Those numbers were over double what was reported for those who favored socialism in the 55 and older age cohorts.
It is unclear to me whether most of these Millennials have any idea of what socialism is or they understand that the comfortable life they have in the United States today has not been provided by "mostly socialist" ideas.
What is clear to me is that our education system has obviously neglected to teach this generation the utter horror of the brutal communist regimes that existed in the USSR and China through the 1980's that resulted in most of the people living in poverty due to the socialist systems in place.
Millennials must also be oblivious to what has occurred in our own hemisphere with Cuba and Venezuela. Both spiraled downward as socialism took hold. Millions of Cubans fled the resulting poverty and persecution to come to the United States. Millions in Venezuela are now starving and living with inflation of over 1,000,000% per year.
Those that are older and should know better---Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris to name a few---are also pounding the drum for socialist ideas. Of course, they argue they only want a system that is more like Denmark, Norway or Sweden.
However, these countries are not socialist countries. They have market economies with broader social services than the United States has. However, that comes with very high levels of taxation---not just on the rich---on everyone. It is the middle or lower income who bear the highest tax burdens in that social system.
I wrote about the Norway and Denmark's social and tax systems after I visited those countries several years ago.
How do they pay for all of those government benefits in Denmark and Norway? The fact is that when the government pays for almost everything, everyone has to pay. You simply cannot tax the rich and get the money you need. Everyone has to pay. And everyone pays a lot!
Most personal income in Denmark is subject to a flat 8% social security tax that everyone pays. On top of that, everyone is subject to a minimum income tax rate of at least 36% (after a 43,400 DKK ($6,400) personal allowance. On top of that there is a 25% VAT (value-added tax) that is applied to almost every purchase in the country.
A flat tax of 28% is applied to all personal ordinary income in Norway after a modest personal allowance deduction. There is also a 25% VAT on almost everything one would purchase (15% on foodstuffs).
Notice that in these countries the tax burden is not skewed toward the rich with a progressive tax system as it is in the United States. The rich pay more because they make more but these countries really are flat tax rate systems. In the United States the wealthiest decile pays 69% of the total tax federal burden. In Sweden, that share is only 27%. In fact, as I pointed out several years ago in a blog post, the United States has the most progressive tax system of any industrialized country in the world.
Do these Millennial Socialists understand any of this? Do Sanders and the other Democrats care anything about this other than they are trying to attract these young voters with socialist themes? The fact is that the Democrats are selling false promises.
David McWilliams in The Financial Times has an interesting take on the love affair that many yonger voters seems to have with socialism. He believes that Ben Bernanke's quantitative easing program is "the father of Millennial socialism".
The low interest, easy money policy of the Fed may have avoided a severe deflationary period in the short term but it has resulted in a decade long bull market in asset prices in the equity and housing markets.
As a result, those who already had accumulated wealth were bailed out while those trying to accumulate were effectively priced out of the market due to the Fed's QE program.
Soaring asset prices, particularly property prices, drive a wedge between those who depend on wages for their income and those who depend on rents and dividends. This wages versus rents-and-dividends game plays out generationally, because the young tend to be asset-poor and the old and the middle-aged tend to be asset-rich. Unorthodox monetary policy, therefore, penalises the young and subsidises the old.
When asset prices rise much faster than wages, the average person falls further behind. Their stake in society weakens. The faster this new asset-fuelled economy grows, the greater the gap between the insiders with a stake and outsiders without. This threatens a social contract based on the notion that the faster the economy grows, the better off everyone becomes.McWilliams argues that the Millennials are really driven to what they see as "evening the score" with their seeming embrace of a socialist system.
For the purist, capitalism without default is a bit like Catholicism without hell. But we have confession for a reason. Everyone needs absolution. QE was capitalism’s confessional. But what if the day of reckoning was only postponed? What if a policy designed to protect the balance sheets of the wealthy has unleashed forces that may lead to the mass appropriation of those assets in the years ahead?
I have written about the dangers and unintended consequences of the Federal Reserve's QE money printing operation over the years in this blog. I pointed out that the QE policy and the Fed's low interest rate policy was making us as dependent as a drug addict. It might have made us feel better in the short term but would it really make us better in the long run.
Here is an example of what I wrote on this subject over five years ago.
Ben Bernanke says the Federal Reserve will not taper its money printing anytime soon. The sad truth is that we seem to be as incapable of kicking the QE habit we have developed as a crack addict has in getting off cocaine.
What I find incredible in all of this is that the foment and friction we are seeing today was all foreseeable by our Founders over 230 years ago.
One of the key bedrock principles underlying the drafting of the U.S. Constitution was to do everything possible to safeguard the union against possible domestic division and rebellion.
The Founders understood that opposing political factions were the greatest potential threat to any government and that in many governments the only redress was violence. They wanted to insure that factions could not wield power that would be dangerous to either the rights of other citizens or the common good.
They also knew that there was little they could do to prevent factions from occurring. That could only be done by limiting liberties or insuring every citizen has the same opinions, feelings and the same interests. Neither was acceptable to the Founders. They had no interest in preventing the causes, which is what Communist and Totalitarian governments do. They focused on controlling the effects of factions. Thus, they constructed a republican governmental framework with an ultimate goal of securing both the public good and private rights against the dangers of an oppressive majority faction. Everything in the Constitution was built on this foundational principle.
James Madison in Federalist Paper #10 also enumerated those things that were most likely to result in the development of dangerous factions that government (and the people) should be protected against.
Madison called them "Improper or Wicked Projects". It could not be much clearer what the Founders thought of these potential risks and the need to avoid them at all costs because of the danger they posed to the nation at large. That is the major reason we have a republic rather than a democracy and the election of President by an electoral college rather than by popular vote.
What were these Improper or Wicked Projects?
1. A rage for paper money (exactly what the Federal Reserve did with QE)
Notice that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also thinks that we can just print all the money that is needed for the Green New Deal
2. A rage for the abolition of debts (what was done to the detriment of secured creditors of automakers in favor of the unions)
3. A rage for an equal division of property (the foundational principle of socialism that includes redistribution of wealth from rich to poor).
Isn't it also interesting to note that the Socialist Democrats like to tell us the U.S. Constitution is outmoded because it was written by a bunch of old, white men that had no understanding of how the world should work today?
By the way, the man that is considered "the father of the Constitution" was James Madison because of his pivotal role in drafting the Constitution and the Federal Papers which served as the principal method of promoting it for ratification by the states.
Here is a painting of Madison as a young man he was when he so involved with writing the Constitution.
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| James Madison Credit: Self-EducatedAmerican.com |
Madison was just 36 years of age when the Constitution was drafted. Interestingly, of the 535 Senators and members of the House of Representatives in Congress today, there are only 13 younger than Madison was when he was so instrumental in drafting the Constitution.
Were the Founders out of touch when they wrote the Constitution? I think not.
The Founders knew exactly what we could be facing.
In fact, I think they completely understood the playbook that these Socialists would use. That is why Madison so accurately described the improper or wicked projects that would most likely be used to stir up factions and foment to create division and unrest across the nation.
Tell a Millennial that you love to be careful about embracing "Improper or Wicked Projects".
Just like QE, these socialist ideas may sound great in the short term. However, it is sure to make life extremely painful in the long term. After all, those young voters are going to have to live with the consequences of their votes for a much longer time than anyone else.
When the final bill comes due based on those votes, it is they that will pay the heaviest price. That you can be sure of.
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