Sixth District Congressman Ben Cline is skeered, and wants you to be skeered, too, about the “threat of socialism,” which he wrote on his campaign Facebook page on Thursday is, all caps from Ben on this, “RISING.”
Now, to be 100 here, Cline – who is running for a fifth term in Congress in the Nov. 3 election – was light on specifics, in the sense that, he offered nothing in the way of specifics, as to what he meant about the “threat of socialism.”
Presumably, he’s not trying to signal to seniors that their Social Security – a government-managed social insurance program – is “socialism” worthy of feeling threatened by.
His voters like their Social Security.
More than he does, actually.
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Nor is he trying to tell people that their Medicare – a government-managed health insurance program – is “socialism.”
See above; Cline’s voters want more Medicare, not less.
He could take it or leave it, given the gold-plated healthcare that he gets as a member of Congress.
Maybe the “socialism” that Cline views as a “threat” is the classical socialism that scholars define as an economic system in which government owns and runs business and industry and plans the economy.
This would seem to be a good time to remind you that Donald Trump has leveraged public funding to get ownership stakes in several tech companies for the federal government.
Say it with me: Trump loves classical socialism.
It’s noteworthy here that Forbes, hardly a leftist news outlet, is calling Trump “Our First Socialist President” over those ownership stakes.
Is Trump socialism the “socialism” that Cline is saying is a “threat?”
It’s hard to tell, because to Cline, per his Facebook post, the rising threat of socialism “means the threat of higher taxes,” which, to be fair, higher taxes indeed seem inevitable, with the news today that our national debt hit the $40 trillion mark – and the sidebar item to that headline being that what we spend to pay interest on our debt is now more than what we spend on our military or on healthcare.
People like Ben Cline are already trying to blame the nameless, faceless brand of “socialism” than the Trumpian version for the higher taxes that are to come to pay down our debts and try to keep the trains running.
It’s worth asking: is “socialism” the reason we incurred $8.2 trillion in debt in Trump’s first term, and we’re at $3.1 trillion and counting a year and a half into his second term?
Quick math: Donald Trump, dubbed by Forbes as being “Our First Socialist President,” in five and a half years in the White House, using our money to get himself and his family rich, is responsible for 28.3 percent of all of the national debt that our country has incurred in its 237-year history as a constitutional democracy.
I’m staring to agree with Ben Cline here.
We do need to skeered of “socialism.”
The Trump brand of “socialism,” anyway.
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Chris Graham
