Commentary

Continued from Part I

Latina nannies are America’s smartest people. Under the radar, they pay no income tax and no Social Security tax; plus, they support each other in old age. By retirement, someone in the family will own a home, probably without a loan.

A perfect market response to government interference in the economy. Intuitively, those nannies understand the cost of progressivism.

In Part I of this article, I give examples of the hidden yearly cost to every U.S. taxpayer: Medicare, $9,600; Social Security, $2,500; the national debt, $6,000; plus the per-parent cost to send just one child to private school, $10,000. Total: $28,100.

To progressives, these costs are simply the price of living under their ideal economic system—European socialism. Progressives see nothing wrong with their system because they believe its costs are mostly paid by the rich. In the spirit of progressive taxation, nannies should pay 5 percent, but what progressives really want is for the rich to pay 70 percent.

Progressives don’t care about America’s $33 trillion national debt. They see nothing wrong with paying for health care, education, Social Security, and national defense by borrowing. To progressives, Karl Marx’s “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” redistribution of the wealth under the New Deal, Great Society, War on Poverty, and Affordable Care Act is morality itself: “The ends justify the means.” Che Guevara.

BUT THE RICH DON’T PAY TAXES! They borrow against their income-producing assets such that interest on the debt (plus depreciation on the asset) offsets any income. The cash they pull out is also sheltered. Apple’s beautiful space station in Cupertino, California, is not its headquarters. Apple is headquartered in Ireland, where the corporate tax rate is 15 percent. To avoid paying tax on its $200 billion cash ($162 billion in 2023), Apple places that money on Jersey Island, a tax haven in the English Channel.

THE MIDDLE CLASS PAYS ALL TAXES!

Look what progressives have done to health care: tripled its cost. The solution: return health insurance to the market. Eliminate health insurance as prepaid health care, and the price of health insurance will drop 66 percent. Cancel Medicare.

The price of health insurance before Medicare was the price of auto insurance: $200 a month (in 2024 dollars), $50 a month for a young person. Now it’s $1,000 to $2,000 a month—why smart nannies purchase health insurance and visit doctors and hospitals in Mexico and El Salvador. Asian nannies prefer Singapore. Medical tourism.

Look what progressives have done to education. From 1970 to 2000, the United States doubled per-pupil spending. From 2000 to 2020, it was doubled again. But with every additional dollar, test scores dropped, and they are 25 percent lower today than they were in 1970.

U.S. test scores are the lowest in the industrialized world—which is why today, 71 percent of Silicon Valley is foreign-born. With their high science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) skills, plus being better educated in the humanities, foreign workers are replacing U.S. workers—just as foreign students are scoring higher on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and replacing U.S. college students. And they don’t even speak English!

America’s education deficit is further compounded by politicians (and teacher unions) that attempt to force diversity and equality in educational outcome on the nation’s schools. With so many children entering kindergarten with a 2,500 to 4,500-word deficit, that’s not possible without lowering standards—which is what has been done. It’s why the U.S. Navy, for example, dropped its entry exam reading level to fourth grade, the grade level at which most U.S. high school seniors graduate.

The purpose of public education—to educate citizens well enough for them to recognize threats to democracy—requires that students read, do simple math, and know the history and culture of British and U.S. democracy, not the history and culture of those nondemocratic corrupt cultures from which their parents fled.

Because the school day was not extended by two to three hours, that postmodern shift to multiculturalism (study of the marginalized) took time away from teaching core curriculum. That is the first reason test scores are down nationwide: diminished marginal utility of the funds.

The second reason is that academic standards are way too low. Solution: Cut funding for public education in half. Test scores will double.

Plus, look what progressives have done to the national debt. The opening of my book “Rome 476” reads as follows: “Rome fell in 476. With it Western civilization, civil rights, scientific and technological progress. Followed by the Dark Ages. One thousand years. Why did Rome fall? Because its soldiers didn’t lift a finger to stop the Huns. Why? Those soldiers hadn’t been paid. Why? All tax revenue went to service interest on the debt.”

Americans should read (and all schools should teach) Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” (1835). They’ll feel proud to be American. De Tocqueville opens with a rebuke (paraphrased): America, get rid of slavery; you’re out of your mind! You have the world’s most responsible citizens; you are about to become the greatest nation on earth.

America’s Founding Fathers gave the nation maximum individual liberty in exchange for maximum individual responsibility because they believed Americans would accept that Jeffersonian trade-off—the unprecedented idea of a nation without a king or queen, almost without government, in which all citizens, regardless of wealth or social status, have the vote. This is the very reason immigrants come to the United States, the source of our prosperity, freedom, and opportunity. The U.S. population was 5 million in 1790 and is today 330 million, the world’s third-largest nation. Citizens are born in other countries, but to America they come: a self-selected citizenry.

Why, then, are today’s progressives so anxious? American nannies aren’t. America’s wealthy aren’t. Living in the most prosperous nation in the world, under a constitutional democracy (which prevents direct democracy: mob rule), not fighting a world war, a nation with world-class health care, and an economy not in recession, what more do progressives want?

To restrict their false anxiety, progressives should restrict their computer and smartphone use to one hour a day. And stop watching the news! The news is a business that purposely caters to anxiety.