevitable.

Whether it takes four years or 40, some Left-wing demagogue is going to push our health care system into a truly socialist framework – one we may never escape.

And while this is certainly not the only systemic risk of socialism we face in the 2020 election – it’s one of the biggest and most worrying.

The COVID-19 pandemic will also become central in the healthcare debate this fall and for years (perhaps decades) to come. That the government has effectively declared the state will pick up (or backstop insurers) on all costs of COVID-19 treatment and testing is an emergency measure.

31 The Socialism Survival Guide

The Left will claim that this sets a precedent that the state should just do this for all health care matters. And no matter what the numbers eventually show, the American Left will assert that European countries with socialized medicine did a better job handling the pandemic than America.

PREDICTION 2: There will be a “public option” health care plan within two election cycles. Wait times will dramatically increase. Quality of care will decrease.

The Democrat-socialists have taken an incremental approach to the government takeover of health care, but they are within striking distance of the ultimate prize.

Even if my first prediction is correct and Trump wins the 2020 election, history tells us that there will be a Democrat president in office within a cycle or two. He (or she) will enact the most transformative policies that the Democrats in the 2020 cycle are advocating. And at the top of the list will be a public option.

The public option is almost inevitable at this point...

Socialists say that they want “Medicare for All” because government paying for everyone’s health insurance is among the most effective ways to move us into a more socialist economy. But there will undoubtedly be strong headwinds against such a move, including resistance from Congress. If the socialists got their way and the private health insurance system as it exists were completely eradicated, there would be substantial risk of political blowback.

That’s where a “public option” comes in. The public option was a topic of intense debate back when Democrats were crafting Obamacare legislation. There are variations of how it would be implemented, but a public option is essentially a health insurance plan set up and funded by the government. It could be a plan that allows more individuals to sign up for already existing government plans like Medicare, or it could be an entirely new plan that the government sponsors that – at least in theory – would just be another health insurance plan competing with all the others in the private market.

32 Health Care Delusions: “Medicare for All” Is a Disaster

This is what the Democrat-socialists can – and will – implement within two election cycles. While a total takeover of health insurance (and inevitably thereafter, health care) would be a heavy lift even for a Bernie Sanders administration with a Democrat majority in both houses of Congress, a “public option” plan is a much easier political sell. The Left will be able to present it as a more reasonable alternative – a compromise with Republicans – in comparison to the more ambitious “Medicare for All” plan.

Once the public option gets created, you will never be able to get rid of it. And the costs will skyrocket over time. Many of the sickest individuals will gravitate toward the plan, which will be heavily subsidized by the taxpayer. If the benefits of the public option aren’t good enough, there will be complaints and public pressure to increase them. But over time, if the benefits are in line with, for example, Medicare, it will crowd out ACA plans as well as other private insurance. The next stop after that will be Medicare for All.

What does this mean for you in the meantime?

Wait times to see an in-demand doctor – particularly specialists – are going to increase considerably. As of 2019, the Association of American Medical Colleges estimates that there will be a shortage of 122,000 physicians nationwide by the year 2032. A big part of that is an aging population, as Americans are living longer lives than ever before.

But there are also pressures on medicine as a career field. These are already well known to anyone who has considered medical school, which remains incredibly expensive (a top medical school can cost about $400,000 all over the course of four years). Doctors have more paperwork and regulation. Malpractice insurance is very high. And private practices have become increasingly difficult to keep open.

The economics of medicine for those who practice aren’t getting better precisely because of all the government efforts to regulate and redistribute it. Socialists can ruin anything they control, but health care is a particularly ripe target for their ruinous central planning.

Our health care system isn’t going to get more free market oriented. It will be more socialists. It may soon be time for many Americans to

33 The Socialism Survival Guide consider concierge medicine or even medical tourism for those who can afford it. How to Survive & Profit

Health care is a top issue for voters heading into the 2020 presidential election. A recent Politico writer referred to health care as “arguably the top issue in the Democratic primary and potentially a deciding issue in the general election, too.”

The COVID-19 crisis will only increase this public concern – intensely.

The Left’s most widely discussed solution – “Medicare for All” – would completely upend the current system and put everyone into a government-run, single-payer program.

To see how this will play out, I spoke with Thomas Carroll – one of the most respected and longest-serving health care analysts on Wall Street. He’s won award after award in the industry for his stock- picking prowess... and was ranked as the No. 1 U.S. health care analyst by Fortune magazine.

Gain an Edge in Health Care Investing Insight From Stansberry Research, America’s Most Trustworthy Financial Publisher

The government’s interest in “doing something” about health care dates back to 1912...

That’s when Theodore Roosevelt included health insurance in his “Bull Moose” campaign platform. But it wasn’t until 1965 that President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the first comprehensive health care coverage for aged and poor Americans – Medicare and Medicaid.

Since then the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations have tried different approaches to expand coverage to as many people as possible. Despite their successes and failures, all of these efforts have achieved one thing – creating massive uncertainty.

34 Health Care Delusions: “Medicare for All” Is a Disaster

The constant scrutiny and debate surrounding the sector has made health care stocks very sensitive to proposed government changes. So many institutional investors totally steer clear of them.

And that makes health care great for investing... It’s complicated, but if you understand health care, it gives you an edge.

Let’s go back and look at an example from Obamacare...

On June 28, 2012, the Supreme Court issued a critical ruling on the future of the ACA.

Leading up to the ruling, experts watching the industry knew the result was binary... either the law stays or it goes. There was no splitting the baby. All of the potential winners and losers from this complex new law hung in the balance.

Unlike the other branches of our federal government, the Supreme Court is tight as a drum. Information does not leak out early. So while we as investors had our own opinions about what would happen, the best we could do was place our bets... and wait.

Keep in mind, that regardless of the rancor and politicking that surrounded the ACA’s passage and subsequent efforts to limit or reverse it... by 2012, most health care experts generally thought the law had been good for the industry. It increased the number of people paying into the insurance markets and seeking out care.

Insurance companies liked the ACA because it forced people to buy health care coverage, which generated lots of new revenue. Insurers who work with Medicaid beneficiaries – Medicaid managed-care organizations (“MCOs”) – were particularly grateful, since the law dramatically expanded the Medicaid rolls.

Hospitals also liked the law because with fewer uninsured patients walking into their emergency rooms, the amount of bad debts on their books would drop.

And the makers of medical devices and prescription drugs also looked forward to expanded markets for their products.

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So how did health care stocks react to all of this?

Take a look at the following table... It shows what the market was thinking around the time of the decision. We look at four different trading periods before and after the ruling...

1. Column 1 shows how you did if you bought health care stocks a year before the ruling and sold three months before the ruling, just as media attention was focusing on the case,

2. Column 2 illustrates buying three months before the ruling and selling two weeks before,

3. Column 3 shows what happened if you bought one year before the ruling, but got cold feet and sold just two weeks before the ruling (combination of the first two), and

4. Column 4 describes the stout-hearted who bought two weeks before the ruling and held on for a year.

1 2 3 4 Health Care Segments Buy: 6/15/11 Buy: 3/30/12 Buy: 6/15/11 Buy: 6/15/12 Sell: 3/30/12 Sell: 6/15/12 Sell: 6/15/12 Sell: 6/15/13 Managed Care 11% -11% -2% 24% Medicaid MCOs 44% -36% -7% 48% Hospitals -17% -1% -18% 97% Med Tech 6% -4% 1% 20% Pharma 22% -26% -10% 86% Biotech 18% -31% -18% 97% Average of Segments 14% -18% -9% 62% www.stansberryresearch.com Source: Bloomberg, Stansberry estimates Owning health care stocks in the year prior to the decision was mostly profitable if you sold before the financial media began to talk up the pending announcement. Doing so earned you 14%, on average.

But this changed quickly...

Health care stocks declined 18% in the three months prior to the ruling. Investors began to get skittish. Pundits began to suggest that

36 Health Care Delusions: “Medicare for All” Is a Disaster the court would find the ACA unconstitutional. The benchmark S&P 500 Index fell, too... but only about 5%. Health care underperformed the index by 13 percentage points.

In total, owning these segments the entire year before the ruling proved unprofitable, but they got killed in the three months leading up to the decision.

But if you were a contrarian (as I was), you bought this weakness as the ruling approached...

My team and I understood every last detail of the ACA and fully believed the court would uphold it. It was a lonely position.

My CEO at the time called me after reading our thoughts on the ACA. He told me I was wrong. He said the ACA was a socialist program... it would raise expenses for all of us... and there’s no way it could be constitutional.

When the court ruled the ACA could stand, the stocks ripped higher.

Buying the sector in the weeks ahead of the ruling, during the moment of maximum fear, proved to be the best timing. Doing this and holding for a year provided great returns. The average of our groupings returned 62% versus the S&P 500’s return of 21%.

If you really understand the impact policymaking can have on an industry... and have the guts to make a contrarian call... you can profit. Learn more about our latest health care recommendations at www.StansberryResearch.com using the credentials you received when you purchased The Socialism Survival Guide.

37

Open Borders: Sovereignty Is for Suckers

— Chapter 3 — Open Borders: Sovereignty Is for Suckers

“It is one thing to have free immigration to jobs, it is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both.”

– Milton Friedman

The dominant liberal media narrative on immigration has been a series of shifting lies for about the last 40 or so years. But in the Trump era, the main Leftist argument on immigration has shifted into outright moral blackmail...

Have a problem with a million new illegal arrivals from Central America?

You must be a racist.

Ask any questions about who will pay for these new illegal arrivals?

Sounds like a racist question to ask.

Wondering about how Social Security and Medicare will remain viable programs when millions of illegal aliens will need similar benefits when they reach retirement age?

Only a racist would worry about such things.

That’s more or less the extent of the intellectual discourse you can expect from Leftists on the issue of illegal immigration. They prefer to engage in ad hominem attacks on anyone who supports the rule

39 The Socialism Survival Guide of law, and to change the terms of the debate to suit their side of the argument.

“Illegal alien” is a term that appears in the federal legal code many times. Leftists now consider it wrong – even hateful – to use words written in our law books. Until recently, they insisted on the term “illegal immigrant”... before deciding they disliked the admission of illegality contained in the phrase itself. Now they have moved on to the Orwellian nonsense term of “undocumented,” which is both absurdly vague and inaccurate. Illegal aliens do have documents, just not the type of documents that allow them legal status in the United States.

To call an illegal alien “undocumented” is like calling a trespasser a “pre-invite guest.”

Keep in mind, this phraseology fight comes after decades of brainwashing the American people with platitudes meant to conflate legal and illegal immigration, mislead citizens about the costs of illegals, and pretend that the problem was less massive all along than it is in reality.

Loaded, misleading claims like “America is a nation of immigrants” and “immigrants do the jobs Americans won’t do” have become second nature for many Americans. News anchors and policy analysts alike repeat them as though they are written in the lines of the Constitution. CNN seems to actually believe that Emma Lazarus’ “Great Colossus” poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty is the foundation of federal immigration law. Yet that poem was simply part of a fundraiser. And the plaque that sits there today is for tourists.

Historically, Ellis Island was a place where immigrants could be rejected on the spot after a weekslong transatlantic journey. Around 2% of all new immigrants at Ellis Island were, for medical or mental reasons, told to get back on the boat and go home.

The Left’s rewriting of immigration history isn’t simply an academic matter. It has been used to create narratives that support illegal immigration at the expense of the rule of law and sovereignty. Over

40 Open Borders: Sovereignty Is for Suckers the past 30 years, illegal immigration into the United States has continued, year in and year out, while the media either ignored, lied, or cheered it on.

And now that we are just beginning to understand the role of globalization and loose border controls in the spread of COVID-19 in 2020, there will be an intense fight over the need for borders, not just for economic reasons – but for public health and national security reasons as well. How Many Illegal Aliens Are Here?

The “official count” as of 2017 is that there are around 11 million illegal aliens in the United States. However, that figure is only an estimate based on voluntary census data. And it’s almost certainly wrong. The real number of illegal aliens residing in the United States is much, much higher.

A bunch of math super-nerds at Yale crunched all the available data as part of a PhD project, and they estimated that the number of illegal aliens in America was potentially more than 20 million. That’s close to double the official figure.

Ann Coulter, in her smash hit book ¡Adios, America!, cited a group of Bear Stearns finance experts who looked at the available date on remittances in 2005. They came away estimating the number of illegal aliens at more like 20 million. That was 15 years ago... And over the past 10 years alone, illegal aliens in the “Northern Triangle” countries of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala have sent home another $120 billion.

On my multiple trips to the U.S.-Mexico Border to cover the immigration crisis in 2018, I asked members of Border Patrol what their thoughts were on the official “12 million” illegal aliens number that is taken as the gold standard. They either laughed or shook their heads in disbelief.

Border Patrol arrest people every single day trying to come into America. And yet the “official” number of illegal aliens has stayed roughly the same for the past decade?

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The claim on the Left is that many illegals have gone back home as Latin American economies have improved – offsetting the number of illegals who entered in the past decade.

That’s just not realistic. For one thing, there are hundreds of thousands of visa overstays in America every year. That means people who entered legally did not leave when they were supposed to, in violation of federal law, subjecting themselves to sanctions like a multiyear ban on reentry. In 2017 alone, the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) said there were 600,000 visa overstays.

Some of these may be “forgetful” students and vacationers. Some may plan to go home at some point. But it is incredible that half a million people a year fall into that category. Many of these overstays are “hiding in the shadows” – as the media cynically refers to living illegally in the United States – with almost no serious fear of deportation unless they commit a major crime.

Add to this figure nearly 1 million Central American migrants that will have crossed into America from 2018 to 2019, and the government’s “approximately 12 million illegal aliens” number seems fanciful.

This is also happening in a broader context of mass migration that is unprecedented in the history of this nation.

America has gone through the most radical immigration transformation in its history based on the legal immigration that has occurred since the 1960s. There were an estimated 44.5 million total immigrants in America in 2017. That means today there are close to 50 million permanent residents, green card holders, or citizens of the United States who were born on another country’s soil.

Nobody really knows what the long-term effects will be of such a massive change in the demographics of America. During previous waves of immigration from countries like Germany, Italy, and Ireland in the late 19th century, there were immigration moratoriums that were then followed with periods of assimilation to the dominant national culture.

42 Open Borders: Sovereignty Is for Suckers

Not anymore. Multiculturalism means that every group of immigrants that shows up is told that the host nation should be thankful for them and they don’t need to change anything. English as America’s national language should be an obvious policy choice, but the Democrat Left opposes it as unnecessary, even nativist.

Today, the socialist-Democrats decry supporting the enforcement of immigration laws currently on the books as “white nationalism,” “xenophobia,” or “racism.”

Any discussion of changing our immigration system so that it focuses on merit instead of chain-migration (“family reunification”) is similarly shouted down. That America accepts a million new immigrants as permanent residents every single year never seems to factor into the Left’s calculations.

As far as many Democrats are concerned, more immigration – both legal and illegal – is always better. The Left wants no discussion of additional limits or a shift to a primarily merit-based system – such as is employed by Canada.

Ultimately, the socialist Left plans to do away with any real restrictions on entry into the United States. And if they get their way in 2020, the doors to America will be kicked open even wider.

America will become an open borders country in all but name. The Holy Grail for American Socialists

With this one policy, socialists in America see an opportunity to vanquish their political enemies (conservatives, capitalists, Constitutional rule-of-law advocates) once and for all. By gaming the system to encourage mass migration, the Left is creating new voting blocs instead of trying to win over the voters who are already here.

This is how open-borders immigration policy turns America socialist. The Left does everything it can to make sure the border is porous and that interior enforcement is lax. So-called “sanctuary cities” are the most visible and egregious examples of this. The new arrivals will, overwhelmingly, support the party that promises to provide them with the most state benefits. 43 The Socialism Survival Guide

The Left then takes this a step further...

For example, they say it’s our fault that there are illegal aliens from Central America breaking the law to come into this country. New York Magazine journalist Eric Levitz is a good example of this mentality. During the height of the “family separation crisis” in the summer of 2018, Levitz wrote:

The United States is not suffering a crisis that justifies radical measures; the Central American families gathered at our border are. And those families aren’t bringing crime and lawlessness to our country – if anything, we brought such conditions to theirs.

You read that right. The fact that El Salvador and Honduras have murder rates among the very highest in the entire world – 50 and 40 per 100,000 residents respectively – is somehow America’s fault. Why nearby Costa Rica has only 12 per 100,000 is a question with which the libs don’t trouble themselves.

The “it’s all America’s fault” mentality on questions of illegal immigration is widespread on the Left. This is no accident.

From there, it’s just a matter of time that a majority of those who are a part of this process start voting for the political class that bleats phrases like “no human being is illegal.”

And for the socialists in our midst, it only gets better. What is currently a de facto open border can rapidly become de jure. All it takes is one act of Congress and a presidential signature.

Amnesty is the immigration holy grail for American socialists.

The initial amnesty doesn’t have to cover every illegal in the country. It can be, officially speaking, a limited amnesty for one select group of sympathetic illegals – like the so-called “Dreamers.” (More on this category in a moment.)

But once Congress declares a few million illegals are now part of the American family forever, it will be the beginning of the end of immigration enforcement. Once an amnesty is passed, other illegals

44 Open Borders: Sovereignty Is for Suckers will find a way to attach themselves to that legislative act. The courts will be overwhelmed with legal challenges – maneuvers meant to capitalize on the latest gaping hole run through our rule of law.

Of course, the Left may not go for a half-measure. They were remarkably close to achieving mass amnesty in the second half of the Obama administration, with the “Gang of Eight” bill working its way through the halls of Capitol Hill. That legislative effort was defeated, but it will almost certainly be revived in some form during the next Democrat administration.

Whether it’s Joe Biden or another Democrat, they all know the importance of a mass amnesty to their party’s future. It will turn America into a de facto, one-party democracy, like Mexico was for over 70 years from 1929 to 2000. And as they are advocating for amnesty, they will shout down anyone who opposes them as wanting “kids in cages.”

Let’s be clear: Whatever they call it, they’re really talking about amnesty. The libs can call it a “pathway to citizenship,” a “strictly enforced multi-layered naturalization protocol,” or a “trip to the moon.” What they mean, however, is amnesty.

The Left wants to abandon the enforcement of our laws, reward the systematic violation of American sovereignty, and create one-party rule in this country. Amnesty achieves all of that. California Now, Texas Next

California is the model for the socialists’ immigration plan. It’s easy to forget this now, but California used to be solidly Republican in presidential elections. Starting with Eisenhower in 1952, the Golden State went for the Republican presidential candidate more often than not, including two solid Reagan victories in 1980 and 1984. There was even a George H.W. Bush win against Dukakis in 1988.

Yet in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton – the scandal-ridden, charmless, pantsuit-clad ultra-grifter and twice presidential loser – crushed President Trump 62.3% to 31.9% in California. Of the state’s 19 million registered voters, a paltry 25% are Republicans. It is now the ultimate liberal stronghold in every national election.

45 The Socialism Survival Guide

How did the California Democrat party achieve this stunning turnaround? Did they win over skeptical voters with their incredible management of the state? Are San Francisco and Los Angeles now models of urban governance?

Nope. San Francisco has skyrocketing petty crime and an epidemic of human feces on the streets. They even have an app you download to avoid the worst areas (some call it the “poop patrol”). Los Angeles has among the worst homelessness crises in America. And the state of California overall is hemorrhaging residents to the tune of 5 million total leaving, with more than 1 million more moving from the state than to it over the past 10 years.

Democrats did not win the argument about politics in the state of California. What has changed are the demographics...

California now has the single largest concentration of illegal immigrants – predominantly Latin America – of any U.S. state. Almost one-in-three residents in California are immigrants, including millions of illegal aliens. The single-largest ethnicity in California is Latino, and about 60% of Latinos are registered as Democrats.

It’s not hard to see how the numbers have switched against the GOP. California is now a lost cause for Republican presidential candidates and Senators. The last GOP Senator from the state was in 1992.

Democrats are now hoping to flip Texas blue through largely the same means. This is why “Betomania” caught on during the 2018 midterm election. Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke is as Latino as I am Samoan, but he was running against Senator Ted Cruz (an actual Latino!) in a state that is the electoral backbone of the Republican Party.

Beto, as he likes to be called, isn’t someone who comes to mind after the word “statesmen.” He’s the guy you went to college with who brought an acoustic guitar to all the frat parties and told your girlfriend he wrote a song for her “just as friends.” Beto is the quintessential Democrat beta male, whose manliest moments involve dropping the occasional F bomb on live TV.

46 Open Borders: Sovereignty Is for Suckers

But in 2018, he also set a record for the most cash ever raised in a Senate race. Democrats were so hellbent on showing they could turn a Senate seat in Texas blue, the DNC apparatus helped the goofy, sanctimonious Beto bring in a stunning $80 million in campaign donations.

Despite all that cash, Beto lost 51% to 49%. Why did so many libs from around the country shovel money to Beto, a candidate whose insipid stump speeches about “bringing the country together” while decrying “Trump’s white nationalism” make fortune cookies seem profound by comparison?

Texas. It’s all about the Lone Star state. If the Dems can flip Texas and take its 38 electoral college votes, it’s over for the modern Republican Party. You’ll have a generation or two of uninterrupted Democrat-controled White Houses. Every socialist lunacy that Bernie Sanders speaks of today could become a reality before long.

Just as California has spiraled down the vortex of central planning, if Texas goes blue, the whole country will be on a path toward further socialist economic and political rot.

Immigration – particularly of the illegal kind – is critical to the libs’ plot to turn Texas into a new California. There are an estimated 1.6 million illegal immigrants living in Texas, though the real number is likely much higher. Add the Democrat Party’s obsession with identity politics into the mix, and the Leftist political future of Texas becomes even clearer.

Texas is going through rapid demographic change. In 2018, Texas gained nine Latino residents for every white resident. Over the past 10 years, the Latino population of Texas grew 20%. (It also grew 50% for Asians, but they are a small fraction of the state’s overall population.) The demographic trends point to Texas being a majority Latino state within five years.

Of course, a solid chunk of Latino voters in Texas do vote for Republicans – roughly 35% to 40% in the 2018 midterm election. And there is of course an argument to be made that the GOP could start winning over Latino voters with compelling messages about

47 The Socialism Survival Guide jobs and the economy. But based on the numbers, such GOP efforts would inevitably fall short... At the national level, Latinos are registered for Democrats over Republicans at a rate of two-to-one.

Additionally, Pew polling data supports what we could intuit from the differences among the Hispanic population. Those who are more recent arrivals in America, and particularly those Latino immigrants who have an illegal alien family member, are more likely to support Democrats.

And a clear majority of Latino voters really, really don’t like Trump. Most Latino voters hate the president’s promise to build a “big, beautiful wall” from sea to shining sea on our southern border. They oppose more aggressive deportations of illegal aliens, and have largely bought into the narrative that President Trump harbors an animosity against people of Hispanic descent.

The immigration formula for Democrats’ electoral aspirations is simple: new arrivals plus identity politics equals victory.

With enough of these two ingredients in play, the Left can stack the deck in its favor on election day.

Once they are in power again, the Democrats’ first order of business will be a massive amnesty, which will only increase the political power of their stealth open borders policies. And then, with an unbeatable advantage in nationwide voters, they can pursue the whole litany of socialist policies: health care, green energy, and so on. Walls Obviously Work

Now you may be asking, is there a way to stop this from happening?

Love him or hate him, the last, best hope of preventing an open borders-backed Leftist political takeover is President Donald J. Trump.

In his first three years in office, Trump’s immigration scorecard has been a mixed bag at best. He has single-handedly changed the national conversation around illegal immigration and called out the Fake News media for their part in propagating immigration lies.

48 Open Borders: Sovereignty Is for Suckers

“The Wall” is a case in point. It was one of Trump’s signature issues during the 2016 primary and the general election. Crowds chanted “Build the Wall” at Trump rallies across the country. What may have seemed like a metaphor at first was a policy directive. Trump’s supporters wanted him to build an actual, physical barrier to prevent the continued inflow of illegal immigrants into the United States across the 1,954 miles of our southern border.

The media went apoplectic – and continues to do so – about anything related to the wall. “Walls don’t work” became a favored talking point for pundits at the lunatic asylums of MSNBC and CNN. “Walls don’t work” would be news to pretty much every civilization in the history of the world, all of which have used walls to great effect in a variety of ways. Emperor Hadrian would like a word, libs.

And you don’t have to turn to history to make the case for walls along national borders. The state of Israel built a physical barrier that massively improved its security. Palestinian suicide bombers in the early 2000s were so easily able to infiltrate into Israel proper for mass casualty terror attacks that daily life was becoming intolerable.

Then, Israel built a wall. After it was completed, it was like a miracle. No more suicide bombers in Israeli cafes and discotheques. Apparently Hamas didn’t get the Democrats memo that “walls don’t work.”

While the media chose not to do the basic fact checking on the matter, it turns out that there are already walls at work on our southern border. When I visited the San Diego border sector in early 2019 to meet with Border Patrol, they spoke about the fencing they had in their area of operations as a game changer.

The chief of Border Patrol for that sector told me that fencing between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico was largely responsible for a drop of over 90% in illegal border crossings from their height in the 1990s.

But no matter what President Trump does to help the Latino community in this country, the following lines from his campaign in June 2015 will be cited as incontrovertible evidence that the leader of

49 The Socialism Survival Guide the free world harbors bigotry against the Latino population – even though 28% of them voted for him in 2016:

The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.

Thank you. It’s true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

Trump’s loose way with words got him into trouble here. No fair- minded person thinks the President was saying that all illegal aliens are rapists. That’s absurd. Not even the most hardline immigration restrictionist believes that all (or even above a percentage point) of the millions of illegal aliens coming across the U.S.-Mexico border are violent criminals.

Despite the way the mainstream media chooses to portray them, however, they aren’t all valedictorians and future Nobel Prize winners either.

What Trump was saying, in his usual blustery and provocative manner, was intended to give voice to some uncomfortable truths. Chief of among them is this: there are real downsides to the decadeslong migration of illegal aliens into the United States.

When the president talks about murderous MS-13 gangsters as “animals,” he is expressing a frustration that many Americans – including law-abiding Latinos – feel about transnational criminal gangs preying on innocent people in communities with high numbers of illegal immigrants.

In response, the media pretends to have such a limited grasp of the English language that they suggest Trump was referring to all immigrants as “animals.” While they peddle falsehoods like this, the media should not be surprised that trust in them has been hitting historic lows.

50 Open Borders: Sovereignty Is for Suckers

On the “animals” controversy, let’s dive into what was really said for a moment. Here’s the President’s statement during a meeting with a California sheriff on sanctuary cities and their refusal to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) efforts to apprehend criminal illegal aliens already in custody, including suspected MS-13 gang members:

We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in – and we’re stopping a lot of them – but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals. And we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before. And because of the weak laws, they come in fast, we get them, we release them, we get them again, we bring them out. It’s crazy.

Clearly, the president was talking about violent thugs, the kind of “bad hombres” who use machetes to cut off the limbs of victims – a gruesome trademark of MS-13, a group with an official motto of “kill, rape, control.” He doesn’t think that every illegal alien who crosses the Rio Grande in search of menial labor jobs and better overall economic opportunity is a bloodthirsty murderer.

That would be completely insane – and despite what the media says about President Trump – he isn’t insane.

The same can’t really be said for our Democrat-dominated corporate media. In an era of “Trump derangement syndrome,” anything goes if it is useful for bashing Trump. Instead of attempt to grasp the context and intent of Trump’s words, the media pretended to be scandalized.

Attacking Trump has also been used by the dishonest media to deflect public attention while the country has been in the midst of the largest immigration crisis in recent memory. It is a bad-faith charge that distracts the public from the systematic violations of U.S. law – aided and abetted by a complicit media and Democrat party – that have made a mockery of our immigration laws.

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The surge of Central American migrants to the U.S.-Mexico border started under the Obama administration, but it reached crisis proportions during Trump’s second year in office. From its inception, this “asylum wave” has been one giant series of frauds and misrepresentations. Hundreds of thousands (it will likely be over a million when all is said and done) of Central American migrants have abused a loophole in immigration law in order to “skip the line” of other immigrants and live in America permanently.

The recent migrant scams are straightforward, and all exploit the generosity of the American people...

First, Central American migrants began sending their children – alone – across Mexico to the U.S. southern border. Because of laws meant to prevent human trafficking of children, those “unaccompanied minors” were immediately transferred from Border Patrol to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and from there to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Refugee Resettlement.

From there, these minors would then be placed in the care of adult relatives or guardians in the United States. What this meant in practice was that there was a major incentive in place to send young kids from Honduras and El Salvador on a long, dangerous overland journey, where they were often abused and attacked.

There is also an arcane regulation that helped blow a massive hole in our southern border. While Mexican illegal aliens caught at the border can be rapidly deported to their country of origin, any illegal alien in detention from a non-contiguous country (that is, not Canada or Mexico) is a more complicated case for deportation.

Then in summer 2018, the family units began showing up at the border. Generally one adult and at least one child (though sometimes many more) were surrendering to Border Patrol after illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. They would then claim asylum, often using rehearsed talking points about fleeing gang violence in their home countries. Having passed this very simple “credible fear” standard, the family unit migrants would be processed and released into the interior of the United States, pending a court date. This had 52 Open Borders: Sovereignty Is for Suckers to happen rapidly because of the “Flores Settlement Agreement” from 1997, which declared that migrant children could not be held longer than 20 days.

Surprise! Once the migrants were released into the American interior, many of them never showed up for their asylum hearing. That was apparently the plan all along – get taken into custody, released into America, and join the millions of illegal aliens currently “in the shadows” in states across the country.

For some illicit actors, this was a tremendous business opportunity. The drug cartels – already in control of the various plazas used for smuggling narcotics along the southern border – expanded their operations to focus on bringing family units to the border. For the ultraviolent kingpins of such notorious cartels like Sinaloa, Juarez, and Gulf, estimated profits from this scheme run into the hundreds of millions of dollars a year – perhaps as high as $2 billion in 2017.

Word of this gaping loophole in American immigration laws quickly spread south of the border. That’s when the real flood of migrants began. By first quarter of 2019, apprehensions at the border were well over 100,000 a month. This surge created massive additional pressures on Border Patrol and ICE – ensuring they were thinly stretched across the rest of their core mission of protecting the border.

Border Patrol officers were already overwhelmed when I visited the San Diego sector in late 2018. During ride-alongs at the fence line separating U.S. and Mexican sovereign territory, group after group of migrants crossed over from Tijuana to present themselves for surrender. Sometimes, the migrants numbered in the hundreds, and Border Patrol officers for the entire sector would get locked down with the sheer logistics of processing that many illegal entries, including large numbers of children.

The media, unsurprisingly, lied about this to the American people on a regular basis. First, they claimed that the so-called “caravans” of migrants were never going to make it to the border. Then, after a massive caravan did in fact show up, they claimed that any concern about these massive caravans was the result of xenophobia or 53 The Socialism Survival Guide

Trump’s desire to turn out his base in the November 2018 midterm elections.

Throughout 2018 and 2019, hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens entered the United States on foot from Mexico. While a vast majority of illegal crossers were from Central America, individuals from nations across the globe were arrested as well. Chinese, Bangladeshis, and Cubans were all in custody at the Border Patrol holding facility in San Diego when I was there. And they all knew how to take advantage of holes in our immigration system.

Many apprehended illegals were claiming to be minors, knowing that then they would be handled under more favorable, expedited processing guidelines. There were constant cases of age fraud. Border Patrol told me that the record for an illegal lying about his age was a 33-year-old Bangladeshi in custody who said he was 17.

Adults were also abusing the “family unit” regulations. For the past two years, Border Patrol and ICE have been on the lookout for cases of children being “rented,” meaning that adults pay smugglers to pair them with children to pose as a family at the border.

Women frequently show up at the border eight or nine months pregnant and claim credible fear, knowing that any child they have while in custody or awaiting a hearing will be an American citizen and receive the entire gamut of welfare benefits – some of which will be passed on to the illegal relative.

When you add all this together, our southern border has been systematically overrun and the organizations that are supposed to handle the influx have been overwhelmed. In late 2019, the Trump administration took some measures to reduce the flow, but it could easily open up again, especially if a Democrat takes office in 2020.

One unavoidable takeaway from the most recent border crisis is that Democrats openly undermine efforts to enforce immigration law and control the border. They block legislation meant to limit asylum scams and fraud, and focus their discussion in public to yelling “kids in cages, kids in cages!” at any Republican who dares to question the

54 Open Borders: Sovereignty Is for Suckers wisdom of importing hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens using the guise of refugee status.

The Left also receives substantial help from activist judges when it comes to the stealth open borders agenda. On almost every major executive branch border initiative since 2016, an activist in judges robes has leapt to the side of the #resistance to shut down whatever the White House had in mind.

From the so-called “Muslim ban,” which actually banned U.S. travel from a small fraction of Islamic countries, and even in those countries there were case-by-case exceptions... to reversing Obama’s lawless Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) quasi-amnesty... to, of course, building a border wall... there has been endless judicial obstructionism. Obama, Clinton, and Carter appointees – usually from the 9th Circuit and especially in California – have made it nearly impossible to get anything done.

Why would they do this? Why would Democrats, the Left, and even substantial elements of the judiciary support lawlessness and chaos in our immigration system?

Power. The Ultimate Socialist Prize

The Left understands what is obvious to anyone who spends a minute thinking about it. The more illegal aliens they can pump into the federal system, the better.

Despite what leftwing activists like to say, illegals are much more likely than native-born Americans to use welfare benefits. The socialist Left wants to give everyone – including illegals – free health care, free school, free college, and even free housing. They want more clients for their massive government programs.

Illegals are also entering an increasingly information-based economy, with greater automation (soon to be increasingly AI-enabled) which means the days of “who will pick our fruit?” as the libs’ catchall illegal-immigration justification are numbered. There is also a simple economic answer to the question: Pay higher wages. 55 The Socialism Survival Guide

But as far as the Democrats are concerned, the illegal alien population is not a problem to be solved... Instead, it provides an opportunity to exploit. Most of the illegal migrants showing up at our southern border in recent years come from Central American countries that are poor, crime-ridden, and dysfunctional in large part because of their recent (and historical) forays into socialism.

You might think that this would mean those fleeing these countries that President Trump memorably referred to as having “sh*thole” status would want to abandon all the failed policies in their countries. A similar dynamic has certainly played out with post- Soviet Union immigrants from the Eastern bloc, many of whom have become reliable conservatives who are deeply critical of their former Communist overlords’ ideas.

Will most poor farmers and unskilled workers from El Salvador or Honduras arrive in America and immediately embrace the tenets of free-market capitalism, like generations of other immigrants before them?

And aren’t Central Americans overwhelmingly Catholic and family- oriented?

Well, we have been running this electoral experiment in America for a few decades with Mexican immigrants. They come from similar cultural and socio-economic backgrounds to their Central American illegal alien counterparts. And, among those who have legally immigrated and are able to vote, they consistently vote for Democrats over Republicans in state and national elections by a 10% to 20% margin. And consider that legal immigrants tend to be more educated, skilled, and financially self-sustaining than illegal immigrants. So expect illegal immigrants who become permanent residents to be overwhelmingly Democrat supporters. In turn, Democrats will want to move past mere legal status for their newly legalized residents to full citizenship – which means voting.

All it takes is one election, one act of Congress, and one left-wing president to sign an amnesty bill, and conservatism is done. With every passing month, more and more illegals settle in America,

56 Open Borders: Sovereignty Is for Suckers waiting for the day that the Democrats reward their law-breaking with the ultimate prize – amnesty.

Once that happens, the Democrats will have an unbeatable electoral advantage. They will have a whole new tranche of supporters, eager for the very socialist utopia that the American Left has been promising them all along.

PREDICTION 3: The next Democrat administration will enact a major partial amnesty for illegal aliens.

The Obama administration had a three-pronged plan to plunge America into an irreversible socialism dive: health care, immigration, and environmentalism. Obamacare was the only part of that trio of socialist takeovers that they were able to implement as a legislative action. Environmentalism (climate change activism) was so politically risky even for Democrats that their own caucus was unwilling to go forward with a major bill to do the kind of things the environmentalist-socialists Left would want.

But immigration was different. The Democrats wanted an amnesty – and Republicans almost went along with it...

Were it not for a huge surge of angry GOP voters and conservative media calling out the reality of “comprehensive immigration reform” under the Obama administration, it is very possible that “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013” would have resulted in legalization for millions of illegal aliens.

The effort failed. But the Democrat-socialists had follow-on plans...

Using the most sympathetic group of illegal aliens – the “Dreamers” – the Obama administration granted a few million illegals an official (but limited in duration) amnesty from deportation, and then tried to extend that to their parents, which would have added a few million more. President Trump’s executive branch tried to reverse that exercise in prosecutorial discretion. A court stepped in to stop him. And that brings us to the present moment.

Even President Trump views the status of “Dreamers” as a bargaining chip with the Democrats. He has expressed that, in order to get much more

57 The Socialism Survival Guide effective enforcement of immigration laws on the books, a permanent deal for Dreamers would be possible. Democrats have balked at this so far, thinking that as they calculate that the political winds are in their favor with Dreamers, and so they feel no impetus to make such a deal.

So here’s the reality: an amnesty is coming within two presidential administrations.

Even if it starts as a partial amnesty at first, it will soon be expanded. Almost immediately after it passes there will be fights in the courts from those who claim they should have been covered under the initial amnesty. And by the time all is said and done, this amnesty will include millions of illegal aliens. It will have profound electoral implications for generations.

Amnesty is coming. It’s a matter of time. How to Survive & Profit

As I mentioned early in this chapter, no one knows exactly how this kind of radical immigration transformation will change America, thanks to the “no need to assimilate” policies of the Democrat Left.

To find out what sort of effect this would have on the financial markets, I reached out to Stansberry Research. What their experts shared was concerning...

What Immigration Chaos Will Lead To Insight From Stansberry Research, America’s Most Trustworthy Financial Publisher

The problems that the financial market will have with immigration isn’t an immediate one.

That is, the market won’t sell off as soon as amnesty passes. It might even rise. After all, higher levels of immigration – whether legal or illegal – is generally correlated with higher economic growth. But the secondary effect that Americans should be concerned with is the turmoil around the immigration argument.

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Today, we have the largest gap ever between the rich and poor. We have huge increases in violent protests about immigration and race. We have a completely ineffective government. And we have extreme animosity toward the “elites” from both the left and right.

From the protests and marches... to the refusals to stand during the national anthem...

From Black Lives Matter to the anti-immigration movements... to the rejuvenation of white supremacists... to the massive membership increases in the Democratic Socialists of America.

It’s clear we are in the middle of an extreme “populist” period in America.

Ray Dalio, one of the richest men in America, studied the political environments of the past 100 years and concluded...

The last time that [populism] existed as a major force in the world was in the 1930s, when most countries became populist. Over the last year, it has again emerged as a major force.

And the economic comparison is stunning...

Interest rates hit zero leading up to each of these periods. The government went into mega money-printing mode during both periods. Printing money caused the stock market and other risky assets to boom during both periods... boosting the wealth of the rich, but doing nothing for the poor.

Just like today, the economic conditions of the 1930s caused extreme income inequality.

Back then, the top 10% earned 45% of all income (compared with 50% today) and owned 85% of the wealth (compared with 75% today).

And in both the 1930s and today, the percentage of the population that was foreign born was higher than normal... causing animosity among the “common man.”

Even the political characters are the same...

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The 1930s saw a popular socialist presidential candidate just like we had in 2016 and 2020. Huey Long was a former governor of Louisiana and a U.S. senator. He proposed an income cap at $1 million... a 30-hour federal work week... and 100% income taxes at the highest level.

Long even established 27,000 “Share Our Wealth” clubs around the country and had a radio show that was listened to by one in five Americans.

So where did this all lead?

In 1933 – in order to deal with mounting debts and print money to pay for dozens of new social programs – President Franklin D. Roosevelt made two extraordinary changes to the financial system.

1. First, he closed banks for four days and forced Americans to turn in each ounce of gold they owned for $20.67 in paper money.

2. Then the government raised the price of gold, wiping out 69% of the savings of anyone who followed these rules.

You’re probably familiar with that part of the story. But that was only the beginning...

Roosevelt also eliminated the “gold clause” in all contracts, including loans, bonds, and other financial instruments.

You see, at the time, people were worried the government might inflate away the value of their money. So they added a gold clause, which said repayments could be required to be made in gold. These gold clauses were in federal loans, bank deposits, insurance contracts, and other private agreements.

When Roosevelt outlawed the gold clause, he stole billions from investors. In fact, a Harvard paper estimates this rule took $700 million a year from private investors who bought government bonds. Billions more were stolen from folks who lost money from the elimination of the gold clause in private contracts, bank accounts, and insurance deals.

60 Open Borders: Sovereignty Is for Suckers

Eliminating the gold clause was so controversial, investors sued the government. The case went to the Supreme Court. Roosevelt was terrified his actions would be overturned. He even drafted a speech saying he would ignore the court if it ruled against him.

But his political pressure worked, and the court ruled 5-4 in Roosevelt’s favor.

Of course, there were consequences...

Tens of millions of Americans lost massive amounts of their savings. And after booming, the stock market soon fell 50% in a single year.

Could it happen again? Of course it could.

And when it does, millions of investors, pensioners, insurance customers, and creditors will lose a fortune. Stocks will collapse. Dozens of companies will go bankrupt.

I’m not saying this to scare you. This is simply the reality we face.

This trend is already starting. Protect your financial accounts. Get out of the common investments that are most likely to get crushed. Focus on ways to profit while everyone else loses their shirts. And learn all you can about the corruption destroying America.

61

Green Extremes: Climate Change Is Total Control

— Chapter 4 — Green Extremes: Climate Change Is Total Control

“The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” – Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez”

“Climate change is an existential threat to the entire country and the entire world, and we must be extraordinarily aggressive.” – Senator Bernie Sanders

“This is the existential crisis of our time. You know that movie The Day After Tomorrow? It’s today.” – Senator Amy Klobuchar

“Yes, [climate change] represents an existential threat... we can change our behaviors in a way that saves our planet.” – Senator Kamala Harris

“No challenge – no challenge – poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.” – Former President Barack Obama

Climate change is an existential threat – to our freedom, economy, and way of life.

Perhaps most of all, climate change catastrophism is a threat to our sanity.

But I have news for some of the Leftists out there: There is no climate change crisis. It’s a myth. A fantasy. And a very destructive one.

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It’s no exaggeration to say that the Left plans to make the insane mandatory under the rubric of saving the world from a theoretical 1.5 Celsius rise in temperatures. They are telling everyone that unless we dramatically transform foundational components of our economy, we’re all going to die.

That’s really what they’re saying. They believe that if the world becomes “uninhabitable,” as so many climate change proponents claim, there won’t be any human beings left. The alarmists in this debate really think that they are fighting against extinction of the human species.

How can so many millions of otherwise rational human beings come to believe such an absurdity?

They tell you it’s because of “science.”

But really, climate change is about socialism.

In fact, climate change belief not only encourages socialism, it bears some similarities to the pseudo-scientific scribbles of Karl Marx. It’s all about emotion over reason.

Marxism and climate change catastrophism both view capitalism as not just immoral, but a threat to the existence of the world. In fact, capitalism and the unequal prosperity it has created are identified as the enemy. The industrialized world is explicitly the target from climate activists. The Climate Change High Priests

Climate change is a religious belief for people who believe they are too smart for religion.

It comes with many of the trappings of other organized religions. It creates an existential purpose, such as “we must stop using straws in this war against rising temperatures or else all living things will die!” It has its own end times prophecy. And it certainly has its prophets, all of whom are about as credible as a traveling revival preacher, promising small towns that he will drive out demons and heal the sick with the touch of his hand – in exchange for coins pulled from the hands of old ladies.

64 Green Extremes: Climate Change Is Total Control

Former Vice President Al Gore is not a scientist, but he is probably more associated with climate change than any other figure on earth. He’s also worth a couple hundred million dollars. If you go back and watch Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, you will see that his predictions were not only far-fetched then – they are demonstrably wrong today. Despite ominous graphics in the film that show much of the world (like Florida) entirely underwater in just a matter of decades, none of which has happened, or even started to happen.

Why is it that the high priests – the most visible figures – of climate change are never the very scientists that devotees of the movement tell us are locked in an absolute consensus about the need for extreme action to avert climate catastrophe?

Couldn’t we get at least one person with a relevant degree and experience in a scientific field to come forward as a spokesperson and take some personal responsibility for explaining the “scientific consensus” and answering questions from the climate deniers?

And no, Bill Nye “the Science Guy,” who has only an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering, doesn’t count. Wearing a bow tie and a lab coat doesn’t make you smart – and it certainly doesn’t make one an expert in climate change. But that didn’t stop Nye from releasing a video in 2019 in which he claimed “the planet is on f***ing fire.” The second coming of Galileo, he is not.

The reason that celebrities, cable news personalities, and assorted grifters are the most well-known advocates for climate change belief is because it is a movement based in emotion instead of scientific fact.

Just ask ultra-rich film star Leonardo DiCaprio who has, without a scintilla of scientific (or really any) academic background, burnished his personal brand through climate change activism. He’s not just an actor, you see – he’s trying to save the planet. It’s nice of him to make time for such a selfless endeavor in between shuttling Victoria’s Secret models around the world in his private jet.

In perhaps the most utterly absurd climate change stunt of all, in 2019 a 16-year-old Swedish climate activist named Greta Thunberg

65 The Socialism Survival Guide become a global phenomenon for sailing across the Atlantic in a “zero emissions” yacht, in order to go on a speaking tour that included a testimony before the United States Congress and a speech during the U.N. General Assembly in New York.

The liberal media celebrated her as though she were a Nelson Mandela-like salvation figure. In a sense, she was even bigger than Mandela, because she wasn’t saving the nation, but the world. This delusional portrayal in the media was unsurprising, as Thunberg in many ways was the perfect platform for the virtue signaling climate change religion.

And for people who claim to care about the facts and science so much, the climate change catastrophists were very quick to attack anyone who thought relying on the wisdom of a 16-year-old might be problematic. Using her age as a trap, the media immediately savaged anyone who questioned the wisdom of a teenager making demands that would have trillions of dollars of impact on the global economy.

Reasonable, sane adults should recognize how absurd the whole thing was. Keep ‘Fine Tuning’ the Models

Is there any other area of public policy where the exhortations of an often visibly agitated child would be considered a voice that not only should be listened to, but also is beyond criticism or reproach?

Here’s an excerpt from one of Ms. Thunberg’s better-known speeches from the 2019 U.N. Climate Action Summit:

This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school, on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you. You have stolen my dreams, and my childhood with your empty words, and yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is the money, and fairytales of eternal economic growth. You’re failing us, but the young people are starting to understand your betrayal.

66 Green Extremes: Climate Change Is Total Control

Adults on the political Left overwhelmingly thought it was an incredibly important speech. The global media made Ms. Thunberg the biggest news story in the world for a week.

Adults who exploit Thunberg should be ashamed... And those who take her advice should feel dumb.

The next time America is considering war with a foreign country, should one side roll out a 12-year-old who angrily screams about “stealing our future?” Maybe Congress should ask a teenager about the Fed rate next or the best way to get a trade deal with China...

If a minimum standard of knowledge and age doesn’t matter for the climate debate, it shouldn’t matter for anything else either.

But Thunberg was in many ways a perfect spokesperson for the climate change movement. Moral blackmail and political pressure have always been central tactics for the environmentalist Left. They claim the mantle of science while using tactics of the demagogue and appealing to the emotions of the mob.

Here’s the simple truth: The objective data to support the predictions of the climate change catastrophists simply does not exist. The computer models that are used to predict global climate decades into the future make leaps beyond the numbers and accommodate margins of error that would be unacceptable in other realms of science.

There is so much “fine tuning” of the models to get a desired outcome that one must ask the question, as David Henderson and Charles Hooper of the Hoover Institute wrote on this issue in 2017, that the models themselves are “more subjective than objective.”

In aerodynamics, nobody would say that medium to high confidence would be sufficient for a new jet plane design. But that level of certainty is supposed to be beyond debate in requiring shifts of trillions of dollars of wealth to stop climate change. While liberals love to cite the U.N.’s annual Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”) report, its actual language relies on vague terms and varying degrees of certainty to build a case for massive policy changes. 67 The Socialism Survival Guide

There’s also the increasingly clear record of the climate catastrophists at using their models to predict the future. Time and again, none of the predictions of catastrophe that the climate alarmists make come true. Decade after decade, they are wrong. Yet when the numbers fail to bear out their predictions, they change them and extend the timeline. None of us are supposed to notice or care.

In fact, one of the primary talking points about climate change involves a series of demonstrably false claims about extreme weather, including hurricanes. Despite the ridiculous tendency that many news anchors and pundits have to blame any single bad weather event (It’s cold! Must be climate change.) on CO2 emissions, there is no data to support the claim that “climate change causes extreme weather” position. None.

Does a changing climate affect the weather in some way? Sure. Does human activity contribute to that? Yes. Is it a problem? No.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s data on the issue of storm severity tells you all you need to know... There are predictions, for example, that 2 degree Celsius warming will have a 1% to 10% increase in storm intensity on average, but storm size responses to anthropogenic warming are uncertain.

Extreme weather events have occurred throughout human history, and there is simply no compelling evidence that climate change has wrought a much more volatile global weather system. It’s not even necessary to refute the data in the news media on this, because no data is generally presented. Their argument is almost entirely anecdotal or observational. “There was an unseasonably severe snowstorm last week, so there must be climate change!” is a thing that seemingly serious news broadcasters will frequently say on television, oblivious to the blatant idiocy of such a statement to normal people.

Like unsophisticated tribes of past eras who believed that extreme weather events – earthquakes, volcanic eruptions – were the result of an angry god punishing the people for their misdeeds, climate change alarmists also view any severe weather event as being in some way tied to your stubborn refusal to abandon red meat and cheap, readily available electricity. 68 Green Extremes: Climate Change Is Total Control

Much of the climate change fear-mongering out there today is the result of a news media apparatus that, full of people who are desperate to appear smart, all repeat the same talking points about “scientific consensus” and the need to mobilize the full power of the federal government to tackle this imaginary problem.

When it comes to translating this into policy, the Leftists are not shy about sounding crazy. All you have to do is read the words of the climate change Left, and their disconnect from reality is clear. The Green New Deal If one is looking for the motherlode of bad climate change policy ideas, the best place to start is the Green New Deal (“GND”).

The excerpt below is taken from the Text of the GND, a 14-page document rolled out in 2019 by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez to considerable acclaim and ridicule. Its defenders claim it is purposefully vague, but this gives you a sense of its underlying thesis:

A changing climate is causing sea levels to rise and an increase in wildfires, severe storms, droughts, and other extreme weather events that threaten human life, healthy communities, and critical infrastructure; (3) global warming at or above 2 degrees Celsius beyond pre-industrialized levels will cause –

(A) mass migration from the regions most affected by climate change;

(B) more than $500,000,000,000 in lost annual economic output in the United States by the year 2100;

(C) wildfires that, by 2050, will annually burn at least twice as much forest area in the western United States than was typically burned by wildfires in the years preceding 2019;

(D) a loss of more than 99 percent of all coral reefs on Earth;

(E) more than 350,000,000 more people to be exposed globally to deadly heat stress by 2050;

To borrow from Dr. Peter Venkman, played by Bill Murray in the timeless classic movie Ghostbusters, the Green New Deal devotees 69 The Socialism Survival Guide claim the situation would be “dogs and cats, living together, mass hysteria.” It’s hard to conjure a more dystopian future.

Half a quadrillion of lost economic output?

350 million people at risk of dying from overheating?

Wildfires and mass migrations on a biblical scale?

Clearly, the proponents of the GND want you to believe it requires all hands on deck. All we have to do to avoid global calamity is achieve the following, according to the GND text:

(A) global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from human sources of 40 to 60 percent from 2010 levels by 2030; and

(B) net-zero global emissions by 2050...

That shouldn’t be impossible, right? And even if it feels that way, they tell us that the future of the human race is literally at stake, so we should be willing to do almost anything to get there right?

This is the magic sauce on the whole climate change scam. Create a massive wave of fear, offer up the one and only solution, and claim that anyone who won’t go along doesn’t care about the human race, probably because they are paid off by “Big Oil” or the “Koch brothers.”

The Green New Deal, apart from its underlying intellectual silliness and absurd claims, is simply a document that seeks to create a surge of deep feelings around climate change activism. climate change activism is built on incredibly complicated, untested scientific claims because of the politics behind it all.

None of this is ultimately about science... It’s about central planning and government control.

Climate change is left-wing mass hysteria weaponized for political purposes. It’s the single most far-reaching excuse for government intrusion into every aspect of our lives. In the 20th century, socialists justified their heavy-handed dictates and enormous public policy failures (not to mention mass murders and famines) through the

70 Green Extremes: Climate Change Is Total Control refrain that the revolution itself was at stake. The revolution justified anything they needed it to, whenever they needed it to.

In the 21st century, the socialists’ “revolution” talking point has largely been replaced with “climate change.” By asserting that the survival of the planet is at stake, anything can be justified.

And even if the costs are massive – trillions of dollars of lost wealth, decades of prosperity sacrificed on the altar of the green energy gods – they will tell us that it was the price that had to be paid. In this way, climate change belief is both unfalsifiable and uncorrectable.

Once you buy into the initial premise that the planet is at risk, there is nothing that can be more valuable. It is the ultimate trump card. Nothing can outweigh the need to save us all, nor can anything be allowed to subvert the coercive collective action required for our supposed climate change salvation. A Bizarre, Self-Defeating Strategy

Before we even get into the specifics of this climate change mess, let’s apply some basic logic to their sweeping claims...

Let’s assume for a minute that the socialist environmentalists got their way and America embarked upon a Great Green Leap Forward. In this scenario, America would spend trillions of dollars in an effort to get this country to net zero emissions by the year 2050.

Guess what? According to the predictions of the climate alarmists, we would all be screwed anyway. The latest numbers available from the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) show that the U.S. in 2014 was responsible for only 15% of all global emissions. China alone was double that number.

Does any serious person believe that China – a country where the major cities are infamous for their blanket of thick clouds of smog – is going to put the brakes on its economic growth in order to achieve the CO2 emissions that a United Nations committee wants it to? China’s drinking water is so unsafe, it’s estimated that it’s the source of more than 10% of digestive-system cancers there.

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China covered up the origins of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic within its own border. Their authoritarian government lied to the world about the severity of COVID-19 and its state propaganda even tried to blame the United States for the disease. Anyone who thinks China cares about what CO2 will do to the rest of the world in 100 years isn’t paying attention.

This is why the Obama administration’s much-touted Paris Climate Accord of 2016 was really an exercise in nation-state virtue signaling. There were no enforcement mechanisms in place. The primary polluters – China and India – aren’t going to be held to account by an international body that will do nothing more than send strongly worded memos.

This isn’t the only reason the Paris Accord is a foolish sham. There is a strong undercurrent of environmental Marxism to it. The developed world (formerly called the “First World”) is supposed to pay the developing world (the “Third World”) to skip the phase of fossil fuel-based growth that has been the single-biggest driver of human progress and prosperity in history.

There are a variety of ways that the Left will frame this. Some will push for these transfer payments – totaling trillions of dollars over time – from wealthy to poor countries as a kind of bribe. The basic pitch is: “Here’s a lot of cash from our citizens, please don’t do what we did with fossil fuels to become prosperous and efficient industrial societies.”

Setting aside for the moment whether or not climate change really requires this (or any) action, think about the implications of this. The U.N./Davos globalist crowd wants America and the countries of Western Europe to write checks to poor countries so that they won’t follow in our fossil-fuel footsteps and become wealthier countries.

It’s hard to think of a more bizarre, self-defeating strategy. Western governments want to disburse the money they have seized from their citizens and hand it out to many of the most corrupt, inefficient governments on the planet – all so that they will limit their CO2 emissions.

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What if these countries take the money and decide to build coal plants or oil derricks or whatever fossil fuel apparatus most terrifies liberals? What is the international community going to do then?

The answer is nothing, of course.

We aren’t going to invade countries who fail to do their part under the Paris Climate Accord. And they all know it. Even economic sanctions would look like American bullying a developing country that should be much more concerned with indoor plumbing and potable water than solar energy panels and Teslas.

There is no international enforcement mechanism for countries that fail to meet their CO2 reduction standards, and it is completely unrealistic to think that any countries outside the West would be willing to make themselves voluntarily poorer in order to placate a bunch of globalist bureaucrats. No One Sees the Future Additionally, all of the climate-change catastrophe predictions are rooted in a fallacy: the ability of scientists to predict the future. Science is constantly changing. Moore’s Law – that computer processing power doubles every two years – is an observation that has effects in other areas of technology as well, including power generation.

How can any group of scientists – never mind a motley collection of U.N. administrative functionaries – know what the future impact of CO2 will be on climate in 10 or 50 years, when there could be a scientific breakthrough next year that completely changes the game?

Take hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” for example. It’s a technology that in the last decade made a massive impact on global energy markets. The process of fracking has been around since the 1940s. In basic terms, it involves injecting liquid (99% water and sand, and a tiny amount of lubricant chemicals) into shale formations that create small fractures, allowing the extraction of oil or natural gas from sites where the oil derrick and well had been removed.

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But the technique’s refinement and expanded utilization in recent years has led to an explosion of domestic U.S. development of oil and natural gas. More than 90% of American oil and gas wells currently in use are hydraulically fractured – and America is once again a true global energy superpower because of it. The price of energy has stayed low, which in turn has helped to generate immense wealth around the world. Fossil fuels are the lifeblood of a modern economy, and the fracking revolution gave an injection of stimulus into the markets that can never be fully quantified.

Did any of the geologists who were predicting that “peak oil” would hit in the early 21st century foresee this phenomenon? Of course not. Nor could the American geopolitical strategists who became almost obsessed with keeping energy sources in the Middle East open to global markets understand what fracking would do to the balance of power there.

Middle Eastern dictatorships no longer have the same hold over American foreign policy that they once did. Dictatorial strongmen in Russia and Venezuela all of a sudden had less leverage to bully regional rivals, and smaller revenues to buy off their populations. Simply put, fracking has been a godsend across the board.

And the so-called “intelligentsia” didn’t see it coming. They assumed that the technology used to extract oil would stay the same, and eventually we would simply run out. Books were written on the subject. Even as recently as 2004, the Wall Street Journal published a story with the headline “As Prices Soar, Doomsayers Provoke Debate on Oil’s Future,” that gave some details on a “small but suddenly influential band of contrarians known as the peak oil movement.”

Meanwhile, back in reality, oil was over $100 a barrel in 2011. Today, it’s a fraction of that price. Thank you, fracking.

What do advances in the energy industry have to do with the overheated political debate about climate change?

For one thing, the fact that the entire global energy market has been transformed in a decade is just another example of how disruptive

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– and beneficial – technology can be. Based on the prevalent oil and gas extraction technologies from 20 years ago, it was understandable that there would be concerns about fossil fuel shortages in the future. But the future of technology is constantly changing – especially in an area with as much importance and, yes, cash at stake as energy markets.

Given this reality, how could climate change scientists possibly know what CO2 emissions will be in 20 years? Or even two years?

They can’t.

All they can really do is take educated guesses. Remember: nobody can predict the future, not even the “scientific consensus” around climate change.

We also need to be honest about the enormous, built-in incentives for anyone involved in the climate change debate to err in favor of catastrophic predictions.

It’s a straightforward proposition, especially for climatologists. They can either be the high priests of a global movement to save the world from annihilation – or they can be not much more than a glorified weatherman.

Human nature is straightforward in situations like this. When a person is entrusted with a judgment call that can either give them money and status, or obscurity and financial hardship, we know what the overwhelming majority of people will do. Scientists, even climate scientists, are people like the rest of us. And their careers, grant money, speaking engagements, and all the rest of the perks of the war on climate change rely on them propagating the narrative that climate change is an existential threat to humanity.

You’ll notice that on the other side of the equation, there are constant accusations of “Big Oil” and “Koch brothers’ money” thrown around. Why is one of the climate change debate able to, without providing any evidence, casually and recklessly impugn the motives of the other side, without taking any of the same heat? I think we all know the answer.

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This argument about climate change can go on forever, and perhaps it will. For the true believers – the people who really think the world will end in 10 years – there is no evidence you could ever present that could change their minds. There is also always a ready-made excuse, usually handed to them by a media apparatus that has made climate change alarmism an article of faith. All they have to do is extend the timeline a little more, adjust the statistics, tinker with the failed predictions, and they can continue the cycle of fear-mongering, virtue signaling, and government control that are defining characteristics of the climate change movement.

And of course, socialism. Sending Trillions to Poor Countries Climate change activism is deeply alluring to those who want to radically transform the American economy.

Under the banner of climate change, government central planners can regulate anything they want to. Every product you buy, every activity you partake in, everything you do would be subject to the petty dictatorial whims of the governing class in D.C. If you object to any of this, they say you are a bad person – someone who doesn’t care about the safety of the earth, clean water, or future generations. There have even been a handful of climate change activists who have publicly supported the idea of arresting climate change skeptics.

Increasingly, those Leftist political elements who push a climate change catastrophe narrative see it as a means of harnessing state power for whatever they desire, including socialism in the service of racial justice.

At an October 2019 hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on civil rights and civil liberties, Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez said the following:

“[T]he people that are producing climate change, the folks that are responsible for the largest amount of emissions, or communities, or corporations, they tend to be predominantly white, correct?”

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In case there was any doubt about where the Congresswoman planned to take this discussion, she added the following about a devastating storm in Puerto Rico back in 2017:

“My own grandfather died in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. We can’t act as though the inertia and history of colonization doesn’t play a role in this.”

The implications here are clear. AOC believes that predominantly white countries, with America at the top of the list, have a duty to the rest of the world – especially majority non-white countries – to pay for the alleged damages of climate change. In essence, those who adopt the AOC line on climate change want to subsidize the rest of the world for choosing less efficient, slower, and more expensive ways to grow their GDP.

This is an incredibly effective way to destroy wealth – all in the name of addressing a crisis that doesn’t really exist. Beyond that, it would create a perpetual excuse for countries that lag behind regional and global development indicators for their inability to reform, root out corruption, and catch up. Instead of thanking the developed world for handouts of cash – courtesy of their citizens – it is much more likely that this worldwide scheme of climate change socialism would be treated similarly to U.S. foreign aid.

Currently, America hands out about $50 billion a year in foreign aid. If there is a lot of gratitude from those countries, we have yet to see it. In fact, the globalist consensus tends to be geared much more toward complaining about how American foreign aid props up dictators and encourages kleptocracies.

Do we really think that, whatever amount of money the U.S. taxpayer gives to the rest of the world as a form of climate reparations, the response from the recipient nations will be anything other than ingratitude – if not outright contempt? For example, when he was in the race, Bernie Sanders’ campaign wanted a $40 billion climate justice resilience fund for “frontline communities” affected by climate change. At least theoretically that was only for domestic U.S. groups.

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If the Left gets its wish of a climate change global fund, it would result in trillions of dollars transferred from the First World to the Third. The global climate activist community wouldn’t even blink at such a price tag. They have already put out estimates that a 1.5 degrees Celsius change elevation in global temperature will cost $54 trillion. Against the backdrop of such a massive price tag, what’s a few trillion dollars a year transferred from rich countries to poor ones?

This is another reason why climate change is so appealing to the socialist Left. Climate change isn’t just about socialism within the United States anymore – it’s a global racket. The honest, open socialists already know this. They recognize that climate change alarmism opens the door to an unprecedented transformation of our economic system and our way of life. As the International Students Youth and Students for Social Equality put it in September 2019:

Any serious effort to reverse climate change would involve a scientifically planned global restructuring of the world’s energy industry to transition from a reliance on fossil fuels to renewable energy. This in turn would involve a transformation on the same scale of transportation, logistics, agriculture and ultimately society as a whole. Such changes would necessarily cut across national boundaries, corporate profits and national security interests. These institutions are bound up with capitalism: the division of the world into rival nation-states and the subordination of economic life to the accumulation of private profit.

The only form of economic life that is capable of placing the world’s productive forces on such an internationally coordinated scale is the opposite of capitalism: socialism, that is the democratic control of the world’s productive forces by the international working class.

To achieve the great transformation – and re-balancing – of wealth around the world, there is no more effective issue to push than climate change. The inextricable link between fossil fuel emissions and national prosperity is used to justify massive government intervention in markets, control of almost any human behavior, and 78 Green Extremes: Climate Change Is Total Control state-mandated redistribution of capital on a scale that would have made Karl Marx green with envy. The Last Time Alarmists Won Meanwhile, climate alarmists don’t want the public to pay any attention to the progression of energy source de-carbonizing that has long been underway as a function of technology. Since the dawn of the industrial revolution to present, hydrocarbon fuel has been becoming less carbon emission intensive. Technology has taken us from coal to oil to natural gas, an improvement in renewable “clean” energy sources along the way.

About 15% of U.S. power comes from renewable sources, but those sources are getting subsidies of over $11 billion a year. There is a clean energy future ahead of us – it is almost inevitable – but the climate change alarmists insisting on taking Soviet-style “five-year plan” approaches to energy innovation.

Instead of letting the wonders of the free market work, the environmentalist Left demands reckless accelerations in de- carbonizing and government interference through regulation.

The wacko alarmists have time and again messed up this energy cycle at key junctures. For example, if the environmentalist Left hadn’t made nuclear power anathema in the eyes of the public starting around the 1970s, technology would have already largely solved both global electricity needs and concerns over carbon emissions. Today, only about 10% of the world’s electricity comes from nuclear power from facilities operating in 30 countries.

That number could be – and would be – much higher, if the scaremongering of the anti-nuclear Left hadn’t terrified the population that the world might literally come to an end because of a nuclear mistake. Nuclear disasters like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were magnified well beyond the actual damage done, and major nuclear projects and associated research were abandoned.

The anti-war Left also added to the fear of nuclear meltdowns with the specter of nuclear war. While the specific isotopes of plutonium

79 The Socialism Survival Guide and uranium that can be used in a nuclear weapon aren’t present in a normal civilian reactor, it is possible to enrich uranium to the point where it can be weaponized. Based on this, the “pro-peace, anti- nuclear” global movements of the 1970s sidetracked and hobbled nuclear power as a technology.

Those who are truly worried that the world may become uninhabitable because of CO2 emissions should be outraged at the anti-nuclear movement. Generally speaking, a bunch of ill-educated, sanctimonious hippies were able to largely halt progress on one of the most amazing, transformational technologies the world has ever known.

Bottom line: We’ve come a long way from whale oil already. Fracking has, despite some ideological driven efforts to derail it, created a global energy revolution of which we are all the beneficiaries.

We don’t need government mandates for clean energy, capitalism comes with built-in incentives for energy producers to innovate and make even more efficient and clean power sources. It has been happening for over a century, and will continue to happen – if we just let it.

But the Left doesn’t want an energy revolution – they want a revolution rooted in lies about energy. This is why arguments over global warming or climate change (or “climate crisis,” which is a phrase that has now gained some popularity) is really always an argument about power. Climate Change Religion Socialists ultimately need power to implement their schemes. The central planning of socialists inherently runs roughshod over the free market, basic economics, and individual choice. Extreme scenarios and projections of climate change doom justifies such a heavy- handed approach.

It also provides a ready excuse for all the failures of central planning that we have already seen in the realm of “clean energy.” There are real costs to the Left’s clean energy obsession today, and not just in

80 Green Extremes: Climate Change Is Total Control financial terms. In the socialists’ zeal to both save the planet from CO2 and radically transform our economy, they have created many real victims along the way.

Take the massive California utility company PG&E, for example. As of 2019, PG&E has instituted a policy of voluntary power cuts in order to prevent the kind of wildfires that have devastated California in recent years. On its face, this would seem to be a sensible enough policy. Everybody wants to prevent fires from consuming thousands of acres, destroying hundreds of homes, and risking many lives.

When it comes to wildfires, though, PG&E isn’t really the problem – state policy and the environmental lobby is. Wind conditions are beyond the company’s control, and downed power lines are responsible for less than one in 10 blazes in California. But because utility companies rely on mostly fossil fuels for power generation, there isn’t much political will to protect PG&E from liability. The utility company can be sued for causing a fire, even without any finding of negligence.

As a result, PG&E has to be hypercautious and shut down power to entire grids in California, sometimes leaving up to 2 million people without power at a time. If California were a country, it would have the fifth-highest GDP in the world, but because of poor environmental decision-making, it now can be reminiscent of an underdeveloped country in the tropics with the power switching on and off.

The blackouts are the result of a lot more than just heavy winds. For years, California environmentalists have lobbied against clearing underbrush from forested areas and any controlled burn efforts because they want the forests to be “natural.” Left-wing hostility to the harvesting of timber has also led to overgrowth and high tree density.

Over time, this has helped turn wooded parts of the Golden State into a tinderbox. Add to that the mandates of the green energy activists, and power companies like PG&E have had to spend a lot of money on expensive renewable technology instead of upgrading the critical infrastructure components of the grid – like power lines – that Californians rely on to keep the lights on. 81 The Socialism Survival Guide

Unsurprisingly, the Left learns all the wrong lessons from the wildfire catastrophes. Instead of recognizing that overregulation and the green energy focus of state authorities has been deeply counterproductive, the Left simply yells “climate change!” even louder.

Climate change concerns led some of the bad renewable-energy decisions, and in response to those choices, the environmentalist- socialist Left claims that the real culprit is more climate change.

Again we see how climate change is a religious belief. It is simultaneously the root of any problem and the answer to any question. It’s impossible to prove it right or wrong, but to assert that it could be wrong or even to openly question it is heresy.

There is a clear madness among many of the climate change true believers. Just walk past a climate change protest in any major city around the world, and you will see what looks more like performance art than advocacy for a serious – never mind existential – cause.

They dress in bizarre costumes, throw fake blood at government buildings, and lie down in the streets to block commuters from getting to their jobs. Absurd celebrity ignoramuses like Jane Fonda (remember Hanoi Jane?) and Rosanna Arquette (Who? Good question) gather on the steps of Capitol Hill and ask to be arrested in order to raise awareness about the threat of climate change – and, of course, to get some free press in the process.

It gets weirder. Groups like the U.K.’s bizarrely named “extinction rebellion” gather together thousands of shrieking lunatics to demand the government create a “citizens’ assembly” to tackle climate change. Normal people might find it odd to demand a democratically elected government body create a new democratically elected body to tackle an imaginary problem, but not in Great Britain. Parliament is going along with it.

Proving the point that no level of absurdity is capable of embarrassing the climate change true believers, back in September of 2019 at Union Theological Seminary, there was a “plant confession” session. A group of Religious leaders in training were told to tell

82 Green Extremes: Climate Change Is Total Control a bunch of house plants all their deepest darkest secrets. Union seminary actually put out the following tweet:

Today in chapel, we confessed to plants. Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor. What do you confess to the plants in your life?

What’s next, rosary for the roses? Penance by cactus? That the deification of Earth and the elevation of plants to moral beings that have made it all the way into Christian religious schools in this country should be taken as strong signs something is amiss or the apocalypse is nigh. Worship of the environment around us and the Earth itself are not new... In fact, they are the basis of the earliest religious beliefs.

Climate change believers can yell about “the science” and U.N. consensus as much as they want. At the end of the day, it relies much more on blind faith than data, and the single unifying precept of the climate change faith is relentless virtue signaling. Real struggles to save the world require a lot more than recycling your cans or limiting your showers to less than three minutes.

That so few of the most ardent climate change activists are willing to make even the most minimal lifestyle changes to – in their own minds – save the planet is an inescapable failing of the movement. Wise people can see the difference between morality and moralizing, and climate change alarmists are consistently found wallowing in the latter.

Except Elizabeth Warren, who on the 2019 primary campaign trail asserted that she fights climate change by “mostly flying commercial.” Somebody get that selfless climate heroine a prize.

For the Left, the hypocrisy at the heart of the climate change movement is excused because of the lofty goals it claims to be achieving. Not only does the climate change narrative save the planet, it kicks the door wide open to every centrally planned socialist scheme imaginable.

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Climate change activism is a religion, and so is socialism.

And the Left knows if you they can achieve their goals with one, the other isn’t far behind.

PREDICTION 4: There will be a “carbon tax” of some kind instituted during this decade.

The Democrat-socialists have wanted a carbon tax for decades. They are going to get one, and even some Republicans will go along with them.

A carbon tax is, in effect, a tax on air. For those who believe government regulation and taxation are always a good idea (they have a “fever, and the only prescription is more regulation”), few things could be more appealing than creating what would amount to a tax on all productive human activity.

And unlike other taxes that can always be cut back on the grounds that they fund government programs that are too expensive or wasteful, this one would be justified on the (absurd) grounds that it is actually saving the human species.

The opposition to a carbon tax in the past has come from both sides of the political aisle. Democrats have opposed it because they view the tax as regressive. If applied broadly, it would raise the cost of things like gasoline – and that can have blowback among voters.

Plenty of registered Democrats like to talk a big game about climate change action, but very few of them want to change their lifestyles or do anything to address it. If liberal politicians make their voters pay too much for climate change, the voters will make them pay come election time.

Unsurprisingly, Republicans have been generally even more opposed to a carbon tax. For one, many in the GOP recognize that scare mongering around the threat of human extinction because of CO2 emissions is flatly ridiculous and disingenuous.

Additionally, Republicans are well aware of the way that the Left could use a carbon tax to slow down or even destroy disfavored industries. That’s bad for business, jobs, and yes, upsets donors.

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But at some point this decade, there will be enough Democrats and Republicans in office that some form of carbon tax will pass. Here’s why: There are ways to hide the costs of a carbon tax “upstream” from the consumer.

Those who advocate for a carbon tax as a policy matter already know this. If a carbon tax is instated on the energy producers, and there is enough noise from the media about how this is necessary to save the world, they just might manage to get this through.

There are currently federal excise taxes on gasoline of about $0.18 per gallon on gasoline and $0.24 on diesel fuel. Under existing law, these are supposed to go to the Highway Trust Fund and the Leaking Underground Storage Tank Trust Fund. How many Americans even know about this?

A carbon tax will probably start along these lines – something relatively small and targeted at a politically convenient victim. But from there, like so many other “revenue generating” (taking money from you, the taxpayer) operations, it will expand in scope over time and became a larger and larger piggy bank from which the feds will spend and redistribute your money. How to Survive & Profit There are few things stranger than a climate-change fanatic. As I wrote early in this chapter, the Left doesn’t really care about an energy revolution or saving the Earth. Their real argument is over power.

That is, who can make money – no matter the number of subsidies required – and who isn’t allowed to make money.

I wondered what kind of stock recommendation or trend my friends at Stansberry Research would give me to match with this prediction. I knew that several folks there had made good money during the “fracking” revolution and even a few who had invested and won big in solar companies that were actually profitable.

So I was surprised when they instead shared an asset that they called...

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‘The World’s Most Valuable Asset in a Time of Crisis’ Insight From Stansberry Research, America’s Most Trustworthy Financial Publisher

If things get as bad as we expect in America in the coming years, most people are going to lose a lot of money.

So how can you protect yourself... and even potentially make a profit over the next decade?

Well, you should certainly own a significant amount of precious metals... real, hold-in-your-hand gold and silver. Both of these metals have skyrocketed in recent years: Gold is up more than 400% since the year 2000, and silver is up nearly 200%.

But guess what...

There’s one investment that might prove to be even better than gold or silver when America’s currency crisis hits full tilt.

In fact, from 1992 to 2018, this investment has easily outpaced both stocks and gold, appreciating by more than 1,700%. And if you go back to 1971, a year before the U.S. went completely off the gold standard, the gains are even greater.

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So what is this incredible asset that has crushed stocks and gold, and how does it beat these things handily?

We’re talking about farmland. The chart above shows the total returns of U.S. farmland versus the total returns of gold and silver.

The returns from farmland comes from the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries. According to a recent edition of Ag Decision Maker, published by Iowa State University, roughly half of the overall returns come from the appreciation of the actual land.

The other half comes from the “rent” you can get by farming your land – or hiring someone else to do it for you. Add these components together, and it’s easy to see why the overall returns of farmland have outpaced gold, stocks, and just about any other asset we could name.

In fact, some call farmland “gold with yield” – because you book steady income from rents while you wait for the value to grow. I can think of no better asset to own during any kind of financial crisis.

Why does farmland do so well?

When food prices go up, farmland prices go up. There’s no shortage of mouths to feed – on this side of the globe or the other.

And as an added benefit, farmland returns have little correlation to the returns on stocks and bonds. Farmland didn’t fall in a single quarter during the financial meltdown.

If you believe, as I do, that inflation will only get worse, then you’ll want to look closely at an investment in farmland.

Consider...

If you had invested your money in the stock market at the beginning of the 1970s, you would have made about 17%... TOTAL... over the course of the entire decade. Adjusted for inflation, you would have lost about half your money.

But during the same time the total returns of U.S. farmland were more than 600%.

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Now imagine what farmland might do today.

A number of factors can push farmland prices higher...

Just to name a few: A tightening supply of farmland, rising demand for crops, and commodity prices can send farm prices higher. In short, I expect farmland could be one of the best investments of the next decade.

Of course, farmland has another great benefit as well...

It can actually save your family during a serious crisis.

In his excellent book, Wealth, War, and Wisdom, Barton Biggs reports farmland was the one thing that saved families in occupied France, Poland, Holland, Germany, and Italy.

An unostentatious farm, not a great estate, is probably best. Bricks and mortar real estate can be expropriated or bombed, but the land is always there. Your land can’t be plundered or shipped off to somewhere else.

During World War II in most of the occupied countries, if you had a self-sufficient farm, you could hunker down on it and with luck wait out the disaster. At the very least you were supplied with food in a starving country.

A working farm protected both your wealth and your life.

As my good friend (and multimillionaire investor) Doug Casey likes to say, in a time of crisis, “The best thing you can do is buy a really good farm.”

We began writing about farmland as a “crisis asset” in 2010. Since then, market prices have confirmed our thesis. Iowa State University’s annual survey of farmland values reports Iowa land prices increased tenfold since 1986.

Most people don’t realize how important the black earth of Iowa and its neighboring states was to the formation of the American empire. It’s impossible to overstate it. To this day, the farmland of middle America is a key component of America’s geopolitical dominance.

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This giant chunk of land is crisscrossed by an extensive network of navigable waterways. This allows America to produce stupendous amounts of food... and to efficiently transport that food (via ships) to markets.

There is simply no other region on Earth that can produce such huge amounts of food and ship it at such low cost. Farming this region allowed America to develop a massive, well-fed population. It allowed capital to flow into railroads, factories, and cities. It allowed the buildout of the most powerful military on Earth.

So what’s the best way to capitalize on the booming farmland trend?

Well, just like we prefer owning real, hold-in-your-hand gold and silver rather than owning precious metals on the stock market... we suggest you seriously consider a private land deal. Quite literally, you should investigate buying a plot of farmland.

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Free College: Somebody’s Gotta Pay

— Chapter 5 — Free College: Somebody’s Gotta Pay

“It is time for a fundamental change in how we approach the financing of higher education, and the legislation I will introduce today will do just that... ANY student, regardless of his or her background or income, who has the ability and desire, will be able to get the education they need and the education they deserve.”

– Statement by Senator Bernie Sanders on the College for All Act

The single greatest concentration of left-wing lunacy in America outside the CNN newsroom is academia.

College campuses are overrun with liberals who are deeply opposed to individual liberty. Even free speech on campus has been overtaken by the fashionable leftist doctrine of “wokeness.”

And in what should be a surprise to no one, these indoctrination factories are churning out vapid Leftists who are more concerned with “social justice” than learning anything of use to employers.

And as they do so, they’re taking out tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars of non-dischargeable, government-backed loans.

So what’s the answer from the Left to handle the $1.6 trillion in outstanding student debt?

Well, as we know at this point, the answer is always the same: more socialism.

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In this case, canceling college student debts via government fiat.

Perhaps then it should come as no surprise that, given the general popularity of such a program, the Left wants to compound the situation by making public colleges tuition-free as well.

But first, let’s deal with the issue of canceling student debt. That $1.6 trillion of outstanding student debt is four times what it was in 2005. There are now about 45 million Americans with student-loan debt who owe an average of $31,172. The only debt category in which Americans owe more money than student loans is mortgages – and the utility of owning a place to live is generally clear.

Increasingly, millions of young Americans with largely nondischargeable loans are asking whether four-year colleges are really the answer all of us have been led to believe.

Though before we tackle that – and the Democrat socialist argument to just make all of it free – we need to understand how the student- debt bubble was inflated in the first place.

Much is made of the so-called “federal takeover” of the student-loan business in 2010. It occurred under the Obama administration, so it wasn’t hard to see it as yet another destined-to-fail central planning instance from Democrats who were socialists in all but name.

However, while putting the federal government fully in charge didn’t help matters, it simply made explicit what was already occurring behind the scenes. Uncle Sam was already the guarantor. The federal government – and by that we really mean the taxpayer – was on the hook for student loans before 2010. If a student defaulted on the loan, the federal government was there to make the bank whole.

The problem with the student-loan market is that it’s not really a market at all – it’s a policy directive from the federal government. For decades, it has been an almost-unquestioned maxim of higher education that the most number of students possible should attend a four-year undergraduate program. Currently, that means about two- thirds of the 3.7 million high school graduates in this country will attend some form of college.

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Here we have central planning – and yes, a form of socialism – showing up as college education policy. Since the government decided that everyone should go to college regardless of their level of academic interest, financial situation, or long term career plans, it took away all assessment of risk in the markets.

A student who wants to borrow $200,000 to get an Electrical Engineering degree at MIT will have the same ease of access and pay the same interest rate as a frat bro who wants to spend $120,000 majoring in Folklore at Ohio State.

Unsurprisingly, this has created bad incentives and distortions in the student-loan markets. Our government – in fact our national culture – pushes kids to get four-year degrees, regardless of life plans and with very little assessment of the financial risks that a student-debt load can present. Massive Costs, Massive Debts

Some would say this might be good policy. Numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics do show that those with the highest and most prestigious levels of education earn about three times more on a weekly basis than their counterparts in the workforce who do not have a high school diploma. And the lifetime earnings of a person with a bachelor’s degree are substantially higher on average than those of one without a college degree.

But does that mean that everyone should go to a four-year college? About 10% of student-loan borrowers who entered repayment in 2016 were already in default by 2018. Clearly for some people, the decision to take on tens of thousands of dollars of debt was a big mistake.

Meanwhile, colleges and universities have been the rapacious financial beneficiaries of the government’s “everyone should go to college” policies. Adjusted for inflation, tuition at four-year colleges has risen over 100% in the past 20 years alone. Students today are paying twice what their parents did to attend the same schools.

Back in 1971, when the College Board first began collecting the data on this, the average all-in cost of a year of public college education

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(including tuition, fees, and room and board) was $8,730 in today’s currency. Now, that same cost is $21,370. That is a stunning rise in the cost of a product that is no better today than it was back then. And if you spend some time in your average faculty lounge today, you might even argue it’s gotten worse.

It shouldn’t escape our notice that the two areas of American life where costs have skyrocketed the most over the last 30 years are health care and education – sectors that have enormously intrusive government mandates and market intrusions.

It’s almost like central planning distorts prices, raises costs, and messes things up.

The parallels to government’s hand in the housing bubble that burst in 2008 should also be clear. America almost fell into the abyss of total financial meltdown because it had become the bipartisan policy of the federal government to make this country a place where everyone owns a home. None of the oh-so-wise central planners thought to stop and wonder whether everyone should or could buy a home. The central planners knew better.

The same logic is at work behind the mountain of student-loan debt. If as a society we have decided that everyone has a right to go to college, then the taxpayer takes on the risks of guaranteeing loans for people who should probably consider alternatives like trade school or other professional training that increase earnings... without the attendant increase in debt load.

“Should I go to college?” has been replaced with “everyone should go to college.” One very basic problem with this is that college degrees are as much about gaining a credential for employment purposes as they are about education that is useful in the workplace and life. There is a supply-and-demand aspect of our national push for college degrees that the central planners haven’t really taken into account.

If more people than ever have an undergraduate degree, is that degree less valuable? Of course it is. That’s why since the year 2000, the number of Americans with advanced degrees (e.g., master’s, professional degree, or doctorate) has doubled to 21

94 Free College: Somebody’s Gotta Pay million. Education as a means of attaining jobs – especially in highly competitive industries – is ultimately like an arms race. As more and more people get undergraduate degrees, their competitors look to get an advantage through even higher levels of education. This in turn pushes up the overall student debt load even more.

And what is the Democrat-Left’s answer to out-of-control student loans?

Hand it all over to the taxpayer!

That’s right, the answer to our $1.6 trillion student-loan bubble is to socialize the debts of those who ran up these obligations.

There are variations on the socialist theme, but student-debt forgiveness has become a Democrat rallying cry. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s plan, for example, would cancel $50,000 of student debt owed to the federal government for every American family who makes up to $100,000. Senator Bernie Sanders would wipe the slate clean for all those who currently have federal student loans, regardless of income level.

We are told all of this will be paid for with an assortment of taxes on the rich, including specific fees on Wall Street transactions and a number of other mechanisms for the redistribution of wealth that none of the Leftists pushing really understand.

All they really know is that this program is popular with the millions of Millennial, Gen X, and Gen Y voters it would buy off. And the justification for it is like the old saying from the apocryphal tale of Robin Hood: Take from the rich to give to the poor. Except in this case, Robin Hood is actually giving to the upper middle class.

After all, why should the tab for college debt be singled out and handed to taxpayers?

There are plenty of Americans who owe money for a lot of things... Millions of Americans put groceries on credit cards. Consumer credit card debt hit $4 trillion in the past year. If we use the same tactics of the demagogue that are constantly deployed in favor of canceling college debt, what about people’s need to feed themselves?

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Or what about the more than 7 million Americans who are behind on subprime auto loans? Currently there are almost half a trillion dollars of risky car loans out there. And surely people need to drive to work, pick up their kids, and go to the grocery store.

The socialists among us, it would seem, should advocate for a lot more debt cancellation than just student loans. Or are they a bunch of “Big Academia” shills who only plan to help universities and their sky-high tuitions continue pillaging taxpayers? Clearly if anyone opposes taxpayers funding all of this, they’re unfeeling plutocratic monsters.

Yes, these arguments are ridiculous. That’s exactly the point.

The argument for canceling college loan debt isn’t all that different from canceling any other kind of mainstream consumer debt. Both would have some short-term stimulus effect. And both would encourage more bad decision-making down the line.

Other than that, it’s just a question of those in power in federal government making a decision that is rooted in what is popular right now. The long-term consequences aren’t really a consideration because whatever they are, the claim is that the burden will be handled by “the rich.”

This is always the cycle with socialists. The plan that sounds good today overrides the realistic concerns about what it will look like in a year or a decade. There’s always another government program to institute... another bailout to agitate for... another federal handout to demand. The lesson is never learned because the root cause is never identified: faulty central planning.

Which brings us to the next phase of the “free college” fiasco. Debt cancellation is step one, free college for all is the next piece of the plan. Not content to merely pass on to the taxpayer the debts of those incurring student loans, socialists want the taxpayer to fund all public education for almost anyone who wants to go.

Senators Sanders and Warren, among others, want to make public colleges and universities entirely tuition-free, with some exceptions

96 Free College: Somebody’s Gotta Pay for higher-income households. For example, in a bill Sanders had supported, the cutoff for free tuition would be a household that makes $125,000 a year. Above that, the parents whose taxes are overwhelmingly funding public college are also left to write our checks for wildly expensive undergraduate degrees.

The cost of this free college program is estimated to be around $47 billion a year. That’s not a lot in absolute numbers when compared with the trillions of dollars the Sandernista wing wants to spend on health care, but it still adds up fast.

Wall Street is allegedly going to pay for this with special taxes meant to punish “speculation” – as Senator Sanders prefers to refer to the trading of equities. Here’s how the progressive Left’s favorite socialist describes the payment mechanism if his free college bill became a law:

Fully Paid for by Imposing a Robin Hood Tax on Wall Street. This legislation is offset by imposing a Wall Street speculation fee on investment houses, hedge funds, and other speculators of 0.5% on stock trades (50 cents for every $100 worth of stock), a 0.1% fee on bonds, and a 0.005% fee on derivatives. It has been estimated that this provision could raise hundreds of billions a year which could be used not only to make tuition free at public colleges and universities in this country, it could also be used to create millions of jobs and rebuild the middle class of this country.

Anyone having a passing familiarity with government programs should know that it’s going to be much more expensive than they admit – and cost the average taxpayer a lot more money than they expect. We can also take the “create millions of jobs” line with a sack of salt, as no serious person really believes the government will take a Wall Street transaction tax and start employing people in well-paying and productive jobs. Funding the Indoctrination Factories

So here’s what we know... Canceling $1.6 trillion in debt by socializing the losses to the taxpayer and adding nearly $50 billion a year to their tab thereafter is the direction the Democrats want to go in.

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We will deal in greater detail with the overall debt bomb in a later chapter, but let’s first look at all the myriad ways this “free college” plan is questionable, problematic, or destined to fail.

For one, there should be a much more serious effort to drive down the costs of college, which have become outrageous in no small part due to the federal government giving and subsidizing loans. Students are borrowing more than ever... in response to colleges costing more than ever before. There should be much more attention paid to the outrageous increases in tuition – including at private colleges and universities that benefit from Uncle Sam’s largesse.

And should we even be incentivizing four years of college? Trade school and other employment education programs – including on- the-job training – have been shown to be very effective ways to get high school graduates into steady, well-paying jobs with benefits. The “college at all costs” attitude that has become the norm for the last few generations should get a second look.

The truth is that many students are not ready for a four-year college when they graduate high school. And a significant percentage of students waste their time and money in pursuit of an undergraduate degree that is not valuable enough as a credential to justify the price tag. Getting a college degree is not the only way to be successful in life, as demonstrated by countless studies and real-life examples of capitalist superstars without formal degrees like Steve Jobs and Peter Thiel.

Furthermore, there is reason to believe that a “no skin in the game” approach to funding higher education has already failed. Community college across the country is already either free or close to free – and the dropout rate is shockingly high. Only 13% of community college students finish their degrees in two years... while some 60% of all four-year college students graduate within six years.

It is a near-certainty that four-year dropout rates would increase if students had no financial investment in finishing their degrees. Public universities in particular would have resources and classroom space strained in trying to handle students woefully unprepared for collegiate-level courses – who have been told by everyone they know 98 Free College: Somebody’s Gotta Pay that college is the thing to do. And with no cost involved... what’s the downside?

Beyond the questionable wisdom of pushing millions of high school grads directly into costly college programs every year, there should also be concern over what student-loan forgiveness and free college going forward really means: socialism for the middle and upper middle class. The families who would benefit most from taxpayer-funded free college are the ones already interested in getting a degree. Generally speaking, parents with college degrees are more likely to send their kids to college than their high school-educated counterparts.

Why should a childless steel welder in Michigan pay more in federal taxes so that a pair of high school teachers in Massachusetts can send their kid to UMASS to study glassblowing and intersectional feminism – all without paying a dime?

Ultimately, free college is largely a form of education socialism that benefits the upper middle class, moving money from working class people without college degrees to those who have them. The tax on Wall Street “speculators” is still a tax, and the costs will be spread far beyond those in the financial-services sector.

Instead of thinking about the reasons that college is too expensive, addressing those policy shortcomings, and trying to encourage innovation in the education space to make sure that Americans across the socioeconomic spectrum have the best possible opportunities to pursue their interests and make a good living... our central planning overlords in Washington, D.C. simply want to take more of your money and make decisions about where it is spent.

After all, the one thing they are certain of is that they know better than you.

Let’s not forget, the socialist Left has broader goals in mind when it comes to higher education. Their control of education – from the nationalized lending policy all the way to classroom instruction – is part of a much larger effort to create indoctrination factories and the bolster the machinery of left-wing political activism. Ultimately, it’s a giant, self-licking socialist ice cream cone.

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A Sector of Socialism

American college faculty lounges are hotbeds of collectivist nonsense – as anyone who has spent any time in them over the last 40 years knows. In fact, there were more self-described Marxists on college faculties in the social sciences (18%) than there were conservatives (5%) as of 2016.

American college professors have come to typify the socialist mentality within the Democratic Party. Particularly at elite universities – with their billion-dollar endowments, courtesy of wealthy donors who made their money in the private economy – professors are expected to be evangelists for Democrat policy and ideology.

While universal college attendance has been a goal of both political parties for decades, it is Democrats who have derived the greatest benefit from this arrangement. Despite the fact that the country is roughly half-Republican, there is an astonishing blackout of conservative professors and ideas on campuses across the nation.

The reasons for this dominance of academia could be the subject of an entire standalone book but needless to say, the Bernie Sanders wing of the new Democrat party wants the current system to expand. Under the status quo, the more young minds they can run through the progressive reeducation camps that are our colleges and universities, the more likely there will be enough adult voters who will bring about the socialism that Democrats of the Baby Boomer generation have been hellbent on achieving.

Then there is the unholy alliance of the public school system with the Democratic Party...

Socialists support the public school system and in turn, the public school system supports the socialists. As anyone who has ever tried to reform the sclerotic bureaucracy of a public school system anywhere in America has found out – it places a much higher priority on being a jobs program for adults than an education system for kids.

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Teachers unions are a political force to reckon with. Their politics may be socialist, but they purchase influence like the most rapacious capitalists. And they’ve ramped up in recent years. From 2004 to 2016, teachers unions’ political donations went from $4.3 million to more than $32 million. It is also entirely predictable that stretching back to 1990, at least 94% of those dollars were given to Democrats.

Our public school system is a sector of socialism, and it has also been turned into a political machine for the propagation of that very socialism. That is increasingly true of the politics infused into classrooms across the country. And it is absolutely true of the adults employees of the system who rely on the redistribution of money via the income tax to make the public school system possible.

Keep in mind, their indoctrination goals now stretch into the earliest years of childhood. Senator Elizabeth Warren unveiled a proposal in early 2019 for universal childcare. In essence, Warren’s plan would create a system of taxpayer-funded and state-run daycare centers. For any family earning under 200% of the federal poverty level, they would be able to send their children for free. Those households making more money than that threshold would pay up to 7% of their income for access to the same facilities.

That’s right. The same central planning geniuses who have given us the inordinately expensive and chronically underperforming public school system in America will – if the Left has its way – soon be in charge of your preschool-aged children. What could go wrong?

This quickly turns into a debate over the merits (and drawbacks) for young children to have parental care versus care in the hands of strangers. No doubt child psychologists and educational experts will be arguing over this for decades to come.

What we do know is that for all of human history until what feels like a few minutes ago, the traditional family unit was the norm across cultures and across millennia. Elizabeth Warren, who wrote a book called The Two-Income Trap back in 2004 about the structural problems that have led to married couples both having to work, now has a better idea: Hand the state your kids every day – they’ll do a great job with them. 101 The Socialism Survival Guide

It should be noted that this idea is not new. There have been other attempts at universal childcare, with predictable results. In the middle of the last century, central planners on the other side of the Atlantic also thought that it would be a great idea to have the state provide free all-day babysitting services – the better to get women into the factories and the fields along with their husbands. It was all in the name of economic prosperity and a culture that insisted everyone do their part for the motherland. That’s right – the Soviet Union was an early adopter of the universal childcare model.

Back in 1974, the New York Times wrote an astonishingly favorable piece on the Soviet childcare system. It was universal – and free! Here’s the opening of the Times piece, which reads like it could have come from the pages of Pravda itself:

KIEV, Soviet Union – Zoya Idenko is the model of the young Soviet mother liberated by a local day care center that permits her to hold a job. With her 3 – year – old son in a state nursery, she works as a guide for Intourist and sometimes also teaches English at a night school.

Under the highly subsidized Soviet day care system, Mrs. Idenko pays a modest 10.50 rubles ($13.86) per month – about one – tenth of her pay – for six days a week of child care. She drops her boy off at about 8 A.M. and picks him up at 7 P.M. He gets three meals and a snack daily.

Child-rearing, never had much attraction for Mrs. Idenko.

“I went back to work three months after my son was born,” she said. “I could have waited a year legally and still kept my job, but it was difficult for me to bring up the baby and I wanted to get out of the house. My mother-in-law lives with us and she took care of him.”

The very idea that some American women want to stay at home and raise their own children astonished this 30-year- old woman. For her, work was the only satisfying outlet. And despite her frequent contact with English speaking foreign tourists, she knew nothing about the range of voluntary and community activities done by nonworking American women. 102 Free College: Somebody’s Gotta Pay

You can almost hear the stealth socialists in the New York Times newsroom back then saying aloud, “Wow, the Soviets have really figured out gender roles.” Unfortunately, the same commissars in charge of the program to rear little future comrades were in charge of everything else. The childcare program wasn’t around that long because the largest socialist experiment in history was a catastrophic failure and collapsed. (Maybe there’s a lesson there.)

Would the quality of these childcare centers be higher than that found in your average American public school system? Does anyone care to think about the implications for cognitive function and emotional health of separating toddlers from their parents for most of the day? Should children in their most formative stage of development really spend more time with the State than with their own families?

None of those questions matter to a good socialist. They support universal childcare from the government for many of the same reasons they support the Department of Education and taxpayer- funded college.

It enlarges the state. It creates an army of bureaucrats who will in turn vote for the continued expansion of the state. And it allows politicians to take money from people to pay for subpar education programs.

All we have to do is look at public schools in America for what will come next. Free college isn’t free, and it won’t be good. The same will be true of universal childcare.

To the socialists in our midst, none of that ultimately matters. They want these things because they think they are the right thing to do, and rich people have a moral obligation to fund them.

It’s central planning for the ivory tower and the hand that rocks the cradle.

And we all suffer the consequences.

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PREDICTION 5: There will be major student-loan ‘forgiveness program’ within two administrations.

Journalists, website writers, and news presenters are overwhelmingly draw from the ranks of those with student-loan debt. This is one of the best things that the student-loan “crisis” has going for it. The people who are supposed to be informing the public about the upside and downside of student-loan forgiveness are often themselves still paying off student loans.

The fix is in.

There are plenty of precedents for this sort of government intervention. In recent years, there has been no shortage of bailouts of various industries and sectors. The most well-known would be the bank bailouts (Troubled Asset Relief Program) from the 2008-2009 financial crisis, though there are plenty of others. Who can forget Obama’s classic line from the 2012 election cycle, “Bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive”? Even Trump, as part of the ongoing trade dispute with China, funneled billions of dollars to the agricultural sector.

The government response to COVID-19 will involve the most immense bailouts in the history of the country.

With a record like that, it’s almost inevitable the Democrat- socialists will embark on some form of student-loan forgiveness. And depending on who the president is, it may not even involve any Congressional action.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, during the 2020 Democrat primary, took the position that as president she could wipe away student-loan debts as an executive order. Her stated plan was to wipe away all student loans up to $50,000 for those in households making under $100,000 a year, with some additional loan forgiveness categories.

Warren was the second-most hardcore socialist of the Democrat primary, behind only Comrade Bernie Sanders in her collectivist and redistributive zeal. Even though she dropped out of the presidential race, her plan to use executive power to institute a loan forgiveness program (the socializing of private debts for political gain) could easily be replicated by whatever Democrat-socialists wins the White House. 104 Free College: Somebody’s Gotta Pay

What happens if a future Democrat president instructs the head of the Department of Education to modify loans so as to create de facto debt forgiveness? Republicans might bring a court challenge, but the politics of such a move would be problematic. Democrats will position themselves as championing a more egalitarian university and college system. The GOP will be stuck as the party that tells everyone there is no Santa Claus.

There is going to be a student-loan forgiveness wave – and the ramifications of it will be problematic for education and beyond. Tuition at four-year colleges will continue to rise, and the arms race to get an advanced degree will be exacerbated. There will also be a surge in Democrat-socialist demands for other politically useful debt to be socialized. Your property will become your neighbor’s plunder. How to Survive & Profit There are $1.6 trillion in outstanding student loans in America... spread out over about 45 million Americans.

Forgiving that debt is going to be a very popular political position to take in the coming years.

Of course, the consequences will be severe...

Student Debt Forgiveness Is Only the Beginning Insight From Stansberry Research, America’s Most Trustworthy Financial Publisher

According to the Federal Reserve, student loans outstanding rose to more than $1.6 trillion for the first time in the first quarter of 2018, less than six years after breaking $1 trillion for the first time. It’s risen by another $160 billion in just the past two years.

And nearly one-quarter of these borrowers are already in default, according to the government’s own data. However, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office (“GAO”), the real number could be even greater. 105 The Socialism Survival Guide

In short, the GAO found that U.S. colleges and universities have been inappropriately encouraging alumni who are in danger of default to seek “forbearance” instead.

Why? Because loans in forbearance aren’t considered delinquent – even though the borrowers aren’t making any payments – which allows the schools to report a far lower default rate than they otherwise would.

But forbearance suspends payments, not accrued interest. This means these loans are even bigger and more unmanageable when the forbearance period finally ends.

So it’s no surprise the GAO report found far more of these loans default later on. But again, these defaults don’t count in the official numbers if they occur after the three-year window.

As the amount of debt that must be serviced continues to grow much faster than wages, it’s simply a matter of time before defaults overwhelm the ability of borrowers to pay.

This massive debt bubble has mostly been created by the 45 million Americans who have student loans. These are the people in our society who are the least able to manage their debts... They are the most likely to default.

What do you think happens next? What happens when the least- educated, least-”vested,” and most-violent members of your society... also make up the largest demographic block... and have the largest debts (relative to income) with zero ability to pay back these debts back or discharge them through bankruptcy?

Most of these borrowers can’t afford their loans... nor can they default. They can’t restructure. They’re stuck – many with $100,000 loans that absorb more than 100% of their disposable income.

What do you think they are going to do?

Of course, this $1.6 trillion in student-loan debt mentioned is just a part of the bigger problem that will lead to a market “reset.” For example, U.S. consumers now owe more than $1 trillion on their

106 Free College: Somebody’s Gotta Pay credit cards... and more than $1 trillion for auto loans. It has gotten so bad that nearly three quarters of Americans now die in debt, leaving behind an average of more than $60,000 in obligations.

And what isn’t as well-known is how much America’s companies now owe in debt.

Not since World War II have companies held so much debt, relative to the size of the U.S. economy. This means an increasing number of companies owe debts so large that it threatens their creditworthiness. For example, the amount of BBB-rated corporate debt (just one notch above “junk”) is larger than it has ever been – more than tripling over the past decade.

This tranche of BBB-rated debt now represents more than half the entire investment-grade corporate-bond and high-yield junk- bond markets. In other words, a majority of the debt at American companies with a “safe” investment-grade labeling is just one rung above junk. And just a small change to the status quo could send hundreds of companies into financial distress.

Most people don’t realize that the Federal Reserve has almost single- handedly pushed stocks higher and higher.

During the Great Recession, when the Fed dropped (and held) short- term interest rates down to essentially zero, it started an unheard-of corporate borrowing binge. Before the mid-2000s, U.S. corporations had never borrowed more than $1 trillion in a single year. But from 2010 to 2016 – after the Fed dropped rates to almost nothing – U.S. corporations borrowed more than $1 billion every year.

The Fed switched gears and began to raise interest rates in 2018... and the market panicked. Even a modest change in rates spelled potential disaster for corporate America, especially for those companies that have gorged on the most debt.

To learn the names of the most dangerous companies in America, read our special online briefing – The Ten U.S. Companies That Will Soon Collapse – at www.StansberryResearch.com using the username and password that you received when you purchased The Socialism Survival Guide. 107

The Debt Bomb: Nobody Wants to Defuse it

— Chapter 6 — The Debt Bomb: Nobody Wants to Defuse It

“The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.” – Thomas Jefferson

“The most significant threat to our national security is our debt.” – Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen, August 27, 2010

The U.S. government has racked up $23 trillion dollars in national debt.

It’s a mind-boggling number. If every person in the United States had to take on an equal share of the national debt, we would all be about $70,000 in the hole.

Before we get into how this whole thing can collapse – and how socialism ties directly into our enormous national debt – it’s worth reviewing how we got here.

America has been borrowing money since the Revolutionary War. But until recently, the national debt was on a mostly stable growth trajectory, with the exception of extreme periods such as the Civil War and the two World Wars.

Back in 1981, the debt was just shy of $1 trillion. Today, it’s increased more than 20 times and is currently bigger than our GDP. Even adjusting for inflation, that is a massive expansion of government over- spending. And these financial obligations created in the public’s name

109 The Socialism Survival Guide not only create economic drag on the private sector today, they also burden future generations with seemingly impossible promises to pay.

And here’s the really scary part: The national debt is on a trajectory to get much worse – especially given the enormous financial rescue package that COVID-19 has necessitated in 2020.

First, the debt service payments of the federal government are only going up. In 2019, net interest payments on the debt totaled $393.5 billion – already a startling number – and when interest rates rise, that number will balloon. As it is now, America will be spending more on interest payments on the debt than on the Defense Department by 2025.

But the greatest driver of our national debt is the one thing that neither political party has any interest in changing: Entitlements.

In budgetary speak, these are referred to as “mandatory spending.” Of course, they’re only mandatory because politicians like to give the people goodies.

In fiscal year 2020, mandatory spending is set to be $2.8 trillion. The two biggest parts of mandatory spending are Medicare and Social Security, but Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (“SNAP”), and some other smaller programs are also thrown in there. Social Security as a line item is the single biggest in the federal budget at $1 trillion. Started back in 1935 under the Roosevelt administration, it’s a very popular program to this day.

The problem with Social Security is demographics. The 78-million- strong Baby Boomer generation is retiring in huge numbers at a time when there are fewer workers paying into the program. Until 2010, more dollars were going to Social Security through payroll taxes than what were taken out of it in the form of benefits.

That disparity between who pays in and who takes out from Social Security will only get worse until 2034, when the surplus that the system had built up over decades is gone. At that point, the money will have to come from the federal government’s general fund, or payroll taxes will have to go up.

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Social security is a problem for our national debt, but it’s nothing compared with the gaping hole that Medicare is blowing through our national finances, year in and year out. Like the rest of our debt- bomb scenario, this is only going to get worse. The U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services project that health care spending will reach close to 20% of GDP by 2025, and the government’s piece of this pie is only going to get bigger and bigger. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that government health care spending will jump from 5.3% of GDP in 2019 to 9.3% percent by 2049. That’s almost double.

You might ask: How could this be possible? Everyone knows that the government is just spending too much damn money. Everyone knows that the current trajectory is unsustainable. But nobody in power wants to do anything about it. And here’s another dirty little secret: Most American voters don’t want anything to be done about it. Our national debt has essentially become a bipartisan suicide pact. Feckless Political Betrayal It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The Tea Party movement, which took its name from the early act of colonial disobedience against the British in Boston Harbor back in 1773, was supposed to be an American awakening against the threat of unsustainable government spending and the expansion of the federal government. It started in 2009, in the wake of the mortgage meltdown and financial crisis that experts told us threatened the very foundation of the global economy.

There was widespread anger on Main Street about the bailout of Wall Street, and the Obama administration’s decision to spend a trillion dollars in a “stimulus package” was the last straw. CNBC reporter Rick Santelli took to the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on February 19, 2009, and went on a rant that would launch a political movement:

“We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m gonna start organizing. I think we’re gonna be dumping in some derivative securities.”

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Santelli’s well-timed monologue got the crowd around him fired up, and sparked a political movement that would help elect 30 “Tea Party”-backed Congressmen in the 2010 mid-term elections. But the Obama administration continued its unprecedented spending spree.

And when push came to shove, even those GOP members of Congress who were elected on the promise to rein in spending were not willing to vote for any real cuts in entitlement spending.

In fact, even with Republicans in control of the House of Representatives from 2010 through 2016, the budget debate quickly turned to a decrease in the increase in spending over time, not an actual meaningful cut to entitlements. The Tea Party did little more than rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.

With the ascent of the Trump administration in 2016 and Republicans in control of the House and the Senate, it seemed like the time had finally arrived for conservatives – who William F. Buckley famously claimed had a duty to “stand athwart history yelling ‘stop!’” – to show that they really intended to take the national debt as a serious problem.

They did not yell “stop.” If anything, starting in 2016 the GOP majority said “bring it on” to a future of enormous deficits.

In 2017 the Trump administration presided over a $663 billion dollar shortfall. The next year was even worse at $779 billion – and 2019 was just shy of a trillion, at $984 billion. After eight years of Obama running up the federal government’s tab to stratospheric levels, the Republican Party wasn’t just about to pump the brakes. On the contrary, Republicans kept their foot on the accelerator toward financial oblivion.

Anyone who thought this was an unforeseeable betrayal by feckless, dishonest politicians hasn’t really been paying attention. Everyone in the Washington, D.C. swamp knows that spending money on your issues and your agenda items is perhaps the most effective way to stay in power.

Generally speaking, it’ll never make you popular to tell people that “there is no Santa Claus.” Politicians of both parties have figured out 112 The Debt Bomb: Nobody Wants to Defuse it that the voters would prefer to be told that there’s plenty of money for whatever their side wants. (Looks like Santa is coming to town after all!) Of course, future generations of Americans will be stuck with the tab.

Politicians have figured out that the voting public also prefers to be told the pleasant fiction that the goodies they are getting from Uncle Sam aren’t in any way freebies. This is one of the reasons as to why it’s so hard to tackle the problem of entitlements.

As part of the ruse, hard-working people (“makers, not takers,” in the parlance of Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 presidential bid) have been told throughout their adult lives that they have earned everything that they will get in the programs. Voters of the Boomer generation become indignant when they are told otherwise. They see entitlements as “earned,” unlike welfare.

Unfortunately, the math doesn’t support that... The Social Security Scam The truth is that the average Social Security recipients take out more than they paid into the program over their working lives. Men trying to get votes overpromised what the government could deliver and how effective it would be. The central planners behind Social Security couldn’t foresee the demographic changes that would occur in America over the eight decades of the program’s tenure so far, among other economic changes and challenges the program faces.

This is why Social Security as currently constructed is going to run out of money by 2035. Despite the fact that Social Security is an overwhelmingly popular program that 90% of American workers will need in order to live comfortably in retirement, the only way to keep the program going will be even higher payroll taxes or reductions in benefits.

At the end of the day, Social Security is a fixable problem for the national debt. Raising taxes to keep the program afloat is an option – albeit an unpopular one – that politicians can turn to, as they have so many times in the past. And in that process, the foundational fallacy

113 The Socialism Survival Guide of central planning – of socialism, really – will evade accountability once again.

Nevertheless, Social Security will continue on in some form. And the socialists among us will call the program a success no matter how many analyses show that privatizing it would be a better option for the retirees it purportedly helps.

In our current political climate, that last line about “privatization” is sacrilegious... You mean there’s a better way to provide for worker’s futures than a government anti-poverty program devised almost a century ago in the midst of a great depression?

Indeed. Social Security is at its core a social welfare program masquerading as wise financial planning. We’ve been conditioned to think that Social Security is a fabulously successful program, and any suggestion that it could be replaced is treated as heresy. Media reports take for granted that it is a “third rail of politics” and can’t be touched. And there’s certainly truth to that.

The administration of President George W. Bush found out just how severe the political backlash can be when he tried to take on Social Security reform as his top domestic priority back in 2005. What was Bush’s “radical” idea about Social Security? Allow people to invest a portion of their Social Security benefits in private funds in order to benefit from real market yield. In his 2004 State of the Union Address, Bush outlined his reform plan as follows:

“Younger workers should have the opportunity to build a nest egg by saving part of their Social Security taxes in a personal retirement account. We should make the Social Security system a source of ownership for the American people. And we should limit the burden of government on this economy by acting as good stewards of taxpayers’ dollars.”

With six months of saying that, the public’s disapproval of how Bush’s handling of Social Security jumped 16 points from 48% to 64%. By the fall of 2005, President Bush had to bail on the entire reform effort after losing the support of Congressional Republicans.

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Social Security reform was done before it even got started.

How could a program that everyone agrees is running out of money be so impossible to change?

It’s driven by perception. The Democrat socialists in this country and their media allies turned “privatizing Social Security” into an anti-free market epithet. With more than 63 million Social Security beneficiaries as of 2019, largely reliant on those government checks to pay their bills in retirement, the ability to demagogue and fear- monger is endless. Nobody in politics or media wants to speak truth to power on this issue because the moment you do, you’re no longer in power.

As a result, few Americans know that the oh-so-popular “old age programs” take a big chunk of their paychecks right now. According to the Heritage Foundation, “Social Security’s Old Age and Survivors Insurance (“OASI”) retirement program takes 10.6% of workers’ pay and its Disability Insurance (“DI”) program takes another 1.8%, for a combined total of 12.4%.” Considering that 44% of all Americans pay no income tax whatsoever, Social Security is a massive, regressive, and effectively inescapable tax on workers that lowers their take- home pay starting day one of their employment.

Somehow, this doesn’t matter to most voters. Everybody wants to know they will be taken care of in retirement, and anything that threatens that sense of stability is shouted down and destroyed. This is the dirty secret of our democracy: most people like the government to be their caretaker.

Polling won’t reflect this, but most folks like to think that government will keep them safe and warm at night.

Social Security is socialism, but one of the great advantages of socialism is that it is a promise from the state to provide. Even in America, with our affinity for chest-thumping about free markets and capitalism, the appeal of a higher power (of the bureaucratic, not celestial variety) backing us up when things get tough as we get old is appealing.

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That there are demonstrably better ways for us to prepare for retirement – and for future generations – is an argument that few want to hear, and even fewer will take action on. Medicare Is Even Worse This brings us to Medicare. Here we have another massive entitlement program that is an even bigger problem for the national debt than Social Security.

Unlike Social Security, the coming financial shortfall is not going to be easy to manage, and politics may dictate that Medicare expands dramatically in the years ahead. Only with the federal government is the response to “this thing we are doing is far too expensive” quickly transformed into “let’s do that far too expensive thing a whole lot more!”

Like Social Security, Medicare is overwhelmingly popular. We all know that as we get older, our medical needs and accompanying medical bills will increase, and there is a feeling of reassurance that comes from knowing Uncle Sam will be there to pick up most of the tab. About 75% of Medicare recipients are happy with the program, and with 44 million beneficiaries, that’s a lot of voters for any politician to mess with.

Alas, whether they recognize it or not, most Medicare beneficiaries are getting a partial free ride as they collect their benefits.

The average Medicare recipient takes out three times what they pay into the system over their lifespan. This is why it creates a huge hole every year in the budget. The architects of Medicare and its proponents call it an entitlement, but it is really a wealth transfer system from young workers of the future to retired workers today.

While it’s not popular to point this out to the Boomers who have benefitted from it, Medicare’s cross-generational shifting of money is a redistribution of wealth at the hands of government central planners.

It is a sector of socialism.

Medicare is the second-largest area of federal spending after Social Security, but it is the single-biggest future threat to our national debt... And with it, the entire U.S. economy.

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In 2018, the program paid out $731 billion in benefits, which is a $461 billion increase from 2008. It cost the federal government $582 billion. That’s already a big yearly overdraw on our national bank account. And unless dramatic action is taken, it’s only going to get much worse.

America is facing an old age demographic explosion unlike anything it has ever experienced. Senior citizens are living longer (almost 79 years on average), and there are going to be a whole lot more of them in the decades ahead. By 2048, there will be a projected 60% increase in Americans over 65 eligible for Medicare benefits.

By the time that happens, Medicare payroll tax revenues will only be able to cover about 26% of the total outlays from the program. About 50% will come from the “general fund,” which means that whatever we aren’t collecting in income taxes will get added to the national debt. Realistically, the federal government is going to have to dramatically raise taxes to narrow this gap – and even then, it may be too late to stop a major financial crisis.

Math drives the inescapable conclusion here: Medicare as we know it cannot be sustained.

There is simply too much spending and not nearly enough desire to find a way to pay for the benefits that the government is handing out to people.

But whenever a politician comes along who suggests even relatively modest adjustments to entitlements like means testing or raising the retirement age, that person or party gets crushed. The majority of the voting public wants their goodies today, and will leave it to whomever comes next to pay for it. Death of a Superpower This forces the ultimate question about the national debt. How much is finally too much... $30 trillion? $50 trillion? How about $100 trillion?

Nobody has the answer. What we do know is that along the way to financial oblivion, there are costs that the central planners try to hide 117 The Socialism Survival Guide from us – and eventually the music stops and there aren’t enough chairs.

Before diving into how the national debt could collapse the American economy, it’s worth remembering that there are market distortions and growth hobbling realities of carrying too much debt all along. The most obvious one is the debt-service payments that have to be made.

Those costs to the American taxpayer are already considerable. And as interest rates rise, they will crowd out other essential spending.

Thanks to politicians’ irresponsible spending, voters will inevitably be faced with a choice: less government spending or higher taxes.

There will be a lot of unhappy average folks looking for someone to blame. But politicians will throw their hands up in the air and say, “the other guys before us did it.”

The drag of carrying such a massive national debt will also hurt overall economic growth. The “crowd out” phenomenon will drive most of this – where the purchase of government debts takes away from the pool of capital available for private investments that increase real productivity and jobs. One analysis from the Congressional Budget Office claims that, based on current debt trajectory, individuals in the U.S. can expect a real income decline of $6,000 per person by 2048.

Other countries will also play a role in America’s financial reckoning...

Currently, $13 trillion of U.S. debt held by foreigners. The biggest two – China and Japan – each hold a little more than $1 trillion of Treasury bonds. If, along with other countries, they lost confidence in the American dollar as the global reserve currency, they could dump the bonds they have purchased, discount purchases, or stop buying Treasury securities altogether.

This would send U.S. stock and bond markets plunging. Interest rates would soar. There would be major costs to these countries in a sell-off – they would be devaluing a large asset class they own – but if

118 The Debt Bomb: Nobody Wants to Defuse it they get scared enough by the dollar’s stability, they could still make a run for the exits.

There have even been concerns that President Trump’s escalating trade dispute alone could prompt a Chinese sell-off of U.S. bonds. That hasn’t happened yet, but if the structural soundness of the American dollar comes into question because of the crushing size of the national debt, all bets are off.

The national security vulnerability that our mounting debt creates cannot be ignored either. The single-greatest military advantage that America possesses is that it is the largest, wealthiest economy in the world. As of 2019, the United States spent more ($649 billion) than the next seven highest spenders combined ($609 billion). The Pax Americana – the relative global peace and stability provided by the United States military – is only possible because of the dynamic economic engine that funds it.

Not only is America’s direct military advantage against its near-peer competitor China rapidly diminishing over time, our willingness to fund military commitments around the world will lessen too. As servicing the national debt puts pressure on priorities here at home, our massive Pentagon budget will go from sacred cow to lamb for slaughter.

It’s also worth a word about the more libertarian, non-interventionist school of thought here...

There is a good-faith argument – strengthened in recent years with the failures of successive administrations to remake the Middle East in the mold of modern, rule of law democracies – that the United States takes on far too much of the global security burden. The arguments for and against non-interventionism (not to be conflated with the intentionally pejorative word “isolationism”) are worth a book in themselves, but for our purposes here, the focus is on how national debt can dictate overseas policy in ways that are clearly harmful.

It’s one thing to make the decision to draw down an overseas military commitment or stop spending on an advanced weapons system out of prudence. It’s entirely another to pull up stakes and evacuate a

119 The Socialism Survival Guide strategically sound base under financial duress and knowing that it could cause chaos.

All strategic military decisions operate within financial constraints. “An army marches on its stomach,” a saying attributed to Napoleon, is as true today as it was back in the early 19th century. But when we are talking about the way that our national debt can be a threat to our national security, the real risk is that core security interests will be abandoned out of economic necessity.

When America can no longer make the necessary financial commitments to its defense, the world may rapidly become a more dangerous place.

In other words, the national debt could be what brings about the end of a superpower. An America that no longer has the financial wherewithal to pay for the strongest military in the world will mean the end of an era that has seen more people brought out of poverty and more people liberated from tyranny than at any point in human history.

Whether you care about the rest of the world or not, the national debt could just mean the end of America as we know it. There is even the possibility that, due to the massive debt the U.S. Congress has run up, what would ordinarily be a manageable, cyclical economic crisis would spiral out of control. With $23 trillion and counting already weighing on the Treasury, the federal government may lack the financial bandwidth to manage a major downturn the way they did in 2008.

With $5.83 trillion of U.S. debt held by other arms of the federal government, our supposed monetary policy gurus at the Federal Reserve have already been using many of the tools at their disposal to keep inflation in check and interest rates low.

What would they do if a crisis struck? More borrowing? Take interest rates below zero? Tell the banks they have to take massive capital infusions again?

And what if none of that works this time?

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We were at the brink of economic collapse just a decade ago. Few people saw it coming. Almost no one in a position of power did.

Now that the national debt is much larger, massive obligations loom in the future, and everyone is wondering when this profligate spending will finally catch up with us. Hyperinflation and War As any student of history will tell you, the long-terms odds of success for America’s experiment in monetary alchemy are not good. We are not the first great financial power to fall victim to the temptations of a money system that is all too easy to manipulate and distort.

In a strict sense, all modern currency is “fiat currency.” That is, the only reason they are money is because the government says so. We don’t trade beads or seashells anymore.

But for our concerns today, we’ll consider “fiat currency” as money that is not redeemable for a precious metal like gold or silver. Ever since President Richard Nixon decided to get off the gold standard in August of 1971, our currency has been purely a value construct backed by the full faith and credit of the United States Treasury.

There have been similar declarations of sovereign states stretching back centuries...

Perhaps one of the best illustrations of how central planners devalue currency is one of the earliest: the centuries of Roman denarii coined starting around the 3rd century B.C. The denarius was a silver coin of standard weight and purity, meant to replace the system of bronze weight (“aes rude”) previously used by ancient Rome. As the Roman’s state became wealthier through conquest, it replaced the usage of bronze coins with silver and gold. As these coins were standardized, they were a relatively stable store of value.

Then, politics and greedy leadership started to change things.

In the first century B.C. the Roman leader Sulla minted new coins (his version of “printing money”) to pay his army. Julius Caesar did

121 The Socialism Survival Guide the same thing after him. And Caesar added his own image to the coin while he was still alive, a handy piece of propaganda for future consuls, emperors, dictators, and presidents alike.

But there was a further temptation for the men who had their hands on the levers of financial power: devaluation.

The Roman Emperor Nero is perhaps most famous for his bizarre and ruthless personal behavior. He killed his mother as well as his first wife, and in a timeless apocryphal anecdote, “fiddled while Rome burned.” But more important to our discussion, like many leaders before and after him, Nero liked to spend a lot of money from the treasury.

In order to keep up his spending spree, around 64 A.D. Emperor Nero reduced the precious metal content of the Roman coins in circulation (gold by about 5% and silver by 11%). By the magic of increasing the money supply with devalued currency, it was easier to keep funding enormous public works projects, wars, and whatever else the Emperor had in mind.

Other Roman emperors followed in Nero’s footsteps. Commodus, Caracalla, and Septimius Severus all had coins struck with less precious metal than they were supposed to. Over time, the actual value of Roman imperial coinage kept going down until the Denarius was only 2% silver, and the wise Emperor Marcus Aurelius (author of Meditations) created coins that printed the precious metal value on them.

It wasn’t enough. By the time of the Roman Empire’s collapse, the denarius had a silver content of 0.2% and was no longer used as a widespread currency.

There are plenty of other examples throughout history that illustrate the same point: Political leaders are always tempted to spend the public’s money and then use monetary tricks to pay back those debts. And it always leads to devaluation, inflation, and an eventual collapse of the currency altogether.

In the 7th century, China printed “Flying Paper Money,” which seemed like a great convenience at first compared to the heavy coins 122 The Debt Bomb: Nobody Wants to Defuse it previously in use. Then Kubali Khan took over China and printed too much paper money, resulting in ruined fortunes and a series of chaotic wars.

In the 19th century, the French King Louis XV needed a way to pay back the debts run up by his predecessor, Louis XIV, so his kingdom introduced the “assignat.” Eventually it was overprinted, hyperinflation resulted, and the currency utterly collapsed.

After the First World War, the German government fired up the money printing presses to try and pay off its debts and keep its economy going despite massive war reparations from the Treaty of Versailles. Hyperinflation resulted, wheelbarrows full of cash were needed to buy everyday goods, and the economic deprivation that followed provided a ripe environment for the vicious demagoguery of a previously unknown artillery officer and house painter named Adolph Hitler.

Throughout history, fiat currencies have been able to bring low even the most wealthy and sophisticated societies of their day. They provide a constant invitation to cynical politicians and greedy special interest to play games that can have catastrophic results. And as we see in our own context today, the American political system has become far too comfortable engaging in monetary manipulations that bring benefits now and leave the costs for another day.

How do socialists in America factor into all of this?

After the First World War, a global depression ensued that was widely viewed not as a failure of government policy, but of capitalism itself. The period of the 1930s in America was a time of rapid ascension for left-wing parties, including open socialists and even communists.

In California, the writer Upton Sinclair ran for governor as a socialist in 1932. States including Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and New York saw the rise of far-left political groups in the 1930s. And membership in the Communist Party of the United States of America (“CPUSA”) surged to over 66,000 members by 1939.

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Fortunately, for a number of reasons, the socialist left wing in America wasn’t able to keep this momentum going...

World War II unified the country behind FDR, and the industrial, free market might of America’s economy was on full display in the fight against Nazi fascists and the imperial Japanese. And even before the war began, FDR outmaneuvered the American socialists by adopting some of their more popular ideas as his own – like Social Security.

We may not be so lucky the next time around. In all likelihood, if the national debt precipitates a major financial crisis in the years ahead, the left-wing demagogues will blame the free market for the resulting economic pain. We will be told that unbridled capitalism is to blame for the crisis, and as we emerge from it, the central planners of the socialist Left will be firmly entrenched in power.

This is the dangerous paradox of socialism in America today...

It is their pseudo-religious invocation of “the common good” that drives much of the big spending. This fiscally irresponsible behavior could eventually destroy our currency and crater the American economy. And, of course, they have plenty of help from Republicans who also like to hand out government goodies in an effort to compete for votes.

Still, the political ideology that is most responsible for intruding in the markets with central planning distortions will inevitably turn around and blame those same markets for leading us into the economic abyss.

Thus socialists get to be both arsonists and firefighters for our national debt without ever taking responsibility or being held accountable by the general public. ‘Equal Sharing of Misery’ vs. Hollywood The great advantage of socialists in every time period and every country is that they insist on being judged based on motivations, not results. From this comes the clichéd rebuttal from socialists regarding its many failures: “They just didn’t do socialism/ communism properly.” 124 The Debt Bomb: Nobody Wants to Defuse it

The advocates of socialism never accept that socialism has failed because socialism is a system built on a foundation of faulty assumptions about human nature and how the world works. What Winston Churchill understood more than 70 years ago – “the inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries” – is as true today as it was then.

Paradoxically, while socialists fail to understand the role of self- interest in human affairs, they do exploit our desire to feel good about ourselves – especially when it comes to our political decisions.

Despite the fact that socialism has created unparalleled misery, deprivation, starvation and mass murder over the past 100 years, it continues to hold itself up as the ideology of those who care for others. Socialism as a brand manages to take credit for Sweden and Social Security while escaping blame for Mao and Stalin.

Ignorance plays no small role in the durable support that socialism enjoys.

A stunning percentage of Millennials and Generation Z in America today have no idea who Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot were. They also tend to have bizarrely favorable views of figures like Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

It has become a conservative cliché to complain about liberal Hollywood. But there really is a pop-culture component to the propaganda around socialism and socialists. The 2004 film “The Motorcycle Diaries” depicted Guevara as a handsome, almost Christ- like figure who merely wanted to help the poor and the sick. The filmmakers didn’t seem bothered that this heroic depiction gave no indication that Guevara would go on to become the chief torturer and murderer at Castro’s own little gulag, La Cabana prison in Havana.

Hardcore socialists aren’t the only ones who have Hollywood rewriting history on their behalf. The advocates of big government and central planning in America today have a near monopoly of the entertainment industry. That’s how a movie like The Big Short in 2016, based on the Michael Lewis book, could get away with

125 The Socialism Survival Guide enormous omissions about the role that government played in almost melting down the global economy in 2008.

The Big Short never mentions, for example, Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac – two quasi-government institutions that were at the very center of the policies that led to the mortgage crisis. Nor does the movie make any attempt to describe how the federal government had made the decision on a bipartisan basis to intervene in the housing market for decades specifically to increase home-ownership rates.

Owning a home became a part of the American dream. Nobody stopped to ask what would happen when the government forced banks to lend – specifically to high-risk borrowers in low-income communities in contravention of FICO-based lending standards – not because it was good business practice, but because it was what social justice demanded.

Was there rapacious Wall Street greed that led to the housing meltdown? Of course, and The Big Short takes that to task. Was the bailout of certain investment banks an appalling abuse of government power that made a mockery of moral hazard for the finance industry? Absolutely. But it is simply not accurate to pretend that the basis for the mortgage meltdown was anything other than government policy.

Without the federal government deciding that political considerations would override market realities in the housing market, there would never have been enough crappy loans made to bundle into the mortgage-backed securities and derivative products that almost tanked the entire global economy.

You get none of that from The Big Short. And it’s not an unintentional oversight. For the millions of Americans whose only instruction in the financial crisis is a big-budget movie packed with Hollywood heavy hitters, the lesson is that Wall Street is greedy... the blameless government had to step in to save the day... and surely a lot more regulation and oversight of the financial sector from D.C. is needed.

Central planners never view government as the problem, only the solution.

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Class Warfare Is Coming

If the current trend of irresponsible spending continues and the national debt reaches even more monstrous proportions, there will be a financial reckoning.

However, that doesn’t mean the blame will be cast on the big government advocates and their favorite socialist programs. Socialism means never having to say you’re sorry for wrecking a country.

Just look at Venezuela, which used to be the richest country in South America. Now it has food shortages, blackouts, rampant crime, and inflation that could hit 10 million percent. For a country that has the largest proven oil reserves in the world – larger than those of even Saudi Arabia – to become so poor and desperate that 3 million people flee as refugees – well, that’s what central planning, class warfare, and socialism can accomplish in just over a decade.

If the national debt ends America’s reign as the world’s financial superpower, you can be sure that the Leftists who were pushing for more spending and government control of the economy all along won’t take a shred of responsibility for it. On the contrary, you will hear rhetoric quite similar to what has become standard for Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and the rest of the Left’s socialist cadre.

The implosion of the national debt won’t be blamed on socialist programs like Social Security and Medicare, or welfare programs like Medicaid – it will be the fault of fat cats, Wall Street vulture capitalists, and the “millionaires and billionaires” that Bernie Sanders has obsessed over throughout his political life.

And the reaction of a large part of the voting public – perhaps a majority – will be to rush to the government for help. This is how government builds support, especially in a crisis situation. With stock markets plummeting, unemployment soaring, and America’s role in the world economic order evaporating, average folks will be scared and angry.

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Who is more likely to politically profit in such a scenario?: The honest voices who say, “We told you this would happen, but you didn’t want us to make the tough choices.” or the ascendant socialist panderers who say, “It was the rich who brought ruin on the nation with their tax cuts and foreign wars.”

And when those same socialists promise those hit with a major economic shock that their housing, jobs, food, and health care will all be provided, America will fall deeper into the very socialist fallacies that brought about the collapse in the first place.

The national debt is too big of a systemic risk to keep kicking down the road until catastrophe.

If Republicans are going to be the party of financial responsibility, it’s time they act responsibly. No more passing the debts of the present off onto the shoulders of future generations. No more failing foreign wars to remake failed states. Reforming entitlements is financially necessary and politically possible if they make the case and show consistency in their fiscal approach.

The good news is that, even under the worst projections, we probably have a while before the national debt collapses our system and the socialists emerge from the ash heap of our free-market economy.

But the socialists don’t have to wait for the big crisis to inflict their bad ideas on the rest of us. Class warfare is already a big part of the Democrats 2020 narrative. They want to soak the rich, and they have a perfect policy tool to accomplish just that: taxes.

PREDICTION 6: A debt crisis is coming. And when it hits, America’s status as the global reserve currency will be in jeopardy.

Everyone who is paying attention knows that America is in uncharted territory when it comes to our financial system. The next crisis could be the great reset that some voices have been warning about for decades. The very foundation of our economy is at risk.

We have $23 trillion in national debt. The Treasury and the Federal Reserve have an inordinate amount of power over our future. They

128 The Debt Bomb: Nobody Wants to Defuse it are running economic experiments that have never before been run in human history.

And while we currently have the global reserve currency, that won’t continue forever. When that changes, there will be fewer options to handle it than our central planning wizards are used to having at their disposal.

A crisis is coming. History tells us it is a matter of when, not if. It could already be underway, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

And unlike the Great Recession or even the Great Depression, America may not emerge from the next major economic shock stronger than ever. This could be the big one.

It is highly unlikely that the political will to tackle this crisis will materialize before it is too late. It is a basic human impulse to have good things now and put off what is difficult and painful for another day. But that day will come.

What should you then do about this inevitability of a crisis? Preparation will be key. The dollar is going to be under intense pressure, which means that the traditional safe-haven assets like gold will be a good bet. Real estate and other productive assets will also be a good way to make it through a massive sell off in the markets.

None of this is to say America is coming to an end. Whether we make it through the next financial crisis as the true global hegemon remains to be seen, and there will be a lot of pain and loss during the financial stampede.

In the long run, America and the developed world are going to get richer, faster, and better. Then again, in the long run we are all dead. You don’t want a huge piece of a lifetime’s worth of assets – your blood, sweat, and tears – to disappear in a flash.

No matter who wins in 2020, there will still be a financial crisis sooner rather than later. Count on it. And while we will emerge from it intact, America may never be quite the same global hegemon after.

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How to Survive & Profit

From Rome to France, fiat currencies have brought low even the most wealthy and sophisticated societies of their day. America will be no different.

The American political system has become far too comfortable engaging in monetary manipulations that bring benefits now and leave the costs for another day.

We have $23 trillion in national debt. The Treasury and the Federal Reserve have an inordinate amount of power over our future. They are running economic experiments that have never before been run in human history. And while we currently have the global reserve currency, that won’t continue forever.

When that changes, there will be fewer options to deal with it than our central planning wizards are using to having at their disposal.

How to Take Advantage of Total Market Chaos Insight From Stansberry Research, America’s Most Trustworthy Financial Publisher

The U.S. economy was at its breaking point... and the government was panicking.

The government was borrowing extraordinary sums of money in 1968 to fund the war in Vietnam and the “War on Poverty”... and we were having a very hard time repaying creditors.

At the time, every dollar was required to be backed by $0.25 worth of gold. So the government couldn’t simply print money without acquiring the corresponding amount of gold. And since our creditors were allowed to collect repayments in gold bullion... our gold reserves were vanishing. Between 1958 to 1968, 52% of our nation’s gold reserves left the country in the form of repayments for our debts.

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So in March 1968, the government repealed, with almost no debate, the 25% backing of every dollar by gold.

Then, on August 15, 1971, President Nixon reneged on our promise to pay gold for dollars. This allowed the government to print as much money as was needed to make payments on our debts.

But there were consequences...

The 1970s were a period of total chaos in the markets. Over just a few years, the U.S. dollar lost almost a third of its value. Inflation more than doubled. Unemployment was almost 10%. The stock market fell 40% in just 18 months.

And so... once again... the stage is set for a dramatic shift. Once again... we’re saddled with debts that can’t be repaid and won’t be repaid.

Millions of investors, pensioners, insurance customers, and creditors will lose a fortune. Stocks will collapse. Dozens of companies will go bankrupt.

But it doesn’t have to hurt you...

At Stansberry Research, we’ve written for years about the role gold has played as money for millennia. When a government is inflating its money supply in an attempt to pay for things like wars, bailouts, and social programs... you want to own gold for protection, as a store of wealth.

It’s why precious metal stocks soared in the ‘70s. As the last crisis started to unfold in the early 1970s, people lost their jobs, inflation skyrocketed, and the stock market crashed. Gold soared more than 400% in just four years. And it went up more than 2,300% over the decade.

But... you also want to own gold stocks for a different reason. When gold prices jump... as they do when nervous investors rush to it as a safe haven... the shares of companies that own and mine the resources in the ground can absolutely skyrocket. That’s called being “leveraged” to the price of gold.

The same thing will happen during our next crisis.

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This is the value of buying hard assets – like gold and silver – while no one is paying attention. The best way to buy them is to buy the companies with the best assets. Buying these companies gives you leverage to the underlying commodity.

Learn which gold companies to own with our exclusive special online briefing,The Currency Trade. You can access this report with actionable recommendations at www.StansberryResearch.com after you log in with the credentials you were provided when you bought The Socialism Survival Guide.

132 The Bureaucracy: Our Slothful Overlords

— Chapter 7 — The Bureaucracy: Our Slothful Overlords

“The bureaucrat has the world as a mere object of his action.” – Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

“No Sooner did they enter the state’s service than the iron logic of their situation, inherent in the exercise of certain hierarchical and politically advantageous prerogatives, took its toll, and the young men became cynical bureaucratic martinets while still mouthing patriotic and liberal slogans. And as is well known, a liberal bureaucrat is incomparably worse than any dyed-in-the-wool reactionary state official.” – Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy

I lived in DC and worked for the federal government for years. And the one thing everyone in that town knows is that presidents come and go, but the bureaucracy is forever.

And socialists love it that way.

The bureaucracy is the fourth branch of government. It’s unelected... Not spelled out in the Constitution... It’s massive, intrusive, unaccountable, and only increases in size.

It is also the part of the federal government that everyday Americans have to deal with the most. And it has the greatest capacity to stifle, torment, imprison, and ruin any individual citizen. Anyone who ignores the metastasis of our malignant bureaucracy does so at their peril.

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Bureaucrats are obsessed with rules, so here are a few to understand how bureaucrats really operate:

The first rule of every bureaucracy is that process is the product.

Our civil service is a massive self-licking ice cream cone. Every agency is bloated – and always claims it is understaffed. Every agency overpromises and under-delivers. Basic rule of thumb: these federal agencies take ten times as long as they should, require ten times as many people, and are ten times as expensive.

The second rule is that the bureaucracy protects itself at all costs.

Like the Skynet artificial intelligence system from the “Terminator” movies that becomes self-aware and then starts a nuclear war to eradicate humanity... Don’t underestimate cornered bureaucrats.

You will never see government servants as unified and effective as when it’s time to circle the wagons and protect their perks and prerogatives. Try to cut back their overtime or their “flex” workdays, and they will crush you. As Trump has found out, even presidents are not immune to this.

The third rule: the federal government is riddled with socialism.

I know that probably sounds like an exaggeration. It’s not. Our federal government increasingly pursues socialist ends, and is staffed with socialist true believers. They might be “Democratic socialists,” but the “S” word still applies.

The bureaucracy wasn’t always this way, and doesn’t have to be this way.

In fact, it started out quite small. Back in 1790, the federal government employed 1,000 non-military staff. There were over 2 million by the 1960s. In 2020, there will be almost 2.8 million non- military employees of the federal government. If you add the military services into the mix, there number comes closer to 4.3 million.

Nobody can really even keep track of the bureaucracy. There are 15 federal departments, over 60 agencies and almost 400 non-military sub-agencies. Depending on who you ask, you’ll get different answers 134 The Bureaucracy: Our Slothful Overlords to the question of how many of these bureaucratic fiefdoms really exist in the federal government.

This is the case despite the fact that the Office of Personnel Management (“OPM”) is a government agency to oversee personnel at government agencies and the Office of Management and Budget is supposed to look at exactly what is being spent where. The federal government literally has offices meant to count the other offices, and it’s probably only a matter of time before another layer of bureaucracy is added on top of that.

Federal government spending has also exploded. We dealt with the national debt and the massive entitlement spending that will drag the entire economy down earlier in this book, but just to look at growth of government spending as a percentage of GDP, Donald Devine, Former Director of the Office of Personnel Management, put it in context this way:

Until the early 20th century... local governments accounted for a majority of total government spending, and the sum of all government spending – both state and federal – totaled only 6% of the economy. Today, government spending in the U.S. consumes about one of every three dollars of GDP. Federal government spending alone takes more than one-fifth of the economy – while regulating pretty much everything else.

Within that massive expansion of the taxpayer’s tab, federal government employees in the executive branch alone cost us $291 billion in 2019. And not only do many of those employees work for agencies of questionable Constitutional origin, the bureaucracy isn’t “sending us their best,” to borrow from President Trump’s phrasing. Sit in the Chair, Get Paid The socialist-progressive theory behind our bureaucratic overlords is that their expertise, added to the powers of government, will make all of our lives better. A big part of the problem with this theory in practice is that the federal government generally doesn’t even try to hire the most skilled people for each job. In some ways, it is explicitly forbidden from doing so as a matter of policy.

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Federal civil service is not a merit-based system. It cannot use standardized testing or scores of any kind, in part because of a legacy of aggregate disparities among different races taking those exams in the past. At the end of President Jimmy Carter’s administration, the Professional and Administrative Career Examination (essentially an IQ test for civil servants) was abandoned by OPM because of allegations that it was discriminatory. Some specific services like the State Department have special testing (the Foreign Service Exam), but overall federal government hiring is based on many factors other than skill.

Within the bureaucracy itself, there are all kinds of systemic inefficiencies.

For one thing, the incentive structure is for federal employees to do less, not more. The less an average federal government worker applies himself, the more value he or she is attaching to their labor, because they get paid the same amount either way.

The only thing that matters is doing the minimum and having one’s proverbial ass in the chair. Whether you are good at your job or terrible, it hardly matters. You sit there, you get paid.

And these bureaucrats get paid more than they would make in the private sector, with far better benefits. A recent Heritage Foundation study found that

Pay and benefits [for] federal employees receive wages that are 22% higher than similar workers in the private sector receive. Including the value of employee benefits, the total compensation premium increased to between 30% and 40%. The Congressional Budget Office found a small wage premium (2%) but substantially inflated benefits for an overall compensation premium of 17%. The American Enterprise Institute found a 14% pay premium and a 61% total compensation premium.

Within the bureaucracy it is seniority, not competency, that determines pay. Federal bureaucrats have vague evaluation systems based on mutual agreement and subjective assessments.

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Having gone through a few rounds of these myself, I can tell you that federal performance appraisals read like something you would expect a kindergartner to go home with as a report card. There are lots of mentions of “team building,” “outreach,” and “attention to diversity and inclusion.” Tangible accomplishment and excelling among one’s peers are private-sector stuff.

And it’s hard to get rid of these self-paced, self-evaluated federal employees.

The initial termination process isn’t too complicated, but there are several layers and options of appeal to administrative organizations after one is fired. The federal employees who seek to have their termination overturned almost all eventually lose. That doesn’t mean they are easy to fire, though.

The process to terminate a federal civil service employee is so lengthy, tedious, and wasteful that management usually wants to avoid the hassle. It’s a pain in the neck to do all the paperwork and go through the appeal hearings. And since nobody really has ownership of how successfully the mission is accomplished in any one office or agency, few want to deal with ejecting the worst employees. It’s easier to shuffle them around to another job and ignore the incompetence.

For most federal bureaucrats, if you show up, put in your required hours, avoid breaking the law or committing an EEO violation (which is often treated as much worse than breaking criminal law) – you will find it very difficult to get fired. So Much for Draining the Swamp The bureaucrat’s managerial class generally frowns on increased productivity.

Efficiency means fewer employees, which in turn means fewer personnel to manage, and therefore smaller budgets. This is anathema to the bureaucrats’ ultimate goal – which is to become so large and unwieldy as an organization that it becomes almost impossible to find the structural inefficiencies.

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Your average government functionary wants a place to hide in the flabby folds of taxpayer-sponsored lethargy.

Once the bureaucrat herd becomes too large to cull, the only way to deal with any shortcomings is – you guessed it – hire more bureaucrats. Only in government is failure always rewarded with additional resources. If they fail, it’s because the taxpayers weren’t generous enough with the money they allowed the federal government to take from them.

Any effort to rein this in comes up against a vast bureaucracy that has interest in reforming the rest of the bureaucracy. Everyone in the federal Leviathan wants in on the scam, and nobody wants any accountability.

The culture and inefficiency of the federal bureaucracy is bad enough, but all of these problems only increase over time because the size of the federal government only grows in one direction: bigger.

When was the last time the federal government closed one of its agencies? Or even downsized significantly?

Governor Rick Perry of Texas famously said during the 2011 Republican primary that there were three federal agencies he wanted to abolish... He named two Departments (Commerce and Education) and forgot one (Energy). It was his infamous “oops” moment, and his campaign didn’t last long beyond it.

But in a twist, Rick Perry would go on to lead the Department of Energy under President Trump. That’s right – the tough-talking Texan who at one point wanted to shut down an entire federal agency later took a job as its chief.

That’s about all you need to know about the likelihood of anyone ever draining the swamp in D.C.

Vast sums of taxpayer money are funneled into D.C. in ways that only benefit the class of “beltway bandits” that has engorged itself more than ever over the last two decades. There’s a reason Trump calls it “the swamp,” and that seven of the 10 wealthiest counties in terms of household wealth per capita are in and around the Washington D.C. metro area.

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The swamp may be filthy and foul in many ways, but there’s never been a better time to be suckling at the teat of big government.

Folks, the federal government never gets smaller. My entire adult life, conservatives have been talking about shrinking government and tackling deficits.

It never happens.

In reality, it’s a Herculean task merely to prevent Uncle Sam from growing in an out-of-control fashion every year.

Remember the “sequestration” budgetary battle in 2013 between the Obama administration and a Republican majority Congress? That was all over a decrease in the planned increase in government spending. Our government sending us slightly less rapidly into oblivion turned into a massive political food fight.

The best part of that whole debacle? Congress eventually cut the sequester because it was “too painful.” They just couldn’t handle the decrease in the scheduled increase of our unsustainable budget. Comply or Face Ruin So who wants to work in a huge, unaccountable, inefficient bureaucracy?

When you consider the kind of person who is attracted to work in a massive, unaccountable maze of cubicle farmers, it’s not a surprise that excellence isn’t just discouraged – it’s cause for suspicion.

In general, those drawn to work in our civil service are risk-averse individuals who want to do the minimum personally while the rest of government does the maximum “for you” (really “to you”). They also overwhelmingly believe that experts run the government, and these experts in turn believe that they will make better decisions about every aspect of life than the people for whom these decisions are made.

The liberal mentality of benevolent authoritarianism is the dominant ideology of our bureaucratic ruling class.

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There is a reason that more than 90% of civil service donations in the 2016 presidential election went to Hillary Clinton. This ideological monoculture is the basis of the “administrative state,” which is both vast and increasingly intrusive.

Most Americans concerned with government overreach focus their ire on the clown show that is Congress. There are plenty of good reasons that the polls show public approval of our legislative branch staying in the 20% range for past few years – and staying below 50% for more than a decade. Members of Congress have been acting more and more like B-team cable news pundits.

The best known members of the House and Senate tend to be the ones who show up on television screens to bash the other side and promise that – if only the political opposition would cave – all kinds of amazing things would be possible, courtesy of our genius class of lawmakers.

In reality, the two warring factions of our legislative branch stuck in partisan gridlock is often much better than the alternative.

When Congress does manage to pass sweeping legislation – the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is a prime example – the results are never what were promised and the costs are far higher. This has led many savvy observers of happenings on Capitol Hill to believe that, when it comes to our legislature pass new laws, inaction is better than the alternative.

As the ancient Greek philosopher Hippocrates wrote in his work “Of the Epidemics,” the first principle of medicine is “first, do no harm” (often incorrectly cited as part of the Hippocratic oath). This could very easily be adapted for Congress as “first, do nothing so you do no harm.” Sure, there are basic functions like funding the government and naming post offices that are left to our legislative arm, and they should fulfill those obligations. Of course, Congress regularly fails at the minimal level of competence of simply passing spending bills on time.

There are an estimated 4,500 federal criminal statutes on the books, hundreds of thousands of regulations that carry the weight

140 The Bureaucracy: Our Slothful Overlords of criminal law, and the federal register comprises an estimated 2 million pages. There’s plenty of reason to believe that Congress shouldn’t be passing sweeping legislation to remake whole sectors of the economy and should limit itself to legislative territory clearly mandated in the Constitution.

Alas, it is not so. While Congress bickers, the bureaucrats step in. The federal regulatory agencies are far more prolific in their rulemaking than Congress, and much more intrusive.

A study in 2007 found that as Congress enacted 138 public laws, federal agencies created 2,926 rules including 61 major regulations. The trend has only accelerated since then. The Competitive Enterprise Institute estimated in 2016 that the cost of federal regulation to the economy came just shy of $2 trillion. The micromanagement of American commerce and daily lives that feckless bureaucrats can engage in is truly limitless.

The federal bureaucracy has, for all intents and purposes, usurped entire areas of lawmaking and legal interpretation from Congress. In some cases, this has had an impact on major issues with hundreds of billions of dollars at stake. The public is generally unaware of this transfer of power, and the socialists within the system love it because they have the authority they want with almost zero accountability. Left-wing members of Congress, for their part, like the situation because the statists inside the bureaucracy institute the policies they want without the accompanying headache of having to explain any of this to voters.

A perfect example of this in action was the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Barack Obama’s presidency...

Using an expansive definition of the Commerce Clause, Obama’s EPA took it upon itself to regulate the amount of CO2 power plants could put in the air, costing billions of dollars a year in compliance costs, which were all passed onto the consume. Under the Obama administration, the Environmental Protection Agency made on average over 500 new regulations a year – all of which carried the full force of law.

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Who, you might ask, comes up with these regulations? The socialist bureaucrats within the system who are convinced they are much smarter than you. And in the case of the EPA, they also generally believe they are on a mission to save the world from “climate change.”

This is how federal agencies can so quickly become bloated fiefdoms within the government, acting as mini-legislatures where nobody is responsible for the consequences of their bad decisions because it all comes from the organization.

Once these federal agencies go rogue on the Constitution, watch out. They have a lot of power to wreak economic havoc on businesses and inflict untold misery on individuals. Legal scholar and professor Jonathan Turley laid out this troubling reality of the petty tyranny of government regulatory bodies in a 2013 op-ed in the Washington Post:

The result is that a citizen is 10 times more likely to be tried by an agency than by an actual court. In a given year, federal judges conduct roughly 95,000 adjudicatory proceedings, including trials, while federal agencies complete more than 939,000.

That’s right – people can, and do, go to prison because of what coddled, overpaid middling bureaucrats decide in the bowels of some vast, bland cement box in D.C.

Your choices are to comply or face ruination and bankruptcy. This is how you end up reading stories in the newspaper about a welder in Wyoming who faced fines of $75,000 a day for the crime of building a pond on his own property. The geniuses at the EPA went after him under an absurdly broad interpretation of their mandate under the Clean Water Act.

Meanwhile, as Americans spend a fortune to defend themselves, the dictatorial bureaucrats on the other side of the table take on no personal risks. On the contrary, they get paid either way, win or lose. Their lawyers (generally liberals in the federal government), have something to do. And as the ultimate insult, all of this is paid for with your taxes.

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Under the aegis of well-intentioned expertise, the government tries to do far too much and accomplishes far too little. Welcome to the Deep State For those within the bureaucracy who do not “drink the Kool- Aid” of the administrative state, cynicism is the natural result. When mediocrity is the expectation, mediocrity ensues. Those with aspiration to do good work for the American people become disillusioned and hunker down to count the days until their retirement, or leave for the private sector.

The socialists, on the other hand, are much more comfortable operating within the bureaucratic status quo. And they have been for years. Most of the current federal system we have comes from the New Deal era, coinciding with a massive expansion of outright socialist sentiment within the Left in America.

From the earliest days of American socialism, the dream was to create a professional civil service that would administer a radical egalitarian state that would provide for all. The bureaucrats, you see, were going to keep us all safe and warm at night. They have clung to this vision for more than 100 years.

The federal bureaucracy provides the perfect mechanism for American socialists’ ultimate aims. It assembles and trains the managerial class that is necessary to implement the central planning and redistribution of wealth that are the sine qua non of socialism.

A burdensome state apparatus that becomes more invested in its interests than the people it ostensibly serves is by no means unprecedented. In fact, this melding of employees of the state with the ideology of statism has been a consistent flaw of socialism stretching back to the first Marxist regimes.

Milovan Dilas’s “The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System” has fallen into obscurity, but when it was published in 1957, it was a brilliant takedown of the failures of communism in Tito’s Yugoslavia. As Dilas writes it, the petty totalitarians of the bureaucracy – the “new class” – were obsessed with their own perks

143 The Socialism Survival Guide and powers, and this corruption became central to violations of private property and rights within the socialist system:

“The new class instinctively feels that national goods are, in fact, its property, and that even the terms “socialist,” “social” and “state” property denote a general legal fiction. The new class also thinks that any breach of its totalitarian authority might imperil its ownership... the new class is sensitive criticisms and demands depending on the extent to which they expose the manner it which it rules and holds power.”

It was true in Yugoslavia 60 years ago, and it’s true in America today... The bureaucracy acts as the implementation arm for authoritarian socialism. And along this path, its failures and abuses are cited as further evidence that it needs to be larger and requires more funds, taking away freedom and capital from the productive parts of the economy.

The growth of the bureaucracy over the last century is the result of fundamental flaws in inherent in every socialist scheme. The bureaucracy tries to do too much, rooted in the left-wing belief that government exists to influence our day-to-day lives in every way that it can, all to promote an amorphous conception of the common good.

The resulting utopianism is both the goal and the perennial excuse of public sector functionaries. They claim they are trying to make the world a better place, so if they fail in that endeavor, their only answer is to redouble the same efforts in pursuit of statist paradise – and crush their political enemies for their own good.

That’s where the “Deep State” comes in...

The origin of the term comes from Turkey, where in the post- Ataturk era, a group of military, intelligence, and other powerful state elements has often stepped in to undo the results of an election through a coup. This group has been called “Derin Devlet,” or deep state. And of course, there are similar non-democratic power structures to override elections throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world.

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We too have a deep state in America, though it is quite different from its Turkish counterpart. Here, the Deep State refers to those elements within the government itself that carry out the diktats of the ruling class (an echelon that includes elected officials, media, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, etc.) and override the will of voters as expressed in elections. Unlike the Turkish deep state, however, this rejection of the peoples’ will – for the good of the people, of course – isn’t achieved with tanks rolling up to government buildings. No, the American Deep State is more subtle in its operations.

The single-best example of the Deep State in action that we have seen in my lifetime is the Russia Collusion debacle of 2016-2019. In an astonishing series of governmental abuses and left-wing media malpractice, a narrative was created that President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign had allied with Vladimir Putin’s Russia to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton.

To be clear: there was never any evidence for this. Instead, it started as thinly sourced gossip that was seized upon by supposedly serious journalists and government officials who jointly pretended it was thoroughly vetted, serious intelligence.

The most egregious example of this came through the former British spy Christopher Steele, who compiled the so-called “dossier” on Trump, alleging a slew of treasonous and unsavory activities – including the infamous “golden showers” accusation that Donald Trump... well, I’ll let you read that one for yourselves. The Democrats fought against anyone finding out the truth for over a year, but it turned out that Hillary Clinton’s Democratic National Committee, through a law firm as its cutout, paid for the opposition research of the Steele Dossier.

Despite the absurdity, the accusations stuck. As far as most far- left folks were concerned, Donald Trump had been groomed as an asset of the Russian state for years. Through a series of real- estate inducements in Russia and the threat of personal blackmail, Trump was now allegedly the Kremlin’s version of the Manchurian candidate. That all of this was based on anonymous sources was disregarded. And apparently nobody stopped to think about what

145 The Socialism Survival Guide a wildly risky plan this would be for Trump... and an insanely improbable one for the Russians to pull off.

There was no hard evidence or on-the-record named source for any of it. To any reasonable reader, it was a compilation of rumor- mongering and outright fantasy so ridiculous, it would elicit groans and guffaws as the plot for a Hollywood movie.

But did our intrepid, professional governing class see through this preposterous ruse? Of course not.

Instead, under the leadership of James Comey, perhaps America’s most sanctimonious G-man, the Steele dossier was considered really important stuff. It was even included in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant application to spy on Trump campaign associate Carter Page.

The cold, hard truth is that the Obama administration’s executive branch spied on the political campaign of their party’s political rival, Donald Trump. You’d think that would be something that would upset the so-called guardians of our liberty in the fourth estate – but you’d be wrong.

Instead of recognizing these police-state tactics, based on patently absurd conspiracy theories, as the threat to our most basic freedoms that they represent – the media doubled down on the insanity.

CNN and MNSBC, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, became monomaniacal mouthpieces of anti- Trump insanity. Dozens of major stories meant to damage Trump and add to the Russia conspiracy frenzy had to be substantially corrected or withdrawn entirely. For a corporate press still obsessed with regaining the power it wielded before the Internet came around, this was their Watergate moment. For the prestigious news media outlets, the single-greatest moment in the history of the press was the resignation of Richard Nixon. The Russia collusion narrative gave them a chance to return to that former glory and dispose of an anti-establishment president that they hated even more than Nixon – Donald Trump.

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Unfortunately for the lib media, anti-Trump prosecutors spent two years running a special counsel investigation of Russia collusion and obstruction of justice, only to come up without any charges in the end – and absolutely zero proof of “collusion.”

Former FBI man Bob Mueller was brought in to give the con an air of non-partisan respectability, but it was Democrat attack dog Andrew Weissman who was really running the show. This became clear when Mueller testified before Congress and sounded like he hadn’t read the report – and might have some degree of difficulty remember where he left his shoes on any given morning. The Special Counsel probe was a sham, just as Trump had maintained all along.

Over the course of the investigation, hard evidence of the Deep State at work would emerge. We saw that FBI Director James Comey engaged in clearly unethical conduct, keeping and then leaking memos of a conversation with President Trump in order to create the media frenzy and public pressure necessary for the appointment of a Special Counsel. The lanky, deeply self-satisfied and completely lacking in self-awareness Comey was no longer able to pull off his “last honest government servant in America” routine.

Comey wasn’t the only entrant into the Deep State hall of fame...

Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, according to an investigation of the Inspector General of the FBI, lied twice under oath, in violation of federal laws.

Agent Peter Strzok and his paramour, senior FBI lawyer Lisa Page, exchanged dozens of rabidly anti-Trump text messages on official government devices and made cryptic references to an “insurance policy” with regard to the possible election victory of Donald Trump.

And then there’s the bizarre, borderline insane ranting on national television of former senior intelligence officials like John Brennan, Obama’s former CIA Director, and James Clapper, Obama’s former Director of National Intelligence. Clapper once said in response to the allegation that Trump is a Russian asset, that he would “add to that caveat that whether witting or unwitting, and that is a really painful thing to say, but I believe the FBI was institutionally

147 The Socialism Survival Guide obligated to do what it did.” Brennan, unwilling to be left out of the pantheon of stupid Deep State devotees, said that Trump’s conduct had been “nothing short of treasonous” and stated ominously that “there will be consequences for him.”

As a result of all this, the Left’s argument over the course of Trump’s first term has gone from “there is no Deep State, that’s a conspiracy theory for right-wing lunatics” to “of course there is a Deep State.” The Bureaucrats Strike Back There is no serious question now as to whether supposedly nonpartisan officials of the federal government – including the most powerful security and law enforcement agents in the country – were actively working against a duly elected President of the United States.

First, they were hoping to prevent his election. Then they attempted to bring about his ouster, using their access and government perches to achieve those ends.

What is it about Trump that so mobilized the bureaucrats against him?

Why would so many of them risk their careers and radically undermine the institutions where they spent their careers to take down a president from the inside?

The Deep State and the “ruling class” in America are not new. Both have certainly been around much longer than Trump has been president. And their lackeys in the bureaucratic apparatus have always been incentivized to support those in power.

The Deep State hasn’t been a response to Trump. Quite the contrary... Instead, he has so successfully antagonized them that they have exposed themselves in ways that now make the reality of our self-dealing and hypocritical ruling class impossible to ignore.

Of course, those who comprise the Deep State are convinced that they are the ones upholding and defending the Constitution against the usurpations of undesirables and “deplorables,” in the now infamous parlance of twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary

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Clinton. As we enter the final year of Trump’s first term, the Deep State must admit their efforts to undo the 2016 election have been thus far unsuccessful. Nonetheless, they have no intention of backing down.

The Deep State has come up with a variety of self-justifying narratives and slogans to explain why their judgment and decision- making should override the will of American people as expressed through a presidential election.

For example, take the now-infamous “Anonymous” op-ed writer. This individual, claiming to be a senior White House official, pushed the term “Steady State” as an alternative to Deep State. The idea is that the people who have always been behind the scenes in government should continue to make the real decisions, and elected officials from outside the established power structure must be ignored when necessary.

This is a recipe for ad hoc election nullification, courtesy of statists who are neither elected nor accountable to the people.

The so-called whistleblower controversy over a phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky typified this mentality. Here you had a person from within the bureaucracy who decided to leverage his position and access to create a pretext for presidential impeachment. In response to this coordinate political hit, the Trump White House released a transcript of the phone call in question.

Over the course of the hearings that followed, there was a constant refrain from assorted ambassadors and government experts on Ukraine policy about the “interagency consensus.” Many of the witnesses spoke of the interagency consensus with reverence, as though it came from a higher power (or at least, higher than the President of the United States).

In the bureaucrats’ formulation, once the various government agencies were all in agreement about a way forward on a policy matter like Ukraine – once the “interagency consensus” was formed – it inherently became the mission of government employees in the

149 The Socialism Survival Guide executive branch. It didn’t matter if the president – the elected head of the executive branch under Article 2 of the Constitution – had ordered a different approach. The Deep State knew better because the Deep State always knows better.

Apart from the policy disputes, much of this was ego driven. There was certainly no shortage of true believers within the government ranks who thought that by sidelining presidential directives, they were upholding their Constitutional duties by violating Constitutional norms.

But for many of those who had spent decades-long careers slogging it out in government agencies, Trump was a deeply personal affront.

Here came this brash billionaire as Commander-in-Chief whom they believed knew nothing about foreign policy of any kind – and he was changing the U.S.’s approach to some of the most important “interagency consensus” issues out there. If Trump was right, many of these elitist government functionaries had to be wrong. That notion was utterly unacceptable to them.

Not only that, but Trump was willing to call them out for being lazy, feckless bureaucrats. Who could forget when Trump tweeted the following during the first phase of the House Impeachment inquiry over Ukrainegate, when former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was whining on television in front of the American people about getting fired and Trump’s disruptions to the interagency consensus on Ukraine:

“Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go? Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her in my second phone call with him. It is a U.S. President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors.”

Democrats laughably jumped on Trump’s tweet outburst as evidence of “witness intimidation,” not taking a moment to think about what such a bizarre legal position would mean for the First Amendment. It was yet another allegation rooted in the proposition that Trump is an illegitimate president, therefore anything the Deep State or the Democrats can do to tear him down is inherently justified.

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In the eyes of the bureaucratic governing class, Trump’s willingness to break with “interagency consensus” while calling out policy failures and middling personnel is unacceptable. Because the bureaucrats view themselves as the foundation upon which our entire governing system is built, their attitude from the beginning of the Trump presidency has been “either he goes, or we take him down.”

As a result of this, the Deep State efforts to end the Trump presidency have not been strictly partisan.

Sure, there were lunatic leftists who marched in the streets chanting “not my president” in the days after the election. They wanted Trump impeached before he had even taken office. And yes, “Never Trump” Republicans have been among the president’s most implacable and irrational foes.

But there have also been individuals throughout the system – from EPA to DOJ to CIA and more – who view Trump as an existential threat to the system. His attitude toward the monstrous bureaucracy situated in D.C. and the vast industries devoted to exploiting it was made clear from the start: he dubbed it “the swamp.” For those employees of various alphabet agencies with what should be called “low show” jobs, this was all an unforgivable insult. It was President Trump’s original sin.

In order to protect their positions, the bureaucrats struck back.

With the help of the maniacally anti-Trump media, elements from within the government pushed a narrative that the President was a “threat to our institutions.” There have been countless news stories and editorials pushing this theory, with titles like “Trump’s Bureaucratic Arson” or “Nine Ways Trump Has Shredded U.S. Institutions.”

In a paint-by-numbers fashion, they rely on a similar structure. They use quotes from embittered career bureaucrats who claim morale is terrible in their oh-so-critical government agency, and that unless something is done, there will be mass flight from their ranks. State Department employees tell tales of their brilliant comrades reduced to crying at their desks because of Trump’s latest tweet or off-the-cuff

151 The Socialism Survival Guide press conference. They vow to go get jobs in the private sector if these degradations are allowed to continue.

All the while, we are supposed to believe that if America must fend for itself without the brilliance of every bureaucrat who has ever drawn a government paycheck, a long dark night will follow. Dictatorship of the Bureaucracy French monarch Louis XIV is famously quoted as saying “I am the state.” For those working in the federal government, the dominant mentality has become “we are the state.”

The statist mentality throughout the federal bureaucracy is troubling enough. Now add a movement of explicit American socialism on top of it all. This brings together means – the bureaucracy – with the will to wield it – socialist ideology. Socialists fundamentally believe that the mechanism of the state – when properly empowered at the expense of individual rights – can bring about the best society.

As our federal government has grown in size and scope over the last 100 years, it has become more ideologically tied than ever before to the proposition that it can create a society where nobody is poor, sick, or unhappy. All it requires is a larger budget and greater freedom to impose its will, and the federal government will make society’s problems disappear.

Your standard federal bureaucrat finds the message seductive.

It gives them an inflated sense of importance. And it’s a built-in excuse for any of their failures or excesses. How can the American people get upset at the minions of vast federal agencies who only want to make life better for all of us? If we object to any of this, we are just being ungrateful.

With that attitude firmly in place, it’s no wonder that the fourth branch of government feels free to ignore its long legacy of well- intentioned underperformance. Socialists say they are never wrong because none of their failures are the result of socialism. The same could be said of federal government employees.

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That there is major ideological crossover between these two groups should come as no surprise.

This is not so much a prediction as a certainty: the problems our bureaucratic overlords pose are only going to get bigger. The type of new administrative agencies that the Left wants to lard on top of the already far-too-large unelected commissars will make the disfunction of the DMV look like a Swiss watch by comparison.

Former Democrat candidate Elizabeth Warren, for example, loves to create new massive unaccountable federal bureaucracies. Under the Obama administration, Senator Warren was a senior advisor for the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has existed less than a decade and now has a budget of up to $695 million a year.

But before she dropped out of the presidential race, Warren was just getting started... Her 2020 campaign plans included the formation of a number of new offices of the federal government intended to help implement the socialist schemes she plans to foist on America. If she became president, Senator Warren planned to create a “Tenant Protection Bureau,” a “Green Marshall Plan,” a “Green Apollo Program,” the “Secure Democracy Administration, and the “Department of Economic Development,” – among many, many others.

This explosion of even more federal government offices and agencies will only exacerbate the trend that those who make careers in government direct government policy, not elected officials. Warren wanted to create these federal fiefdoms because it is a sure thing that socialist fellow travelers will largely staff and run them. Limited- government capitalists rarely go to work for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and they certainly aren’t going to sign up in droves to work for a proposed “Office of United States Corporations.”

There’s also a pernicious political motive behind the reliance on these agencies from leftists like Warren. It’s a means of hiding the government’s intent while increasing its power. Regulatory agencies

153 The Socialism Survival Guide give central planners socialist control of government sectors without elected officials having to call their plans “socialism.”

The public is merely told that the government’s intrusion into markets is the result of some altruistic desire for “fairness” or “equality,” and that there will be ample oversight and accountability (probably from another soon-to-be created federal agency). Whether it’s telling you what kind of light bulb you can use or what health insurance you can buy, it’s always about what’s best for you according to people who neither know you nor care about you.

Socialist bureaucrats run into the same problem regulating you as they do trying to regulate financial markets. They interfere with the localized improvisation necessary for optimal personal decisions. And most important, they can never care about you anywhere nearly as much as you do.

The future here is clear: our federal bureaucracy is going to take us over the edge if we don’t get control of it and rein it in.

Karl Marx infamously wanted to bring about a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In America today, we are moving toward a dictatorship of the bureaucracy – a governing class that writes and enforces laws without accountability, all for our own good, no matter what the actual cost or consequence to us.

My friend P.J. O’Rourke once wrote “Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.” We’ve been getting dumped on far too much in recent years.

Socialists want to empower the professional administrative state and they are getting their wish, the consequences be damned. And remember – it’s never enough for them. The socialists have no mechanism for self-correction. Their ideas never fail – there’s always a series of excuses, then demands. If only they had more resources, they say, and their promises would be fulfilled.

Top of that demand list is always one thing: money.

Your money.

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And as part of their plan to remake America, the socialists plan to take a lot more of it.

PREDICTION 7: The federal government will grow larger every single year for the next decade and even more regulatory agencies will be added.

The old saying “the only certainty in life is death and taxes” needs an addition: “and the bureaucracy will grow.” We currently have a massive, unelected de facto fourth branch of government that has far too much say over your life and dwarfs what the founders had in mind when they wrote the Constitution.

The people with the power to make the government smaller are part of the government. Everybody else is just sitting on the sidelines, hoping one day the federal leviathan will be restrained and tamed. Unfortunately, the larger the government apparatus, the greater the power of the people running it.

The executive branch likes to have more resources, not less. Congress has no incentive to try to slow the growth of the government, as they can always just add whatever federal employee expansion or additional agency funding to the taxpayers’ tab. And Democrat- socialists, of course, are the party of the big “S” State, so they will continue to actively grow government.

Democrat-socialists are usually satisfied with enlarging the existing federal government. But every decade or two, they like to add an entirely new agency into the mix.

Sometimes – as is the case post 9/11 – this is done under the rubric of a “re-organization,” when it is really an expansion. Did we really need a “National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC)” to the tune of billions of dollars to analyze terror threats in addition to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center? What about the creation of the “Director of National Intelligence” (DNI) to make sure that all the rest of the alphabet soup of federal agencies have yet another agency to “coordinate” among them (whatever that means). Similarly, anyone who has flown commercial the last 20 years has been taken through

155 The Socialism Survival Guide something of a time warp to the Soviet Union, courtesy of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

The socialists among us already have the Department of Education, Environmental Protection Agency, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and a slew of other bloated federal bureaucracies with which they can implement their collectivist will. There may be temporary hiring freezes and quarterly budget cuts here and there, but the overall trajectory of these organizations will remain on the upswing.

If there is one area where a newly entrenched socialist presidential administration may seize the opportunity to create a brand new federal regulatory body, it is likely to be an implementation arm for the “Green New Deal.” The Obama administration wielded the EPA effectively as a tool of climate policy via executive fiat, but a future AOC or Buttigieg administration is likely to take it a step further.

The next Democrat-Socialist administration may decide that a new administrative agency is the way to go. It may be called the “Department of Climate Management” or the “U.S. Agency for Climate Control” or some other such bureaucratic euphemism. But it would be to climate-change policing what the IRS is to your finances.

Imagine a group of federal regulators entrusted with the mission of “saving the planet from climate change” and armed with the full power of the state to involve themselves in any aspect of your life that they choose. It sounds like a nightmare to anyone who values individual freedom and would like to wake up and go about their day-to-day lives without government micromanagement.

To the democrat-socialists, however, it would be a dream come true. Every aspect of this new agency would appeal to them. It would give them an action arm for every aspect of their climate change agenda. And once the democrat-socialists create such an agency, it will never go away. The climate change enforcement agency would last through administrations of both parties.

Because the bureaucracy is forever.

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How to Survive & Profit

The culture and inefficiency of the federal bureaucracy is bad enough, but all of these problems only increase over time because the size of the federal government only goes in one direction: bigger.

As our federal government has grown in size and scope over the last 100 years, it has become more ideologically tied than ever before to the proposition that it can create a society where nobody is poor, or sick, or unhappy.

All it requires is a larger budget and greater freedom to impose its will, and the federal government will make societies’ problems disappear.

But despite that “bloat,” there’s a way to use the government’s “forever bureaucracy” and its policies to profit, as the folks at Stansberry Research have detailed...

The Tax-Free Way to Make 500% Gains in America Today Insight From Stansberry Research, America’s Most Trustworthy Financial Publisher

Right now, we have an incredible opportunity to make five to 10 times your money... tax-free.

And a lot of smart investors are already taking advantage of it.

This investment opportunity has nothing to do with stocks, bonds, or options. But it’s in a market that’s almost as big as the U.S. stock market.

We call it the “Perfect Hedge.”

You see, the U.S. has managed – and continues to manage – its finances foolishly. As a result, our country’s debt situation is worse than you can even imagine.

By 2041, two things alone will eat up ALL government revenues: entitlements and the interest on the national debt...

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This estimate comes from the government – the Congressional Budget Office – based on what it sees as the likely scenario. And it doesn’t include “governing” expenses, such as bills, lawmaking, military, repairs to roads and bridges, and education. Add those in, and the U.S. quickly looks worse than the banana republics that have defaulted on debts in the past.

But Washington won’t let the U.S. default on its debts. Instead, it will “inflate” them away through money printing.

The Federal Reserve has already spent years printing money – as much as necessary – to stimulate our economy. The obvious result is more paper dollars out there. And the next result is that a paper dollar is worthless.

Unless we see some dramatic changes in government spending, a major U.S. crisis appears inevitable.

But before the crisis arrives, you need to get a huge portion of your wealth OUT of the U.S. dollar... and INTO investments that will maintain and increase their value as the dollar declines.

And today, we have an incredible opportunity to take advantage of Washington’s destructive financial policies and pocket gains of 100% or more. It’s the perfect hedge against a weakening dollar...

Right now is still a fantastic time to buy a house in America.

You may be surprised to hear that getting a mortgage is the perfect way to “hedge” the weakening dollar. When you borrow dollars to buy a house, you are essentially betting against the dollar and betting on the property.

If things go badly in America – if the dollar continues to weaken, if our politicians keep spending, if the national debt and taxes go up – housing will hold its value at the very least, and most likely will go up.

Importantly, it happens to be one of the best times in history to make this investment... for one big reason: Mortgage rates remain near their lowest levels in American history.

158 The Bureaucracy: Our Slothful Overlords

And we have another thing in our favor, driven by interest rates. Even after a boom in housing, affordability is still higher than we’ve seen through most of history.

“Affordability” takes three factors into account: home prices, your income, and mortgage rates.

The basic idea is simple. What do people think about when they buy a house? It’s not the price of the house, really... It’s the payment. People think, “Can I afford this mortgage payment on my monthly income?”

When mortgage rates hit 20% in the early 1980s, monthly house payments were ridiculously high... It was the least affordable time in American history. The second least affordable time in American history was at the peak of the housing bubble in 2006.

But then, home prices crashed. They’ve rebounded a bit, but we still have good value. And mortgage rates recently hit record lows. Since household incomes nationwide haven’t fallen nearly as much, homes are now darn affordable.

Based on these facts alone, now is one of the best times in American history to buy a house. I don’t think we will ever see an opportunity this good again in U.S. housing... Not in my lifetime.

I have two secrets for you that will allow you to succeed in property now that the market has moved up...

I. Don’t get stuck on getting the lowest price.

I believe a “fair price” today will turn out to be a great price in hindsight... a few years from now. Don’t miss out on a great property because of a small percentage difference in your negotiation. You don’t want to try to win the lowball game, only to miss out on a great opportunity.

II. Buy the good stuff now, even though it has moved up in price.

You don’t have to guess which neighborhood is the next “up and coming” area... The areas that are already good are still a great value even though they’re up. They will go up more as the housing market recovers. They are a smarter buy.

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Even though prices and mortgage rates have moved up, the upside potential in housing right now is still incredible...

Most housing experts don’t understand the idea of “relative value” of real estate today versus other assets... They don’t take into account that the bank pays near-zero interest... so there’s nothing left out there for people to do with their money! Who wants to earn near-zero interest on paper money in the bank when you can own a real asset that can pay you rent?

Your downside risk is also limited because a house can’t lose all its value like a stock can.

Your upside potential is also incredible, by the way... even if interest rates are going up...

For example, interest rates in the 1970s shot up – from 7.5% to near 15%. House prices went straight up, too. From 1970 to 1980, house prices went up from about $20,000 to about $60,000.

If you bought a house in 1970 with a 20% down payment (roughly $4,000), a decade later you would have been sitting on a 784% return on your initial investment. (This return doesn’t include property taxes or interest or anything. It’s just comparing the initial equity in 1970 – the down payment – to the rise in value by 1980.)

Here’s the thing: Housing was affordable in the early 1970s. And house prices soared. Today – after the great bust and with our ultra-

160 The Bureaucracy: Our Slothful Overlords low mortgage rates – housing is affordable again. Triple-digit gains – even with a big down payment like in the example above – are certainly possible. I expect we’ll see them!

And remember, buying a house – specifically, by taking out a mortgage – is the perfect hedge against a weakening dollar. You’re betting against the dollar and betting on your home – and housing in general.

Considering the direction our country is headed, and given the perfect storm we now have in housing, this is the absolute best investment you can make over the next several years.

161

Taxes: Your Property Is Their Plunder

— Chapter 8 — Taxes: Your Property Is Their Plunder

“The power to tax is the power to destroy.” – John Marshal

“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.” – Anonymous

Nobody knows where that quote comes from. It has been appearing on the internet in blog posts and chain e-mails since at least the start of the George W. Bush presidency.

Some posts online have cited the author is “Alexander Tyler,” which is generally thought to be a reference to the Scottish historian of the late 18th century Alexander Fraser Tytler. The quote is supposed to have been excerpted from Tytler’s work, “The Fall of the Athenian Republican,” which is apocryphal. So this might be the most famous, profound, made-up quote since Abraham Lincoln said, “Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.”

Nonetheless, this quote is a prophecy that many Americans believe is coming true, one way or another.

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The voices in this country who want mass redistribution of wealth are only growing louder and more powerful. Taxation of the rich has been turned into a moral issue. And as the government runs out of money in the treasury to pay off its obligations, “soak the rich” will turn into a socialist rallying cry.

This is happening as the politics of class warfare on the rise. It was a central theme for every Democratic presidential candidate in 2020. There are constant admonitions in public from some of the most powerful figures in government against the evils of the “millionaires and billionaires,” a phrase Bernie Sanders has made infamous. Nobody seems to care that Bernie Sanders is worth about $2.5 million – least of all the socialist senator from Vermont.

In the hands of shameless demagogues, class warfare is a powerful weapon. It’s based on a simple proposition: envy.

Socialism itself is a creed that relies on envy as a major motivator. The people who are doing well financially must have done something wrong to be where they are, the envy-peddling charlatans say. If only they “paid their fair share,” all of society’s needs would’ve been met. Everyone would have everything they need, were it not for the unrelenting capitalists’ greed. This has the added benefit of creating a built-in excuse for all of government’s failures in the past. If only our statist overseers had more of our tax dollars, they argue, and greater leeway to implement their plans, the bureaucrats could create a paradise on Earth.

These are all lies, of course. And the hypocrisy behind the most powerful proponents of this philosophy is mind-blowing. The left-wing elites love to trash the system that put them in elevated socio-economic statuses, pretending that they are sorry for their own accumulation of wealth. We could fill an entire book with the protestations of ultra-rich liberals, especially in Hollywood and the prestige news media, who like to go out in public and proclaim the need for much higher taxes.

These liberal elites are shameless with their opportunistic class warfare antics. Actor Mark Ruffalo is a case in point. Perhaps best known for playing the Gamma Ray-enhanced monstrous green 164 Taxes: Your Property Is Their Plunder superhero known as the “Incredible Hulk” in the Avengers movie series, Ruffalo is among the most vocal celebrities on the scene when it comes to “social justice” (the moral code of socialists).

As the Democratic primary was heating up toward the end of 2019, Ruffalo shared this with his millions of Twitter followers:

“It’s time for an economic revolution. Capitalism today is failing us, killing us, and robbing from our children’s future.”

This is beyond absurd. Capitalism has been the greatest poverty- eradication program in the history of the human species. There’s nothing else that even comes close.

To suggest that the capitalist economic system that has led to the greatest leaps in human prosperity in recorded history is somehow “killing us” is impossible for an intelligent, well-informed person to believe.

You know what does kill people? Starvation. And globally, starvation- level poverty has decreased 80% since 1970. Thank you, capitalism (along with fossil fuels, which the green-energy socialists also want to abolish).

Keep in mind, Ruffalo is worth tens of millions of dollars. But he is far from alone in this socialist virtue signaling.

Michael Moore, who made a “documentary” on Cuba’s health care system that could have come straight from Castro’s own propaganda ministry, has said “capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil.” Moore owns almost a dozen homes, including a 10,000-square- foot mansion in Michigan.

Susan Sarandon, Danny DeVito, and a host of other ultra-rich actors have appeared in advertisements for Bernie Sanders’s socialism. They are super rich, sanctimonious socialists. They used to call these “limousine liberals,” but now “private jet progressive” might be a better way to describe it. The most vocal advocates of socialism need to fly on private jets to their ultra-elite conferences on wealth redistribution and fighting climate change.

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That’s because these celebrities aren’t content to merely plug socialism at home. As useful idiots, many of them gallivant to the most decrepit socialist hellholes in the world for some photo ops and the righteous feeling of condemning American consumerism or imperialism or some other nonsense. Socialists are quite happy to lecture countries where the population doesn’t have clean water and are still dying of malaria that they need to embrace solar powerful and other renewables.

Venezuela, which has been the single-greatest advertisement against socialist policy of the last decade, has been able to count on a steady stream of idiotic celebrities like Danny Glover and Sean Penn to show up and lend their star power to dictators like Chavez and Maduro.

We can’t write off this impulse for moral grandstanding as the sole province of ill-educated celebs and opportunistic politicians. Some of the biggest names in finance also like to engage in some redistributive moral preening – specifically on the topic of taxes.

Warren Buffett – the “Oracle of Omaha” – repeatedly told the world in 2013 how upset he was that he paid a lower effective tax rate on income than his secretary. Outraged pundits on CNBC and various other cable outlets took this as a proof that clearly something had to be done. Left-wing politicians saw an opening. They proposed the so- called “Buffett Rule” as a minimum tax on high earners.

Here was perhaps the most celebrated American investor of the 20th century giving the tax-and-spend liberals one of their most effective talking points in years. The Obama administration said they wanted to implement it, but Republicans in Congress were strongly opposed, and the momentum behind changing the tax code to reflect the “Buffett Rule” faded away.

There are obvious problems with Buffett’s formulation...

Indeed, the primary reason that Buffett would pay a lower tax rate than his secretary is because the capital gains rate is lower than that on ordinary income above a certain level. The argument here is straightforward: income that can be invested in the markets has

166 Taxes: Your Property Is Their Plunder already been taxed. Plus, there is a broader benefit to the economy from such investment activity that spurs jobs and investments.

There’s certainly room to argue that the capital gains tax is too favorable for those with the disposable income to get involved in the market. But to say that the rich don’t “pay their fair share” of taxes, in Obama’s oft-repeated formulation, is inaccurate. Irrespective of Buffett’s grandstanding about his secretary, the top 1% of earners paid an effective income tax rate of about 26.9% in 2013.

Back here in reality today, the top 1% of American income earners bring home 20% of all adjusted gross income and pay 37% of income taxes. In simple math terms, the top earners are pulling nearly double their weight when it comes to our progressive tax system.

Looking at the scale from the other end can be even more illuminating...

The bottom 50% of earners pay just 3% of all income taxes. That means the top 50% of American earners pay 97% of all income taxes. So the Democrats – and yes, the socialists – have a built-in constituency that will always want more “free stuff” and vote for anyone who promises them the same because they perceive that they only benefit from such a system. How to Pay for Free Stuff Socialists, of course, love taxation. That’s how they at least pretend they want to make down payments for the “free stuff” that they promise to give the masses, whether it’s health care, education, housing, or any of the other goodies they have on the docket.

And raising taxes on the rich is always the Left’s answer to “where will the money come from?” even though the rich don’t have anywhere near enough to pay for the kind of programs that the Sanders/Warren wing of the Democratic Party promises.

People who can do math already know this...

If the U.S. government took every dollar via outright wealth confiscation from each of the approximately 550 billionaires in this

167 The Socialism Survival Guide country, it would fund the federal government at current spending levels for about nine months. In 2016, total federal outlays according to the CBO were about $3.9 trillion. All the billionaires in America have a total wealth of around $2.5 trillion. Anyone who can add or subtract knows there’s a problem here.

If you want massive government spending along the lines of the Swedish system, you need huge tax increases not just on the rich, but on the middle class too. And that’s assuming the focus will be on income tax rates. The proponents of European-style socialist welfare system have an endless array of innovative ways to stick their hands deep into your pockets, including the consumption taxes like the Value Added Tax (“VAT”).

This is where Elizabeth Warren could appear in one of her cringe- worthy campaign ads promising that the answer to all of this is... a wealth tax. In rhetorical terms, a wealth tax has some advantages for socialists over an “income tax.” Lots of people have income, but “wealth” is something for rich people. This makes the wealth tax a weapon of socialist central planners that cannot be dismissed out of hand.

Even on the right, you will come across conservatives who recognize that, given the way our financial system works, there is something inherently less fair about a person, say, paying 25% of their income from a billion dollars of stock-market holdings than a wage earner who pays 25% of his $250,000 a year with no major assets.

This is also why the ultra-rich are often liberals (like Warren Buffett) who grandstand over how they think the rich – like them – should pay higher taxes. There’s a world of financial difference in America today between a person who makes $500,000 annually and one who makes $5 million... but both would qualify to pay the maximum federal income tax rate of 35%.

Meanwhile, the elitist advocates for higher taxes as a matter of policy find every way possible to avoid paying high rates themselves.

In one of the more memorable examples from back in 2004, John Kerry, then the Senator from Massachusetts running for the

168 Taxes: Your Property Is Their Plunder

Democratic presidential nomination, had to disclose his finances – or more importantly, the income of his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry. You see, against all odds John Kerry managed to marry ultra-wealthy heiresses not once, but twice. And his wife in 2004 made over $5 million, mostly from tax-exempt bonds, and paid 12.3% of total income in federal taxes.

You read that right – 12.3%.

It’s easy to ignore what the federal government takes from you when you’ve stored up enough money to last dozens of lifetimes and have sophisticated accountants and attorneys who can help game the system. That’s simply not the case for “high earners” making over $510,300 a year who, if they lost their job or had a major life event that dramatically affected their income, could easily face financial strain or ruination. Ask any Wall Street analyst or Silicon Valley software engineer: $500,000 a year makes you well paid, but it doesn’t make you “rich” in any major American city.

The financial illiterates of our political class, led by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“AOC”), don’t care about any of these distinctions. AOC wants a 70% top tax rate on income. Here’s how she described it to Anderson Cooper, noted liberal television journalist and heir of the Vanderbilt fortune, on CNN:

“Once you get to the tippy-tops, on your $10 millionth dollar, sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60 percent or 70 percent. That doesn’t mean all $10 million dollars are taxed at an extremely high rate. But it means that as you climb up this ladder, you should be contributing more.”

“Contributing more” is a euphemism for taking private property through government coercion. Socialists like AOC like to talk about taxation as though it’s the moral equivalent of donating to the collection plate at church. On the contrary, if people like AOC get their way, the government will take even more money from you than it already does. And if you refuse, men with guns will come to your home, arrest you, and lock you in a cell. Those are the choices you are afforded for your “contribution.”

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As always, it’s all about “fairness” for the Left. What is “fair” when it comes to taxes? Whatever they say it is.

The mainstream media, which is effectively an organ of the Democrat Party (and, therefore, also riddled with socialists), will blast out whatever wealth-redistribution talking points the Left wants them to. One of their favorites is to point to cherry-picked, out-of-context moments in the past where the top marginal tax rate was higher in America.

For example: Socialists that try to support AOC’s demanded doubling of the tax rate point to the Eisenhower administration. It is true that under the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s, there was a statutory top marginal tax rate of 91%. What the libs won’t tell you, however, is the highest 1% of earners during that period paid 42% in taxes.

Only about an estimated 10,000 households at that time made enough money to fall into the 92% tax bracket, and only the top tier of their income had to be paid on that amount. There were also significant loopholes and likely underreporting of income from those families. Despite all the socialists’ complaints about our “rigged system,” the top 1% of earners in this country have paid about 35% to 40% of their income in taxes for the last 50 years.

This is why the socialists have moved beyond just a demand for higher tax rates.

Now they want a wealth tax. Endless Shenanigans

The truly “progressive” position of a wealth tax would mean taxing overall assets above a certain threshold. As Democratic presidential candidates, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders both espoused the virtues of a wealth tax.

Warren has two brackets for this latest socialist innovation – 2% for assets over $50 million and 6% over $1 billion. Sanders wants 2% for assets over $32 million and 8% over $10 billion.

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Here’s one of the most troubling things about the socialist wealth tax: it’s popular.

According to the data we have from 2019, about 61% of people support Warren’s tax. Unsurprisingly, Democrats with a college degree are overwhelmingly in favor of a wealth tax, with more than 80% support coming from both men and women in that category. But about half of Republicans say they support some form of wealth tax.

While this level of bi-partisan support may be startling, it’s not hard to understand the thinking behind it. It is estimated that only 75,000 families would be affected by a Warren or Sanders wealth tax – and by definition those families are wealthy. Even a lot of avowed capitalists aren’t going to shed tears for the Bloomberg, Bezos, or Gates families having to dip into their savings a few percentage points at the government’s demand.

While the American public seems largely in favor of a wealth tax in theory, one of the major problems it raises is implementation.

The decision to tax income instead of assets is largely because of logistical challenges. Most Americans who receive a wage a subject to mandatory withholding, and those who don’t have money taken out of their paychecks on behalf of the government have to send quarterly “estimated payments.” The government knows that it can take a piece of your income because the cash is in the bank, so to speak.

But for those whose net worth would fall into the “wealth tax” bracket, who would be in charge of determining the true value of their assets?

Some of the wealthiest families in America own large pieces of private companies. Would they be forced to sell those? Who would determine the price? Would the government step in and declare a fair market value, as it does through other (often controversial) processes like its use of eminent domain?

The wealth tax may sound reasonable at first, but it would quickly turn into a logistical nightmare. 171 The Socialism Survival Guide

The courts would become overburdened with wealthy plaintiffs suing the federal government over disputed asset valuation. Is a billionaire’s mansion in Malibu or Manhattan worth $50 million or $75 million? Usually the real estate market would decide. Under a wealth tax system, a bunch of unelected bureaucrats – probably a newly engorged wing of the IRS – would get to determine the value and therefore the price tag it would incur.

If a wealth tax was passed, there would also be endless shenanigans from the rich who would do everything they could to evade its grasp on their bank accounts. When that fails, they would do what the rich always do when the system isn’t working in their favor: add a loophole.

There’s a reason the federal tax code is about 2,600 pages long... and why when you add IRS rulings, opinions, and regulations onto the Congressional taxation statues, it stretches closer to 70,000 pages. It’s a massive monument to corruption, pay-to-play, carve-outs, pork projects, and all manner of government cronyism.

The tax code is how companies like General Motors can use “net operating loss carry forward” to avoid paying any federal income tax for years. The more massive the tax code, the easier it is for politicians beholden to the donor class and corporate sponsors of their campaigns to sneak special favors and carve outs into it.

If the socialists are able to get a wealth tax written into law, the wealthy people they are trying to tax will push to get exemptions, or they will just further utilize incentives already structured into the tax code.

Instead of just guessing about the impact of a wealth tax, we can look to our neighbors across the Atlantic to see that, sure enough, a wealth tax is not an effective plan for raising revenue. In fact, many Europeans countries that are substantially more socialist than America have abandoned a wealth tax altogether.

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (“OECD”) data shows that countries with a wealth tax went from 14 in 1996 to 4 in 2017

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In the OECD data, the countries that collected revenues from net wealth taxes on individuals in 2017 are Switzerland, Spain, France, and Norway. Revenues from net wealth taxes made up 3.62% of revenues in Switzerland in 2017 but just 0.55% of revenues in Spain. Among those four OECD countries collecting revenues from net wealth taxes, revenues made up just 1.45% of total revenues on average in 2017.

Of all the countries in OECD, France may be the best case study of the socialists’ counterproductive approach to taxing wealth. The French had a wealth tax from 1982 to 1986, abandoned it, then gave it another shot from 1988 to 2017.

You might ask, why would the Leftist Frenchies go back to a wealth tax after it failed one time?

Remember, socialists never learn from their mistakes.

The “fair” intentions of the socialist wealth tax override any downsides of the policy. The repetition of socialist failure is considered devotion to the cause.

In theory, the French wealth tax was pretty straightforward: There was a rate of between 1.5% and 1.8% surtax on fortunes over $13 million euros. As a means of clawing France out of its financial duress (caused by massive social welfare programs), the wealth tax amounted to a rounding error. It never got much above 1% of tax revenue in France.

Like so many socialist wealth-redistribution schemes, there were unintended but entirely foreseeable consequences. About 10,000 wealthy Frenchmen took on Belgian citizenship... which meant that not only did the French government lose the income from the wealth tax of these individuals – they repatriated all of their other taxable activities, too.

After seeing its meager returns for decades, France dropped its wealth tax – which was also called a “solidarity tax” – in 2018. The socialists there (just like they are doing here in the States) had agitated for its passage for years. When it was finally implemented,

173 The Socialism Survival Guide the inevitable downsides came to pass, but the socialists demanded it stay as a matter of “fairness.”

The only positive outcome one could point to from France’s foray into a wealth tax was that, as a matter of pure numbers, wealth inequality shrunk in France because so many wealthy people left gave up their French citizenship. How anyone could think this helps those with less wealth remains a question that only socialists could pretend to answer.

The French wealth tax wasn’t the only effort to close the “inequality” gap using a soak-the-rich taxation strategy. France also implemented – and then had to abandon – its so-called “millionaire’s tax” of 75% on income above a million euros for many of the same reasons that the wealth tax didn’t work.

France’s richest man, CEO of LVMH Bernard Arnault, got Belgian citizenship in response to the supertax. The famed actor Gerard Depardieu moved to Belgium, and then became a Russian citizen. Even Emanuel Macron, once an advisor to socialist French President Francois Hollande, referred to the 75% tax as “Cuba without the sun.”

So the French socialists’ efforts to tamp down inequality and help pay for a massive welfare state with punitive taxes on the wealthy were flops. One would think that this might be taken as a warning sign for socialists here in America that repeating the mistakes of our Gallic cousins across the ocean would be foolish. Not for socialists though! Where others see the abject failure of central planning, American socialists see an opportunity to run the same experiment on an even bigger scale.

Keep in mind, Warren and Sanders have talked about rates of taxation on wealth as high as 6% and 8%, respectively, for the wealthiest Americans. Under the headline “Tax on Extreme Wealth,” here is how socialist Democratic 2020 election contender Bernie Sanders describes the tiered confiscation plan on his website:

“It would start with a 1% tax on net worth above $32 million for a married couple... the tax rate would increase to 2% on net worth from $50 to $250 million, 3% from $250 to $500

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million, 4% from $500 million to $1 billion, 5% from $1 to $2.5 billion, 6% from $2.5 to $5 billion, 7% from $5 to $10 billion, and 8% on wealth over $10 billion. These brackets are halved for singles.

At first glance, it’s pretty easy to come away thinking that none of these taxes would hurt the ultra-wealthy too much. Anyone who has a billion dollars in the bank isn’t worried about paying the mortgage or the grocery bills. But that mentality – which the American socialists are counting on – ignore the reality of how people become billionaires in this country, and what it would require for them to pay taxes explicitly meant to penalize them.

Hank Sadler and Madison Spach crunched the numbers in a Wall Street Journal editorial in December 2019 titled “How to Pay the Wealth Tax: Sell Everything.” In the piece, Sadler and Spach take a hypothetical founder of a company that has a value of $6 billion and apply Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax.

They came to the conclusion that over the course of five years, the founder of this hypothetical business would have had to sell $3.69 billion of the company, hemorrhaged 61% of his personal net worth, and lost control of his own company. Needless to say, the impact this would have had on the theoretical business itself over those five years, including layoffs and stock-price implications, would be catastrophic as well.

And that’s exactly the point. Ultimately, socialists don’t want to rein in billionaires – they want to eliminate them.

Socialists view billionaires as existing in an inherently immoral condition. French novelist Honoré de Balzac is usually (wrongly) credited with the saying “behind every great fortune lies a crime.” Regardless of the attribution, Sanders certainly seems to believe the faulty maxim.

Sanders targets billionaires for punitive taxation because envy is a powerful political tool. It allows Sanders and other socialists like him to play on the emotion of crowds. That billionaires create services that millions of people enjoy and that tens of thousands of people

175 The Socialism Survival Guide rely on for jobs is forgotten in the rush of demagoguery over “paying their fair share” and the billionaire class “controlling our democracy.” Sanders isn’t as concerned with the revenue from his wealth tax as he is the virtue signaling of being against billionaires. The erosion and eventual elimination of billionaires’ fortunes is not considered an unfortunate side effect of his tax proposal, it’s a central selling point. The Sanders 2020 website makes this clear:

“Under this plan, the wealth of billionaires would be cut in half over 15 years which would substantially break up the concentration of wealth and power of this small privileged class.”

If this doesn’t make it obvious enough how he really feels, Sanders tweeted out in September 2019 that “Billionaires should not exist.”

His wealth tax plan isn’t meant to get billionaires to chip in more. Over time, Sanders wants to make it impossible to stay a billionaire or become one in the first place.

This is the kind of economic wisdom you can expect from a guy who tweeted out “If pitchers can make $324 million, we can pay every teacher in the country at least $60,000.” Sanders doesn’t understand how free markets work, doesn’t know the history of the schemes he is proposing, and even if he did, it’s quite apparent he wouldn’t care. Blatant Government Robbery “Rich people are bad” has been a rallying cry used to rile up a mob since the first caveman amassed too many shiny stones for his neighbor’s liking. While America is enjoying the greatest period of wealth creation and prosperity of any country in the history of the planet, coveting thy neighbors’ goods remains a human frailty that is just too tempting.

Socialists, as cynical and the power-hungry as they are, will continue to exploit this. There will always be a minority of “the wealthy,” and the majority will enjoy being told that these fortunate souls have too much and should give away more of their stuff. When the subjects of this are truly as rich as billionaires, the emotional impulse for redistribution can override even the most compelling arguments in favor of property rights and incentives of a free market. 176 Taxes: Your Property Is Their Plunder

But under the same socialist logic, wealth confiscation could easily be expanded beyond the billionaire class. Once the government has created an opening to take a percentage of everything that you have, no asset class can be considered safe. This is where concerns rise about the possibility of a socialist siphoning off – or even outright seizure – of 401(k) plans.

Before dismissing this as simply too outlandish, keep in mind that a number of countries in Europe have already experienced some form of pension “restructuring” in recent years that amounted to a seizure of private money.

Over the last decade or so, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, France, and a handful of other European states have changed the rules around retirement funds on the whim of finance bureaucrats. In 2011, the Hungarian government told those with individual retirement accounts that they could either hand over the funds to the state, or they would be barred from the state pension system – which they would have to continue contributing to either way.

Perhaps the starkest example of all is the Cypriot banking crisis of 2012 to 2013. In order to stave off the bankruptcy of their banking system, the government in Nicosia implemented a capital seizure program. They needed $10 billion bailout from the eurozone and the International Monetary Fund, so they created the “bail in” model for depositors. In simple terms, the Cypriot government stole a percentage of the private funds held in banks in order to keep the banks from collapsing.

For what was nothing short of legalized theft, the Cypriot government’s plan was easy enough to implement. First, in June 2012 Cyprus requested a bank bailout from the E.U. Later than year, Cyprus and the E.U. announced they had reached an agreement on the bailout size. In February 2013, The Democratic Rally candidate Nicos Anastasiades beat his Communist opponent in the election, and the next month, he announced the bailout terms: 6.75% confiscation of accounts with less than €100,000 and 9.9% for accounts with more than €100,000 in them.

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To make sure the unlucky depositors of Cyprus had no escape hatch for their capital, the central planners behind the “bail in” declared a bank holiday that lasted for a couple weeks. This was just a public relations-friendly way of spinning what was really going on: private accounts were frozen.

Even when banks opened up again, there were strict limits in place for how much could be withdrawn. And of course, when it was all over with, people who had trusted the Cypriot banking system, the local government, and the E.U. to protect private property got screwed. Money that was supposed to be there was just taken.

Guess what they called this blatant robbery by government? Taxes!

Those who remain true believers in the Eurozone and the central planning of bureaucrats in Brussels point to the Cyprus fiasco as an anomaly. After all, they say, Cyprus is a tiny fraction (0.2%) of the E.U.’s economy, and there were particular circumstances, Russian interests, money laundering concerns, and so on that had to be addressed.

None of this should make any of us feel much better.

Of course it was an “extreme” situation. Every time the government decides it’s going to break its word to its own people – to violate a compact – it claims that “this time is different” and that urgent action is needed to avoid total catastrophe. Every leader or legislature who transgresses on property rights has an excuse (usually a series of them) for their behavior, no matter how dishonest or severe.

The U.S. government picked winners and losers in the 2008 bank bailout, which was given the intentionally genteel-sounding designation of “Troubled Asset Relief Program” (“TARP”). Some banks got saved (hooray, Goldman Sachs!), others didn’t (sorry, Lehman Brothers). The feds engaged in similar capricious and cronyistic decision-making around the same time based not on law or sound economics, but on politics.

When the Obama administration decided to bail out General Motors with $50 billion of taxpayer dollars in 2009, it was barely remarked

178 Taxes: Your Property Is Their Plunder on that bond holders were – in violation of existing law – wiped out in favor of handing over even more power to the labor unions that had been an enormous drag on competitiveness for General Motors.

Obama’s team didn’t save GM from bankruptcy. It merely replaced a standard bankruptcy proceeding with one more to the Democrat- socialists’ liking. The Obama White House used the power of government to shovel taxpayer dollars to a struggling company that desperately needed to renegotiate union contracts if it was going to be a healthy company in the future.

The government-directed bankruptcy prevented that from happening. The Auto “Tsar” Steve Rattner (a term we have become far too comfortable with in American government) used the rubric of “saving jobs” to shovel money to the very unions that had been major part of dragging GM deep into the red.

This heavy-handed government intervention in the market is by no means a new phenomenon. When times get tough, the U.S. government has a long history of changing the laws on private property. All it takes is a market shock and some economic uncertainty, and then all of a sudden, our bureaucratic overlords will make some declaration that what you have isn’t really yours anymore.

Nowhere near enough Americans know the history of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 6102 signed on April 5, 1933. During a time of mass unemployment, mounting public debt, and growing unrest, FDR decreed via executive order – not a legislative act of Congress – that individuals who owned physical gold bars, coins, or bullion must bring it to a bank and exchange it at the official rate of $20.67 an ounce. This was a declaration from the White House of gold confiscation with compensation.

If the U.S. government can nullify bond contracts or insist that private citizens hand over their property, it can certainly decide to seize assets in a bank during the next crisis. What occurred in Cyprus is a small-scale version of what could happen in any developed country anywhere in the world, including here in America.

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During the next financial panic – which most observers view as cyclical and therefore inevitable – the U.S. government may decide to just seize assets to shore up the banks or some other troubled sector of the economy. If the crash is from a truly systemic risk like a national debt collapse, the government may become rapacious in its needs for immediate cash.

As of 2019, Americans held an estimated $5.9 trillion in assets in 401(k) plans. When the next financial panic occurs and the socialists of the Democratic party are able to leverage fear of the masses, any major store of privately held assets becomes an obvious target. You can’t judge the likelihood of such an event by sentiment right now, with unemployment low and a booming market. When the people are scared, the socialists have an opening.

And remember what Bernie Sanders says: “What seems radical today will seem mainstream tomorrow if we stand together.”

Socialists don’t plan to let it be a choice whether to stand with them.

You will give them what they want... Or they will take it.

PREDICTION 8: There will be a wealth tax in America within two election cycles.

Despite all the evidence that it will not have the intended revenue implications, a tax targeting the 1% is coming to America. The next Democrat-Socialist who wins the White House and has the votes in Congress will take action on this. If it’s really targeted at the wealthiest American households, it will be politically popular enough that the Democrats will feel emboldened to push it through.

For the Left, instituting a wealth tax is much more about optics than it is about adding to the Treasury’s coffers... though they like that, too.

Leftists view taxing “the rich” as a moral crusade. It plays on the envy of the masses against the most financially fortunate. As you can see every time Bernie Sanders rails on about “millionaires and billionaires” and the “Aw-li-gawhks,” there is no form of socialist demagoguery easier or more effective than pointing the finger at the rich.

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And as is always the case with socialism, even the failure of “the plan” won’t result in any lessons learned.

Democrats will institute a wealth tax knowing that no matter how ineffective or counterproductive it may be, if Republicans repeal it, they will be derided as tools of the rich. Their way is always a win-win for socialist true believers and a lose-lose for America and freedom.

What can you do to mitigate the upcoming wealth tax on your finances? There’s always the dirty little secret that many of the wealthy have already figured out: loopholes. The U.S. tax code is a document that is tens of thousands of pages long to give government a critical tool of policy (meddling in markets and your life), as well as to hand out goodies and carve-outs to special interests.

In response to Senator Harry Reid’s intentional smear claim that Mitt Romney hadn’t paid taxes in 10 years, Mitt’s response was that he “paid all the taxes owed.” That wasn’t an effective punch-back effort at the sinister Senator from Nevada – but it should be your attitude toward a wealth tax. Pay exactly what you owe and not a penny more. Let the Democrat demagogues be the ones to start making voluntary donations to the federal government first.

Whatever ways you can find to legally evade the seizure of your property under a wealth tax are fair game. How to Survive & Profit Capitalism has been the greatest poverty eradication program in the history of the human species – nothing else even comes close.

But still, the government thinks it can spend your money better than you can. And taxes are the only way that socialists can pay for all the “free stuff” that they promise you in order to get elected.

What is “fair” when it comes to taxes? Whatever the government says it is...

And the current taxes – federal, state, and local income taxes, payroll taxes, corporate taxes, property tax, vehicle taxes, school taxes, gas taxes, sales tax, capital gains taxes, and even estate taxes after you die – just aren’t enough. 181 The Socialism Survival Guide

Now, the radical “progressive” left wants a wealth tax.

And if the government knows about it, you can bet that they’ll try to tax it. But there are a few things that you don’t have to report to the government...

The Three Assets You Do NOT Have to Report to the U.S. Government Insight From Stansberry Research, America’s Most Trustworthy Financial Publisher

Things may seem OK on the surface in America right now...

Sure, the market’s rally over the past few years has been punctuated by some sharp down days... and the global economic news often sounds bad... But by and large, the neighborhood you woke up in today feels a lot like it always did.

Your friends still tool around in the same kinds of cars they always did... You and your wife still go for dinner and a movie when you can find a babysitter... And you still go over to your neighbor’s house on Saturday to drink a couple beers and watch the game on their big-screen TV...

But I can tell you with near certainty that the next few years are going to be a major shock for most people in this country.

The debts our country has rung up are coming due... And we can’t afford them anymore. Without the Fed keeping interest rates at artificial lows, we could not afford the interest payments on our national debt.

We’re on the cusp of a disaster...

It will result in the biggest government encroachment in our country’s history. It’s coming hard... and fast. And most people are going to be totally unprepared for the consequences.

The good news is that it’s not too late for you to do something about it.

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That’s why I’ve been encouraging everyone I know to take a few simple steps now to protect your money and your family.

Maybe you’re content to think heavy taxes aren’t your problem... That if a few rich folks feel the pinch, well... what’s it to you?

If that’s what you think, you’re wrong.

Without belaboring the point, it’s unimaginable that the U.S. can pay off its debts in our lifetimes... But here’s the catch – it’s going to try... Or rather pretend to try. And the only way to do that is to tax the bejesus out of anyone with a few assets to his name.

This is not a problem just for the wealthy... This is for anyone with a lifetime of savings. Under the current path, everyone who has something will be forced to give a share up to those who don’t have anything. And worse, we’ll be forced to give it to those too lazy to work for anything.

The way to protect yourself from runaway government thievery is to diversify your assets offshore... to move some portion of your wealth out of the country, somewhere safe.

And the time to protect yourself is now. Before the government restricts the flow of currency in and out of the country... Before it outlaws your ability to move you and your assets around... Before it starts confiscating things like gold. (Don’t laugh, FDR did it.)

I realize pulling up stakes and heading to an offshore “safe haven” isn’t realistic for everyone. But that doesn’t mean you’re trapped, that you have to accept whatever the government has in store...

Many of the editors at Stansberry Research have been researching how to do this legally for some time. “Legally” is critical... Remember, we’re talking about this because we don’t want to jeopardize our freedom.

And below are a few key steps you can take without uprooting yourself. But before we get started, you need one other piece of advice: Keep this to yourself. All of these tips are perfectly legal. But that doesn’t mean the government wants you to do these things... On

183 The Socialism Survival Guide the contrary, if too many people start talking about these things and taking the steps below, the government could easily change the rules. TIP No. 1: Open a Foreign Bank Account – Soon

If you open up a foreign financial account with less than $10,000, you do not have to report the assets. This comes under the Foreign Bank and Financial Authority (“FBAR”) regulations, and the IRS states you only have to report if:

• You have financial interest in, signature authority, or other authority over one or more accounts in a foreign country, and

• The aggregate value of all foreign financial accounts exceeds $10,000 at any time during the calendar year.

If you keep more than $10,000 in total overseas, you must report it or risk fines and jail time. (A mere 50% of your assets and up to five years in prison, if a judge decides the oversight was willful.) Be careful about interest-earning accounts, too. Let’s say you put $9,990 in an account in January, and you earn enough interest to take you over $10,000 by year-end. Well, guess what? Now, you must report the assets and the income.

Keep in mind... While U.S. citizens do not have to report assets under $10,000, they do still need to pay tax on their worldwide income and must report income generated from bank accounts – including overseas accounts.

And make sure you open a holding account... This allows you to keep the account in the currency of your choice.

One country you can visit with minimal effort to set up an offshore account is Canada. Most large banks there allow U.S. citizens to set up Canadian bank accounts. All you need to do is visit a local branch office at one of the banks and present two acceptable forms of identification, such as a valid passport and a driver’s license.

To make it even easier, you can set up both U.S. and Canadian dollar accounts. Each bank has different fee structures. But if you open an account with a minimum amount (usually $3,000), you can usually

184 Taxes: Your Property Is Their Plunder avoid monthly fees. Once your account is set up, you Anyone contemplating wealth can link your Canadian preservation and international account with your American diversification must understand one and transfer money as two U.S. government concepts: you choose. income tax and reportable assets.

Please contact a bank If you hold assets offshore, some representative for further are reportable to the government details before making the trip and some are not. to Canada. Here are a few to Income generated overseas is start with... always reportable. And you must TD Canada Trust at always pay tax on passive income www.tdcanadatrust.com such as interest, dividends, or or 1-866-222-3456 rent you collect.

RBC Royal Bank at Earned income may be exempt www.rbcroyalbank.com under the foreign earned income or 1-800-769-2511 exclusion (for tax year 2020, that’s the first $105,900 a year plus a Bank of Montreal at housing allowance). To qualify, www.bmo.com or you must meet one of two tests: 1-844-837-9228 1. Physical presence test: You Scotiabank at are physically present in www.scotiabank.com or a country outside the U.S. 1-800-472-6842 for 330 days in a 365-day period. And stay mindful of reporting requirements. If you decide 2. Bona fide resident test: You to open separate accounts in are a bona fide resident of a U.S. and Canadian dollars foreign country or countries – and the combined value for an uninterrupted period exceeds $10,000 – you must of an entire tax year. report it to the U.S. Treasury Department. There are many details in these requirements. Please contact your tax professional for advice specific to your individual situation.

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TIP No. 2: Buy a Little Bit of Land

Real estate is perhaps the best way of keeping assets overseas. The reason is simple: It’s not reportable. And if it generates no income, you pay no tax on it either. Some of the smartest folks we know invested in foreign real estate and now have millions of dollars in assets safely offshore.

Also, several countries (Panama and Costa Rica, for example) allow you to invest in real estate and even sustainable timber farms. With enough money invested, you can get permanent residency and even citizenship after five to seven years.

The publications International Living and Live and Invest Overseas are two great resources for learning more about international real estate opportunities. You can learn more at their websites: www. internationalliving.com and www.liveandinvestoverseas.com. TIP No. 3: Gold in the Bank And last, our absolute favorite tip for keeping wealth out of the United States...

Bullion gold and silver (and other metals) are not reportable, nor do they generate taxable income until you sell them. So keeping bullion in a private and secure place outside the U.S. is a simple way to hold (and move) assets out of the country.

One of the simplest ways to do this is by opening a safe deposit box in Canada. All you need to open a Canadian safe deposit box are two forms of identification – a passport and driver’s license works – and visiting the bank in person. (This can vary slightly depending on the bank, so call the bank you’re interested in first.)

One bank you can open a safe deposit box with is the Royal Bank of Canada. Some banks do not allow you to store currency or legal tender in a safe deposit box, so call the bank you’re interested in before making the trip.

You can use your box to store precious metals, cash, and other items you want to hold outside of the U.S. And the box fees are similar to

186 Taxes: Your Property Is Their Plunder the fees you’d pay at an American bank.

Transporting your gold to Canada may seem frightening to some people. We’ve heard stories of people having their gold confiscated by ignorant customs officials. But taking gold into Canada is 100% legal as long as you declare it to customs (you have to declare any amount of currency over $10,000). Of course, it’s also risky to carry large amounts of gold as you travel.

If you don’t want to handle transporting precious metals or cash to Canada yourself, you can use a professional transport service. (Although this can be expensive if you’re only moving a small amount of wealth.)

A third option is to purchase your gold or silver in Canada. This means you don’t have to carry large amounts of cash or precious metals while you travel. BONUS TIP: How to Reduce Your Income Taxes by 90%, Without Leaving America

And, of course, there are even bigger tax loopholes if you’re willing to do a little bit more work. One method that we’ve researched is a way to essentially remove yourself from onerous U.S. tax liability without leaving the U.S. and without giving up your citizenship.

By using this rarely publicized loophole, you can reduce your federal income tax burden by up to 90% and eliminate your taxes at the state level entirely.

But if it’s this good... and true... why isn’t everyone doing it?

This loophole won’t make sense for everyone. But it’s something every American should be aware of for consideration at some point. Think of it as an escape hatch...

To learn the full details, read our exclusive online briefing, How to Reduce Your Income Taxes by 90%, Without Leaving America, on www.StansberryResearch.com, using the credentials provided when you purchased The Socialism Survival Guide.

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The Battle for 2020 and Beyond

— Chapter 9 — The Battle for 2020 and Beyond

“So we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight. I suppose we could get lucky somehow. But on economics, as on everything else, a terrible thing has just happened.” – Paul Krugman, Election Night 2016

“By the way, I’m hoping for it because I think one way you get rid of Trump is to crash the economy. So please, bring on the recession.” – Bill Maher, 2018

The year 2020 has been of the most acrimonious election cycles in modern American history.

The Socialist-Democrats are uniquely deranged in their hatred for this particular president. When it comes to their descriptions of Trump, no degree of exaggeration is too extreme. Prominent voices on the Left – famous TV news anchors, Democrat members of Congress, former federal agency directors – have all either called this president a traitor, racist, rapist, white nationalist, or clinically insane.

Now, with the country fighting through the COVID-19 pandemic and with the enormous economic risks that accompany it, the political vitriol will hit new heights.

President Trump’s critics oscillate between calling him an incompetent who can’t understand the most basic functions of government... to accusing him of orchestrating an international conspiracy with Russia to steal both the 2016 and the 2020 election.

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Now they can add “caring about the stock market more than your grandma dying from coronavirus” to their arsenal of lies.

In the fall of 2019, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and her Democrat-socialist colleagues insisted that impeaching Trump was an “urgent national security matter.” Then they proceeded to sit on the articles of impeachment for six weeks. During that time, the world was just receiving its first warnings about COVID-19. Pelosi putting Trump and his White House team under siege as part of their continued soft coup operation was reckless... but entirely unsurprising.

The Left has no principles higher than the pursuit of power.

One feature of Trump that upsets the Left the most is rarely remarked on... He’s an ardent capitalist. Trump has his shortcomings (as any president does). And because of the unique way he approaches this presidency, his tone and messaging choices can seem scattershot.

But an area where Trump has never wavered is his belief in the underlying architecture of capitalism as the greatest machine for wealth creation, prosperity, and stability the world has ever known.

This is why the comparison of Trump and Obama on economic matters makes Leftists so prickly. The Obama legacy is one of massively increased government and bringing America closer to socialism than it had ever been before. There were costs apparent in that effort, however...

On Obama’s watch, America suffered through the worst recovery out of a recession since the Great Depression. It was only through the Herculean efforts of the astonishingly obsequious, dishonest lib media that the public perception was Obama somehow saved America from economic calamity.

Trump came into office with our supposed political and economic intelligentsia proclaiming that the markets would crash. Instead, the S&P 500 Index soared more than 50% in the first three years of Trump’s presidency – which is more than double the average return

190 The Battle for 2020 and Beyond of presidents before him. Quite a reversal from election night, when S&P futures plunged 5% when it became clear that President Trump was going to win.

The truth it that, were it not for the natural disaster of a once-in-a- century viral plague that descended upon the whole world, Trump could have cruised to reelection on the strength of the economy alone.

Trump’s approach to the American economy has been a real-life repudiation of the Democrat-socialist approach to our economy. Who can forget Nancy Pelosi, arguably the single-most influential Democrat legislator of her generation, arguing that Trump’s tax cut would amount to “Armageddon”?

The Democrats certainly plan to blame Trump for the economic downturn from COVID-19... despite the fact that it was government experts who told him shutting down the economy in March of 2020 was a matter of life and death.

We should also remember that a large number of pundits and former senior government officials tried, for the first three years of Trump’s presidency, to give the credit to his predecessor by calling it the “Obama economy.” This talking point was simply a delaying tactic while Democrats were hoping for a recession to hit so they could immediately pounce on Trump’s failed stewardship of the economy. And the black swan event of COVID-19 has given them that chance...

For the Left, there will be no fair accounting of what Trump’s actual policies did. It’s much more politically convenient to deny history and logic, all in order to protect the elevation of central planning and greater governmental involvement in our economy. As a matter of politics, President Obama leveraged the financial crisis very effectively. “You never let a serious crisis go to waste,” Obama’s White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told the Wall Street Journal back in 2008.

Unfortunately for the American economy, the Obama administration didn’t waste the opportunity for the socialist expansion our economic crisis posed...

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First, it added $8.58 trillion to the national debt – nearly doubling the debt that Obama inherited as president. In overall numbers, this was spending on an unprecedented scale.

Then there were the policy moves... Obamacare was rammed through Congress on a strictly partisan basis, which laid the groundwork for the “Medicare for all” push the socialists are waging today. Despite all of their massive spending and big government action, the economy remained for years, relative to previous recoveries, remarkably weak. Central planning underperformed, as it more or less always does.

Then Trump came into office, and his entire approach to governance enraged the Left. They hated the way he spoke, his manners, and his mannerisms. They seemed to take his very existence as an affront. Here was a billionaire, born and raised in New York City, who refused to play by the establishment’s rules.

On the economy, though, Trump’s approach has been largely in line with traditional GOP values. He cut taxes for everyone who paid them, with a notable drop in the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. Overall, he cut $5.5 trillion in taxes. He also took a chainsaw to the regulatory regime that socialists love as a means of engineering society to their liking as well as picking winners and losers in the marketplace.

For this, the Democrat-socialists hate him. Every successful decision Trump has made is a slap in the face to them. They predicted he would fail. They practically promised anyone who would listen that he would fail. And then he completely crushed his predecessor by every worthwhile economic metric we have. For the Left, it’s Trump’s successes that are the most unforgivable.

At least if he had been the bumbling buffoon they were so certain he would be, they would be in a position to make the case that a “return to normal” in our politics (also known as the “swamp”) would somehow benefit a majority of the American people. Instead, they are stuck trying to pretend that he has been a failure in areas where any reasonable observer would have to concede that he has been highly effective as the chief executive of the United States government.

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Sadly, it’s not just liberals that are upset with Trump.

The swamp has always been a bipartisan problem, even if Democrats are the worst example of its excesses and corruption. Many Republicans have been perfectly happy to sell out the people who voted for them and go along with the big government socialist crew when the donor class wanted them to... or when they were desperate for lukewarm praise in the editorial pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post.

The “Never Trump” movement, referring to those who still claim some allegiance to the Right without supporting the President, continues on in 2020. However, now it has undergone a metamorphosis. Some of those who initially claimed they would never support the president have, either as a result of Trump’s successes or their own desire to maintain some relevance to the GOP of today, decided to throw their full weight behind the president. (Never say never.)

Other prominent voices in the “Never Trump” movement on the Right have managed something that only political theorists might have thought possible before: They are so pure in their conservatism that they are now openly rooting for Leftists.

It’s tough to tell how much of this obstinacy is rooted in the widespread malady versus Trump derangement syndrome. Trump has driven millions of otherwise seemingly normal people to lose all sense of context, judgment, and rationality. Some Republicans were infected early on in 2016 and remain afflicted.

Trump’s mean tweets have ruffled some feathers among the tweed- jacket-with-elbow-patches-wearing conservative columnists from the good old days. Voices of the Right, who somehow still manage to work Reagan’s name into every third column they write, refuse to give credit to the current president. No doubt, they will also blame Trump for all the problems of COVID-19, especially the economic fallout.

And while Trump’s record would seem to many enough to overcome the hesitation that normal people share at Trump’s coarser outbursts,

193 The Socialism Survival Guide there are clearly some big names who reject this calculation. If they do so in good faith, well then that’s their prerogative. This is America still... at least until the socialists wreck it. Never Say Never And in this 2020 election year, you will see the Left try to make maximum use of the other contingent within Never Trumpism – the turncoats. These are the people in public life – mostly politics and media – who have decided to actively back the Democrat-socialist cause and candidates because they claim Trump is such a clear and present danger to the Republic. How convenient, it would seem, that these Never Trumpers claim to be so principled now, they are forced to abandon all the principles they previously spent their lives advocating.

Among the most well-known (and delusional) of these is Max Boot, a neoconservative author and academic who seems to have never found a war he wasn’t eager for other people to fight. Max’s personal war today, however, doesn’t involve any risk to life and limb on the front lines: It’s against Trump.

Mr. Boot, who during my time as a lowly intern for the Council on Foreign Relations was internally reviled as an archconservative (he was almost OK back then), now dances to a very different tune. In order to be splashed across the pages of the Washington Post or appear on CNN, Mr. Boot will always find a way to make everything about how Trump is awful.

A perfect example is his editorial from November of 2019 in the Washington Post Opinions section titled “Can American democracy survive a second Trump term?” It’s an enormously entertaining essay, though that’s completely unintentional... Boot is writing with utter seriousness. In one example, Boot expresses his worry that Trump will finally do all the things liberals have been saying he will do for years (but never does), including that:

“With only four years left to cash in on the presidency, Second- Term Trump could give free rein to epic, Russian-style corruption. He could hold Cabinet meetings at the Trump International

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Hotel, mandate that federal employees stay at his properties while traveling and sell federal land at rock-bottom rates for Trump projects. He could finally realize his dream of building a Trump Tower in Moscow – and in the capital of any other country that wants anything from the United.”

Trump also could declare himself king of the Planet Krypton and say that Elvis is hiding somewhere in the Oval Office. Unfortunately, there’s a big market for moronic analysis when it comes to Trump, and Mr. Boot has been among many cashing in on this.

Indeed, these are the useful idiots on the Right (or formerly on the Right) who will do the socialists’ work for them. The noisiest among them are a tiny group of public intellectuals whom the mainstream media will put on TV endlessly in advance of the 2020 election.

One of the Left’s favorite games in the Trump era is to put a “conservative” in a prominent position on a cable news show or in the editorial pages of some establishment news organization for the sole purpose of trashing Trump. You can expect a long parade of such sanctimonious frauds to be trotted out to make the case that socialist policies – whether Medicare for All, free college, or mass amnesty – are what the “true conservatives” support.

There are also elements of the GOP establishment that will quietly fight back against Trump. Unlike the team-hopping Never Trumpers, they won’t campaign for Democrats or openly advocate for their socialist policies. Instead, they will work surreptitiously behind the scenes to undermine the standard bearer of their party, either for their own self-interest, the sting of some lingering Twitter slight from Trump, or because of some deep-seated ideological opposition to one of his policies. Take Trade

Remember the free-trade absolutists? At the start of the Trump administration, it was the consensus opinion of the Washington, D.C., intelligentsia that Trump was making an enormous mistake with his “protectionist” policies.

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There was no shortage of finger-wagging from the think-tank world and assorted policy wonks that Trump didn’t understand anything about trade. He was wrong, they claimed, that the trade deficit was a bad thing, and even more wrong to try to address it through the usage of tariffs.

Trump moved ahead with his so-called “trade war” against China... And once again, the experts were left scrambling to explain the results.

Sure, there were some retaliatory trade moves from China – farmers in the Midwest got hit directly (and intentionally on Beijing’s part) – but at the end of Trump’s first three years in office, China was suffering through its worst economy in 30 years. The United States, on the other hand, has been setting records with its strong economy. If this was a trade war, Trump was kicking the Chinese Communist Party’s butt.

Now that everybody has seen this play out, the elite’s consensus has shifted on China-U.S. trade relations. Experts will openly concede that America should have confronted China on its predatory trade practices long ago. They are much more willing to state publicly that what was really happening before Trump came into office was a one- way trade war.

For decades, China was waging a trade war against America. America just wasn’t fighting back... until Trump came along and upended the bipartisan consensus.

Before COVID-19, Trump had entered phase one of a deal with Beijing that could put the U.S. on a pathway to a more equal and fair- trade relationship with China. Trump did all of this while being told by “experts” on both sides of the political aisle that it was something akin to madness to take any action against China.

Will those experts speak up in favor of Trump’s reelection given his ability to go against the smart set and instead follow his instincts? In most cases, it’s highly unlikely the policy intelligentsia will give credit where it’s due when it comes to Trump.

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He’s still considered a risk (and an ongoing insult) to the establishment. Those who have built careers giving advice to governments and corporations on trade (or any matter) are resentful of Trump swooping in and taking actions that – once we have seen the results – make the rest of us ask questions. If Trump was right and they were wrong, then who among these experts should we really trust? Experts and Journalists The expert class is still largely anti-Trump. As a function of their collective egos and self-interest, there will be countless think tankers and former senior government officials coming out of the woodwork to support the socialist policies and supposed leadership qualities of Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

Many are no doubt true believers who really think “spread the wealth” and “tax the rich” are great policy ideas for America’s middle class that will end poverty and bring about utopia. But there will be plenty of professional wonks who throw in their lot against Trump in this election because they want to go back to an era when the media could just refer to “experts” and most of America would nod in unison.

Speaking of resentful “experts”... No group of people in America is as psychotically spiteful toward this president as the mainstream media.

One of the great features of the Trump presidency so far – one that will benefit America no matter who wins the election – is that “journalism” as a profession comprised of skilled nonpartisan truth tellers has become laughable to any reasonable person. Journos are a bunch of left-wing activists posing as unbiased guardians of our liberty.

Journalism in America is now overwhelmingly left wing. Of political donations that journalists made in the 2016 election cycle, a stunning 96% went to Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. That isn’t indicative of a slight lean among those who run newsrooms and TV news channels... It’s total domination.

And this is by no means new to the Trump era. The establishment press has been effectively an organ of the Democrat Party since at

197 The Socialism Survival Guide least World War II. But the echo chamber effect has gotten even stronger at the major national outlets. There’s now total political polarization of the media that has transformed the news industry from a (stated) mission of information gathering and dissemination to a series mutually reinforcing left-wing propaganda efforts.

Previous GOP presidents were well aware of the left-wing bias of the media. Both Bush presidents and certainly Ronald Reagan knew that your average establishment journalist at the New York Times or Washington Post was about as likely to support socialism as a randomly picked member of the Oberlin or Brown University faculty lounge.

But the leaders of the GOP always felt obliged to treat members of the press as a hallowed institution worthy of respect, no matter how disrespectful and dishonest they were in how they did their jobs. Journos were free to undermine the Republican Party and conservatism in any way they saw fit, while simultaneously promoting the Democrats and their big-government, socialist agenda at every turn.

Thanks to Trump, that has changed. Part of the genius of this president is that he calls the media out for who they really are and what they really do. Instead of allowing the TV anchors, print reporters, and the biggest outlets in the country to constantly trash him without ever fighting back, Trump went on offense. When he began to call various Democrat-aligned outlets “fake news,” he was giving voice to what millions and millions of Americans had been feeling for years.

As we have seen, journos hate the “fake news” moniker. They complain endlessly that Trump’s criticism and mockery of their biases are an assault on the press itself. Many outlets publish self- pitying articles about how, just by making fun of them in public, Trump makes journalists physically unsafe. The New York Times writes about “ominous signs” and “threats of retribution” against journalists because of Trump.

They seem to have conveniently forgotten that “fake news” was a phrase that journalists popularized themselves. Part of the Left’s 198 The Battle for 2020 and Beyond narrative of how Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 – other than the Russia collusion insanity that the Democrats and their media allies fabricated – was that there were false stories circulating on social media sites in advance of election day.

Essentially, people were sharing things they saw on their Facebook feed without verifying where it came from or whether it was true. Many of these stories or posts involved common political memes or talking points. This “fake news,” the narrative went, must have changed minds and made people vote for Donald Trump instead of Hillary.

Therefore, as the journos told the tale of the 2016 election, Trump voters were too dumb to know real news from fake... And on top of that, the Russians and others who intentionally spread fake stories online stole the election from Hillary. This was just a roundabout way for journalists to both mock Trump voters and insinuate (without evidence) that Trump cheated.

In response to this, President Trump flipped the term “fake news” on the press itself, which has led to lots of whining and histrionics from the journalistic establishment. When Trump started to call journalists “the enemy of the people,” the Left acted like fascism had befallen America.

To bolster the otherwise flimsy case that Trump was an existential threat to the First Amendment, some in the media began to blame Trump for the anti-press statements of dictators abroad. When right- wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro claimed that his country and the U.S. stood together against fake news – or Philippine President Duterte’s spokesperson says that those spreading fake news about the President’s health should “kill themselves,” the media says it’s all Trump’s fault.

In an incredible feat of cognitive dissonance, anti-Trump reporters are willing to believe that Trump is an incompetent who cannot accomplish anything, while also leaving open the possibility that anything anywhere in the world can be attributed to Trump’s misdeeds. They certainly plan to heap as much blame for coronavirus on the president as they can. 199 The Socialism Survival Guide

So we know that more than 90% of the American news media despises President Trump. And an astonishingly high number of journalists are also favorable to – if not open advocates for – socialism. You can expect that as the 2020 election season heats up, the establishment press is going to do everything in its power to tear down Trump and clear the way for a socialist Democrat president. Scorched-Earth Tactics As America enters this pivotal election year – one that will be either an affirmation or repudiation of socialism – we should keep in mind the lessons of Kavanaugh. The Supreme Court nomination battle over Brett Kavanaugh in the summer of 2018 was one of ugliest political spectacles of my lifetime.

There were a number of reasons the Left despised Kavanagh, an eminently qualified judge and by most accounts an incredibly decent human being. But he was white, male, and Republican... which as far as liberals are concerned, were strikes one, two, and three.

He also was taking a Supreme Court seat that the Left had convinced itself “belonged” to Merrick Garland. The Republican Senate majority under Mitch McConnell held the line and refused to give Garland a confirmation vote, effectively keeping a seat vacant that the Democrat-socialists insisted Obama should be allowed to appoint and get confirmed.

Most important, Kavanaugh was believed to be a more reliable constitutional conservative than Anthony Kennedy had been, meaning that the political leaning of the court could move to the right. For the Left, this was an intolerable outrage.

After decades of having the Supreme Court decide major policy questions in their favor, the Democrat-socialists now faced the real possibility that the Supreme Court would interpret constitutionality of the law instead of making the law up as they saw fit. To prevent this, Senate Democrats and their lackeys in the mainstream media launched an all-out campaign of destruction against Kavanaugh.

A series of three women came forward to accuse Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct stretching back more than 30 years ago. Some 200 The Battle for 2020 and Beyond found Christine Blasey Ford to be a credible-sounding witness against Kavanaugh, even though she had absolutely zero proof of Kavanaugh’s misconduct or that she had ever even met Kavanaugh.

There were also gaping holes in her story, convenient memory lapses, and a complete and utter lack of any corroborating evidence or testimony. In fact Blasey Ford’s own best friend from high school, Leland Keyser, didn’t believe the tale, telling reporters on the record “it just didn’t make any sense” and “I don’t have any confidence in the story.”

Two more women came forward after Blasey Ford, Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick. Ramirez took a week of coaching from her lawyers to even recall if Kavanaugh engaged in misconduct against her, and Swetnick told the world that a high school-aged Brett Kavanaugh was running a gang-rape ring in the D.C. area that involved drugging and assaulting large numbers of young girls. Somehow, no one else heard a whisper of this happening back in the 1980s – probably because it was an absurd and obvious lie. Swetnick was an attention-seeking loon, and Ramirez was willing to throw in with her political side to try to take down Kavanaugh.

Blasey Ford was the only one of the three accusers who wasn’t immediately clear as an obvious, outright liar, though the most likely explanation for her allegation is a combination of emotional distress, delusion, and political malice.

Ultimately, Justice Kavanaugh was narrowly confirmed to the Supreme Court in a 50-48 vote. For anyone watching the proceedings in good faith, it was a clear, vicious political hit job. And the lingering bitterness and political polarization from it likely helped the Republicans keeping control of the Senate in the 2018 midterm election.

Now you might ask, what does the all-out battle over the Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation have to do with the 2020 presidential election and the socialists who seek to win against Trump?

The scorched-earth tactics against Kavanaugh are just a taste of things to come.

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Every Attack Will Be Resurrected

In 2020, the Left will deploy any tactic that works. Lies, smears, bizarre conspiracy theories about collusion – nothing will be considered out of bounds.

As we go to press, it’s clear that the Left believes its single most effective weapon against Trump will be the human and economic toll of the COVID-19 virus. Every casualty will be blamed on President Trump’s allegedly slow response. They will claim that he did not listen to experts, and that he favored the stock market over human life... even though he shut down the entire economy to try to slow the spread of the virus and mitigate its toll.

The full consequences of the pandemic of 2020 remain to be seen – but the Left will be shamelessly leveraging it to oust Trump from office no matter what he does and what the country looks like come the fall.

The pandemic is a horrific crisis for America... and the whole world. Politically, the Democrats see it as an opportunity to take back power and implement their goals – perhaps even more radically and rapidly than they could have before the virus spread.

The Democrat Party is both closer than it has ever been to its socialist goals and more deranged in its opposition to a Republican political figure than ever. The Left hated Reagan... And they are psychotically enraged to the point of delusion when it comes to Donald Trump. When you add all of these factors together, it’s certain to be an election cycle so volatile, there will be comparisons to 1968 – and maybe even echoes of that violent, tumultuous time.

A lot of the election coverage will feel like déjà vu. There will certainly be a return to familiar storylines from the 2016 election and its aftermath. Millionaire cable-news anchors and TV pundits will rediscover the Stormy Daniels fiasco. Others will try to resurrect the Billy Bush tapes, hoping to squeeze whatever juice they can out of that failed October surprise from the last election.

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The biggest of all these resurrected attacks will be the Russia collusion madness. Former FBI Director Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel investigation didn’t manage to end Trump’s presidency, but it kept the administration under intense pressure for almost three years. For those suffering from Trump derangement syndrome, it also locked in place an unfalsifiable narrative that Trump used foreign help to cheat – and that he planned to do so again.

The Ukraine controversy that began in the summer of 2019 was an extension of this effort. Under the leadership of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats impeached Trump at the very end of 2019. The Democrats used a “whistleblower” complaint about a phone call between Trump and President Zelensky to claim he abused his power.

Additionally, the Democrats alleged that Trump’s White House turning to the courts to adjudicate the limits of House subpoena power constituted “obstruction” – which they made the second article of impeachment. During the impeachment proceeding, Democrats gave hours of speeches in which they claimed that Trump tried to “solicit foreign interference in our election.”

Leaving aside whether they could prove this claim or not, the implication of the smear was clear: Trump had foreign help to cheat in the last election, and he wanted more of the same in the next election.

Fortunately for the country, Republicans held a majority of the Senate, so the Left was unsuccessful in removing Trump from office after impeaching him. However, the false anti-Trump narrative – that Trump reached out for “foreign influence in the election” – will be a mainstay of the media’s stop-at-nothing campaign to undermine his 2020 hopes.

There is also a high probability that some elements of the Deep State will try to tip the scale toward Trump’s general election challenger. The success of the “whistleblower” in leveraging classified government access to get the impeachment ball rolling against Trump will likely inspire copycats.

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The federal bureaucracy is completely dominated by Democrat activists and socialists who will feel justified in taking extreme – perhaps even illegal – measures to try to bring down Trump. This has been a risk surrounding the Trump presidency since the day after the 2016 election.

Lest we forget, some anti-Trump partisan with a very high security clearance leaked information about a conversation between Gen. Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that led to the dismissal of the incoming National Security Advisor as well as his felony prosecution for lying to FBI agents. Of course, those FBI agents were sent to Flynn’s office under false pretenses to entrap a three-star general with over 30 years of service to his country.

If Deep State operatives were willing to play that dirty to take down a decorated veteran before Trump had even taken office, imagine what they will be willing to do now that they have been immersed in an endless loop of media-induced anti-Trump hysteria for four years.

We know the establishment hates Trump now more than ever, and they will work openly and behind the scenes to do everything they can to torpedo his reelection aspirations. Add to that fervor the sense of self-righteousness and messianic vision from the socialist- Democrats.

The most powerful voices from within the Democrat Party have convinced their base that once Trump is pushed aside, a utopian future for America is possible. To that end, the Democrat-socialists have convinced themselves of a series of policy lies that sound too good to be true because they are.

Without massively raising taxes across the board, it’s simply not possible to give every American (and perhaps every illegal alien residing here) health care that would be even more generous than Medicare.

Open borders and mass amnesty might make Leftists feel good, but that virtue signaling comes at the cost of our national sovereignty. We won’t have the greatest country in the world for anyone to come to if we don’t secure our borders because we won’t have a country.

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Wiping away student loan debt for everyone and making college tuition free across the board would be a giveaway for the upper- middle class that wouldn’t begin to deal with the outrageous costs of tuition. Nor would it do anything about the need to rethink and restructure a higher education system that needs to elevate marketable skills over the arms race to get the fanciest-sounding degree.

We cannot continue to run up a trillion dollars of debt a year while we are already $22 trillion in debt as a nation. There is no magical economist or social justice genius who can wipe that debt away without catastrophic results to our economy.

And that there is a real movement among Democrat-socialists under Modern Monetary Theory to spend whatever public funds they want on policy regardless of the price tag. It’s proof that the Left is equal parts foolish, reckless, and determined.

In 2020, the Democrat Party can quibble just how radical the Democrat candidate’s proposals really would be. But it will be clear to anyone paying attention that yes, their party has embraced a socialist platform. After all, the Democrat establishment – the Bidens, Clintons, and Obamas – have provided cover for the incremental socialism of their party for decades.

Every Democrat candidate choice is merely a question of degrees of central planning. All want to control your lives much more than the Constitution allows, and they are willing to use all the mechanisms of the state to enforce their statist will upon you. 2020 Is in Your Hands Make no mistake about it: 2020 is an election about socialism. It’s also an election about freedom. America has long-been unique among the nations of the world for its emphasis on individual rights, free markets, and liberty.

Socialism is a departure from these ideals.

We have seen the history of collectivism turn once-great nations into pauper states. 205 The Socialism Survival Guide

We have seen the promises of socialist utopia crash upon the rocks of reality time and again.

President Trump may be able to turn the tide against the forces of Democrat-socialism, or he may just be a temporary respite from what is coming.

The 2020 election will force this choice upon the nation: Do we want the government to be our caretaker, or do we wish to be free?

To answer it, we must take action.

Politically, we organize as best we can, fight the false promises of socialism in the public square, and cast our votes against it.

Financially, we prepare for the inevitable course correction of government policy that cannot continue. What goes up must come down – and it will.

But above all else – remember that your freedom, property, and security are ultimately in your hands... and yours alone.

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