It seems that my last couple of posts have done what I would have said was impossible, namely scare up several people willing to attempt to argue in favor of Bernie Sanders and his policy proposals.  The latest is someone identifying him/herself as "Tehy."

For Tehy, the crux of the matter is that Bernie "cares about the poor":

But what this is about is that ultimately, bernie cares about the poor and wants to help them. That could and even probably will end up going south, but at least he's a guy willing to try.  

Oh yeah?  I don't believe it for a second.  In fact I find the statement that Bernie Sanders "cares about the poor" to be completely preposterous.  Here's why.

If Bernie Sanders actually cared about the poor, he would be loudly demanding every day and in every way HOW CAN IT POSSIBLY BE THAT WE SPEND A TRILLION DOLLARS A YEAR SUPPOSEDLY FIGHTING POVERTY AND YET THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE LIVING IN POVERTY NEVER GOES DOWN?????  If Bernie Sanders actually cared about the poor, he would be loudly and insistently demanding accountability and answers from the hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats who disburse the annual trillion without ever achieving the slightest measurable progress toward the goal.  If Bernie Sanders actually gave a hoot about the poor, he would be demanding a complete housecleaning of the failed programs that spend the trillion every year, only to maintain tens of millions of people in handout-dependent poverty from which it is almost impossible to escape.

Bernie Sanders has been in Washington now for about 25 years.  He can't pretend to be an outsider.  After twenty-five years in Washington, it is impossible for Sanders not to know that the entire point of Washington "anti-poverty" efforts is to make absolutely sure that the number of people in measured "poverty" never goes down.  The only real goal of every government program is to grow the program.  That goal is the exact opposite of the goal of curing the problem that the program is supposed to cure.  And so the bureaucracies actively scheme to keep the number of people in poverty up, so that the poverty figures can then be used to sell a gullible public on yet more spending and further growth of the programs.  I have written many previous articles on this subject, for example here.

Sanders is absolutely complicit in this scam.  For example, the section of his website on "Income Inequality" contains this chart of child poverty statistics:

Well, Bernie, you've been in Congress for 25 years and you have had a big say in how all that government money is spent.  How can you have gone along with spending all those hundreds of billions every year in a way that would address this issue so ineffectively as to leave the U.S. child poverty rate still at 32%, well above the rate in every other advanced country?  (By the way, I am not saying that I accept the validity of the figures in this Unicef chart.  But Bernie does.)

The answer is that Bernie absolutely knows that the government spending never removes anyone from poverty and is explicitly designed to do the opposite and make sure that poverty never goes down.  But he also knows that there are millions of people like Tehy out there who will never figure this out, and who will always believe that the people who advocate to spend more and yet more money on such disastrous programs should be elected because they "care about the poor."   So Sanders advocates for precisely the kinds of programs that send the federal dollars straight to the core constituencies of the left wing of the Democratic party, like college professors (free college tuition for all!) and that he knows will have no measurable effect on poverty whatsoever.  Are the voters really this easy to fool?

At the end of his/her comment, Tehy asks, if I supposedly hate "crony capitalism," "besides campaign reform, what is your solution for it?"  There is only one solution:  shrink the government.  The smaller and less powerful the government, the less need and use for trying to buy favors.  As government control and regulation become more and more intrusive, then the government can crush the businesses it does not like, and success goes to those who make the political contributions and hire the batteries of lawyers.  And at the socialist extreme, when the government controls everything about the economy, you get the situation of Venezuela, where the richest person is the daughter of recently deceased dictator Hugo Chavez.