Free healthcare. Free roads. Free jobs. Free retirement money. Free daycare. Free college. Free rainbows and unicorns. In Bernie Sanders Land, everything is free.
Unfortunately, there is very little overlap between Sanders Land and reality. Here in the real world, we have to deal with something called scarcity — the fact that very few of the goods and services that people want are unlimited. The study of the allocation and distribution our scarce resources is called economics. Sanders should take at least an introductory class on the subject if he wants to make binding decisions for those of us that live in reality.
Scarcity means that we can't wave a wand to get sick people healthy or our roads fixed. We need things like MRI scanners and construction vehicles to get those things done, which are in limited supply. Labor to work these machines is also limited, both in the number of qualified individuals and the number of hours they can work in a day. The real world imposes real limitations on the real factors needed to make real change, which means they're going to cost real money.
A real lot of real money, according to the Wall Street Journal. They recently tallied up the total costs for the many new programs and initiatives that Sanders is proposing and found that they'd cost $18 trillion over the next ten years alone. If the people using these goods and services aren't going to have to pay for them, someone else will have to.
That unlucky someone else in this case is the federal government of the United States. Since the government in turn gets its money from the American people, you and I and everyone else that pays taxes are going to be the ones who have to cover this bill.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the current plan is to bring in $42 trillion in taxes during that time, but all of that money and then some is already tied up covering other programs. If we're going to pay for all this "free" stuff it will mean $18 trillion in new taxes, or a 43 percent across-the-board increase over current projections.
As college students we all love free stuff, from food to T-shirts. But somewhere deep down, we all know that those "free" cozies were paid for by someone, and were only free to us as a marketing ploy. And while I'm fine with taking "free" pens from a hotel that decided to spend $10 of its money on them as a cheap way to distribute its logo, I'm not OK with taking "free" benefits from a politician that decided to spend $18 trillion of other people's money on them as an expensive way to win an election.