Political Pistachio
By Douglas V. Gibbs
In a recent interview on FOX News, Jesse Watters asked Abdul El-Sayed (DSA Senatorial Candidate in Michigan) about his call to tax the rich, and go after their wealth. Abdul responded, “Do you want to drive on good roads or would you rather have a billionaire make a second billion? Do you want good roads and good schools? They pay so that everyone can have a little bit more.” He then accused Jesse of being for billionaires over average people. “I thought you were for the everyday man,” he said. “Billionaires don’t make their money off of their labor. If we tax them, their still going to make money off of their money.”
Jesse responded with a relatively good answer, but didn’t have the time to go deeper into his argument. Jesse said, “I think I have the right to the fruits of my own labor. I don’t like politicians like you capping how much people can make in America.”
The truth of it all is that Abdul was throwing around socialist rhetoric that is based on economic fallacies and a fundamentally flawed understanding of wealth creation. The Democrats have always had this “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer” argument, basically deducting that wealth is finite. Abdul was is arguing that if the billionaire makes another billion, there won’t be enough money left for “good roads and schools.”
Wealth is created. And if that billionaire makes another billion, it not only did not come out of the pockets of everyday Americans, but in the process that billionaire more often than not created a product, a service, or efficiency that generated billions of dollars of new value in the economy.
As an example, Home Depot makes home improvement less expensive and more accessible. The corporation’s owner got wealthy creating a more efficient system, creating tens of thousands of jobs, lowering prices for millions of families, and allowing countless small contractors to start their own businesses. The billionaire’s wealth grew, but so did the overall size of the economic pie for everyone. Those people, based on the incomes they are making, in addition to the taxes the billionaire is paying, then fund the things that need to be funded – more taxes are collected from the free market growth and innovation accomplished by the billionaire, rather than just taking from the billionaire. And understand, if you penalize the billionaire for making his money, he will be less likely to engage in the market, take the risks, make the investments, and in turn all that he created for society suffers. Going after the billionaires, in turn, actually hurts the everyday man, and in the long run reduces how much revenue is available for roads and schools – not that fixing the schools is a money problem.
As for the “Billionaires don’t make their money off of their labor” statement, Abdul used the classic communist class warfare approach – creating a class distinction between the “worthy” laborer and the “unworthy” capitalist. This ignores the role of intellectual labor, risk, and organizational labor. The billionaire began the process. They took the chances. They risked their capital and early blood, sweat and tears on a vision that could have failed spectacularly and left them with nothing. They made high-stake decisions to navigate the pitfalls of creating a new venture, of which only a few percentage survives those initial stages. They allocated capital, hired the people, put in place strategies, and innovated. A single bad decision can bankrupt a company, and they took that chance. They organized the labor, creating a cohesive, productive enterprise – an ability and skillset that is truly rare – and thanks to their work to get where they are, many people earn their livelihood. The billionaire’s “fruit of his labors” is value created by their risk, decisions, and organizational skill.
In a collective system where taking those types of chances is penalized, who innovates? Who takes those chances? Who would be willing to risk an investment?
Abdul’s position is that if you take from the rich, and give to the public, everyone wins. And the idea is based on the assumption that all rich people are greedy people who are taking from everyone else, and that government somehow will better manage society through central planning. Government creates nothing, and we only need to visit a govenment office to see that their efficiency is not exactly up to par. Taxation is the taking of money, and then those dollars are filtered through layers of ineffecient bureaucracy, with a significant portion lost to administrative overhead before it ever reaches a road or a school. The private sector, driven by profit and competition, is almost always more efficient at allocating capital to where it creates the most value.
Meanwhile, as you tax the rich, you reduce the incentive to take the risks, make the investments, and make the decisions that innovates and produces. In turn, they will invest less, innovate less, and take fewer risks. The result is a government taking billions, but the next billion doesn’t get created because of the disincentive – which means less money is available down the road, less jobs are created, and everyone ends up poorer as a result. Then, the capital flees the jurisdiction heavily taxing the wealthy. It will go where it is welcomed, and in the end, the tax revenue continues to spiral downward, and the economy collapses as a result.
So, to answer Abdul about if you want good roads or a billionaire – you get the best roads and the most opportunity when you have a system that encourages the creation of billionaires. The billionaires wealth is a byproduct of the value they created, and it is not beneficial to the system if government punishes that success. Government’s job is to get out of the way of the market, and instead create a stable framework of necessary law, and a system of reasonable taxation that encourages more people to take risks and create value. In turn, less government involvement in the process of the creation of wealth creates a growing economy, more jobs, and innovations that improve everyone’s lives. And what then will come out of that is better roads and better schools – all because government did not confiscate the earnings of the successful.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
By Douglas V. Gibbs
“He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes” (Proverbs 13:24). While often paraphrased as “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” this biblical principle speaks directly to our current crisis of youth violence.
Recent news reports reveal teenage street takeovers and public brawling have become commonplace. At the Wisconsin State Fair, “teens” began beating anyone in sight, with multiple police officers attacked as families fled for their lives. When law enforcement intervenes and someone gets shot or tackled, the predictable chorus follows: the defund-the-police crowd condemns authorities, while a crying mother insists her “good boy” didn’t deserve it. The father, typically, is nowhere in sight.
We may call them “teens,” “youth,” or “young adults,” but they remain children, rebellious, uncivilized, and ignorant of orderly society because they were never taught its fundamentals. This brings us back to Proverbs: disciplining an unruly child young typically prevents that same child from becoming an unruly teen clashing with police.
The problem runs deeper than parental discipline, though parenting certainly shares blame. We’ve cultivated a cultural poison of evading responsibility. While parents may fail to apply appropriate correction, these children still make choices, and increasingly, they’re making bad ones. When consequences arrive, the culture, politicians, and media blame everyone except the perpetrators. The teens in question chose their actions. Though parents may have failed in their disciplinarian role, it wasn’t the parent attacking people at the fair.
Not only does the child blame parents for their decisions, but our entire culture encourages shifting blame: it’s their neighborhood’s fault, the police’s fault, the teacher’s fault, economic factors’ fault. Nobody says, “You made the decision. You are primarily at fault.”
An undisciplined child becomes unprepared for life. A child receiving participation trophies and rewards for mediocrity becomes unprepared for life. Without the “rod,” that symbol of authority and correction, the child lacks the values necessary to function in a civil society. While upbringing deserves partial blame, and some of us take time to learn life’s lessons, absent tough love when young, the culture or its authority figures will apply it later. Then the choice becomes: learn from the lesson, or become harder, stupider, and one of those idiots brawling because you lack self-respect.
Ultimately, we make our own decisions. The key is not to be stupid about them, regardless of our childhood’s quality.
We are, after all, civilized humans, right? So why do so many act like idiot animals?
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
By Douglas V. Gibbs
It seems strange to me that the SAVE America Act, which requires voter ID, has yet to make its way through Congress. Election integrity should be a bi-partisan issue. But, it’s not. And it’s not an issue the Democrats and some of the remaining old guard establishment Republicans are willing to support for the same reason there was push back by the once-lefty Supreme Court regarding the question about immigration status being on the Census, and ultimately removed from the Census, in 2019.
In 2020, the election that President Trump (and many folks like yours truly) believes was stolen through a number of strategies including illegal alien voting, illegal aliens voted in high numbers. The Census Bureau has reported that so far they have identified 24,000 non-citizen voters in that election. While the Democrats have been arguing that our elections are safe and secure, and illegal voting is rare, it turns out that at least 24,000 votes were cast illegally, and God knows how high that number truly is.
When you consider the small margin of victories for Biden in a number of states, that number of votes is not some small, insignificant case of “rare” illegal voting.
In the breakdown, most of the voters identified (3,800) were from Mexico, and 7,000 were identified as not being identified with any country of origin. And this is just the beginning of the review. Millions of records are still on the table to be reviewed.
During President Trump’s second term we are making a little headway regarding election integrity. On August 24, 2026, the United States Supreme Court ruled that President Trump can implement parts of his executive order meant to tighten up mail-in balloting in the U.S. The ruling gets the courts out of the way of the Trump administration creating lists of adult U.S. citizens in each state and to send those lists to states at least 60 days before a federal election as a means to ensure only citizens are sent ballots. The order in question also directs the U.S. Postal Service in states that have mail-in voting to obtain lists of eligible voters and deliver mailed ballots only to those people.
In California, also due to a suspicion of voter fraud, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco seized approximately 650,000 ballots from the November 2025 special election on redistricting (and this after numerous investigations regarding previous elections), after which California Attorney General Rob Bonta launched a legal challenge, ordering the sheriff to return the ballots. Bianco refused, stating he is holding the ballots as evidence and as a custodian for the court.
“How strange, that now we have evidence that the machines counted something different than the ballots that we have, and an Attorney General runs in to stop that investigation so that we’ll never know,” Bianco said outside a courthouse.
The Democrats are desperate to hide what they’ve been up to – something they were even willing to destroy the lives of when it came to anyone near The Capitol on January 6, 2001. They have been rigging the elections, and they’ve been working with foreign actors to make it happen. We had evidence of Chinese influence on U.S. Elections in 2020 before the voters even went to the polls, and the Democrats did everything they could to hide it. And this is not some recent occurrence. Communists have been interfering in our elections long before any of us took our first breath. They’ve been at it for a long time, and along with their Democratic Party accomplices, it has been conducted through careful planning. And now that we are sniffing around the evidence, they are doing everything they can to stop the investigations, be it in California, or their legal challenges to anything President Trump tries to launch.
We know that there is foreign interference in our country going on simply due to the fact that it is being uncovered in other areas. According to a recent report, online tools are being used by foreign sources to support the operations of far-left terrorist networks like Antifa. They are built, according to a State Department memo regarding an “A/I Collective” with links to several foreign terrorist organizations, and they are specifically “built to enable them to organize, recruit, communicate, disseminate propaganda, share target information and tactics, and carry out violent attacks – all while remaining anonymous, untraceable, and beyond the reach of the law.”
The memo identified Portland-based Rose City Antifa as one U.S. group that has used the A/I Collective infrastructure, not only to communicate with foreign groups, but to disseminate personal information about Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel and to call for attacks on agents “in their homes” and in public. Why? Because it is all tied to power, and making sure not only that the flow of illegal aliens continues to flood our country with anti-American persons to crumble the culture from within, but to continue to rig the electoral system with votes that countermand any vote by a patriotic American. Without illegal immigration, and with election integrity in place, the whole structure of power that the Democrats have created crumbles like a house of cards.
We have an internal infestation of anti-American actors inside our Halls of Government, most of them Democrats or radical leftists, and if they are not rooted out, the SAVE America Act may simply wither on the vine. And once the strong force of Donald J. Trump is no longer in office they will get back on their original track to fundamentally change America from within. Their aim is to destroy our free market system, and torch the Constitution.
It is that simple, that critical, and that dangerous.
God Bless Donald J. Trump.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
By Douglas V. Gibbs
Communism: Socialism realized; theory of social organization based on principles of common ownership, ownership and possessions being ascribed to the community as a whole, or to the state. System in which all economic and social activity was once controlled by a dominant government (oligarchy), administered by the ruling elite of a single, and self-perpetuating, political party, but faded away as society came to accept the resulting utopia. While some countries have been labeled as “communist”, true communism has never existed in human society, and is considered as being impossible to achieve due to the complexities of human nature.
Socialism: A political system in which the government owns the means of production. An economic system in which good and services are provided through a central system of cooperative and/or government ownership rather than through competition and a free market system. Most often characterized as an oligarchy.
Liberalism: The definition of liberalism has changed over the years. The basic definition of liberalism provides that it is a theory in economics emphasizing individual freedom from restraint based on free competition and a self-regulating market; a theory in politics emphasizing individualism and autonomy. In modern times the definition has altered to include considering government as a crucial instrument for achieving equality, and recognizing the essential goodness of the human race. In order to pursue the agenda of the modern definition of liberalism, advocates support popular control of government, while denying that the aim is to ultimately establish an oligarchy.
Progressivism: Philosophy that views progress as seeking change in approaches to solving economic, social, and other problems, often through government sponsored programs. Associated with democracy, and transition from a republic to an oligarchy.
Democrats don’t believe that socialism is a loser with most American voters. They simply believe it is too early to pull the trigger…The statist drive to control education is the drive to control the children. If the children are taught that Liberty is to be avoided, or that the American System of Liberty is somehow evil or oppressive, the children will follow the dogma of socialism and secularism for life.
What you just read was taken directly from my book, An American Promise of Liberty published in 2019. What is going on is not new, nor was it unexpected. The Democrats, for over a hundred years, have been infiltrated by Communists, but adopted the Fabian style of spreading socialism: slowly, incrementally, and from within.
The strategy has always been a gradual takeover. On page 47 of the book, The Unseen Hand by A. Ralph Epperson, the author explains, “The strategy is to promise the American people one thing and to deliver another. Never make it appear that you, the candidate, are supporting socialism or are a Socialist, even though the platforms you will support after your election are indeed socialist in nature. And you must never deliver so much socialism that the American people will discover the exact nature of the game and remove you from office.”
The news outlets are telling us that after supporting the entrance of the Democratic Socialists into the Democratic Party, many of the establishment Democrats are experiencing cold feet and are not sure they like the socialists invading their party. In truth, they are more than happy to have the socialists in their party because many of them are socialists as well – they just believe that the DSA candidates are pushing the socialist line too early. If they go full socialism too early in the game, as Epperson stated, the American people will reject it and push the other way.
There is no socialist wing of the party. There is no big tent. They are all socialists. But, some of them have gotten louder and more organized than ever before and it has those who have been playing the long game nervous that the move is too early. If the louder democratic socialists keep winning primaries, it will create a situation where the Democrats may lose what they’ve been building for a century. The new wave of younger socialists are not buying into the Fabian style of incremental infiltration and influence. They don’t possess the patience of the old school communists who began the process and have steadily moved it forward one incremental step at a time. The younger generation communists are not afraid to exclaim their version of the truth out loud and they have put the whole plan in jeopardy, and that is why the old guard is trying to put out the fire. The problem is, if they sound too much like they support the radically loud democratic socialists, they lose moderate and swing voters. If they cut off the DSA and turn their back on the new wave of socialist demands, the activists and their supporters who have been helping the democratic socialists win the primaries will stay home in November – so they have to distance themselves sort-of, kind of like they are straddling the fence, in a manner that does not accept the madness in the eyes of one part of their party, but makes it look like they don’t reject them wholesale, either.
Hence, the claim that the party has a “big tent.”
There is no big tent. The Establishment’s strategy is to hang on to the power they built any way they can, and survive the crisis to fight another day. Their aim is to stop the bleeding, but also not lose the ground they worked so hard to accomplish. They can’t allow the DSA to destroy all they’ve worked for, or allow President Trump to stop their progress by taking advantage of the situation caused by the young socialists. And to be honest, calling it a Big Tent is all they have right now, and all they can do to stop the bleeding – all because some of their comrades have lost the patience embedded by the Fabians.
The damage is marching ruthlessly through the Democratic Party, and despite their Big Tent argument, their strategy is not working as they hoped. They are drowning in fundraising problems and they are sitting on a pile of committee debt. They can’t lose Congress, and let their arch-enemy in the White House who is on to them get his way. They have to call themselves a “big tent” party, hope that they can survive enough to gain control of at least one House of Congress, ride the storm, and deal with the petulant commies once they get things under control and get Trump out of office.
The evidence that they are not a Big Tent party is as clear as can be. If they really were a Big Tent party, they wouldn’t be talking about ousting Senator John Fetterman for refusing to march in lockstep with the socialists in his party, be they Israel-hating open border socialists, or Israel-hating open border progressives.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
By Douglas V. Gibbs
The United States National Debt topped $40 trillion for the first time in history on August 18, 2026. The number has been roughly rising a trillion dollars about every five months over the last couple years. When the news of the $40 trillion milestone hit the wire, the lefties in my life began to grumble about how Trump and the Republicans have been driving the national debt up faster than ever before with their “senseless wars” and their “federal spending on the ballroom” and “Trump’s self-aggrandizing spending” to “help his billionaire friends.” None of their accusations are true.
The White House Ballroom is being paid for by private donors. The UFC fight was paid for by Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and its affiliated groups. The Grand Prix race was paid for by Penske. The America 250 Anniversary events and fireworks were largely paid for by corporate sponsorships, though some of it was funded by federal taxpayer money appropriated by Congress – the federal spending largely was for the staging, fireworks, and security. Roughly $25 million came from private funding by over 80 major corporate entities.
DOGE was created by President Trump to reduce federal spending by exposing and eliminating wasteful, corrupt, and fraudulent spending. $2.7 trillion alone has been identified regarding payments since 2003 that were made in error, in the wrong amount, or without proper documentation. The General Services Administration announced it has identified suspected fraud by federal contractors totally in $13 billion since March this year, a realization that is primary due to the work by Vice President J.D. Vance as “fraud czar.” President Trump has made rooting out wasteful and fraudulent spending, as well as deregulation, a core priority. He has slowed the growth of federal rules more than we’ve seen over the last one hundred years (aside from President Reagan, with Trump matching and often exceeding President Ronald Reagan’s benchmark for active deregulation along the way) – all of which reduces the outflow of federal funds – and all of which the Democratic Party screamed bloody murder over.
Yes, the national debt is still skyrocketing, but not because of President Trump’s policies.
The growth of the national debt, in addition to unconstitutional federal spending, is primarily due to interest costs – and when you have a larger burden you get higher interest costs which then makes it a vicious cycle that continues to feed the voracious beast more and more.
Over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) the national debt will exceed $60 trillion if nothing stops its growth. And, the problem is, despite measures seeking to do otherwise, debt harms economic growth, slows natural wage increases, and increases the cost of living and the cost of doing business.
So, if Presidents Reagan and Trump spent so much time trying to get a handle on federal spending (while accusations about military spending and other spending gets launched against those two presidents), why is it we can’t seem to slow down the rise of the national debt?
Two key problems: Unconstitutional spending, and the Federal Reserve – both of which exist due to leftist policies by both Democrats and Republicans during our last couple centuries of existence.
The First Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, our first big-government lefty in American History that slammed the hammer of debt into place, argued that a perpetual national debt was good for the country – claiming it creates credit and makes it less likely that states would secede. He argued for the Bank of the United States, and got his way in 1791, using the unconstitutional concept of implied powers to convince Congress to pass the bill. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson was staunchly opposed to the idea of a centralized national bank that took the money-creation task out of the hands of Congress. The only upside is that the charter for the bank would only be good for twenty years, and then expire unless renewed by Congress.
A $75 million debt launched America after Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton consolidated state and federal debts from the American Revolutionary War.
During Jefferson’s presidency many years later, he reduced the national debt seven of the eight years he was in the White House – the only year the national debt went up was during his military execution of the First Barbary War. He inherited a debt of over $83 million, and had it down to about $57 million by the end of his presidency.
James Madison initially strictly opposed a central bank, and under his watch the First Bank of the United States’ charter expired in 1811. However, during the chaos of the War of 1812, the federal government struggled to secure lines of credit or major loans to fund the war. Proponents of a central bank argued that if a central bank had been in place, hundreds of local state banks would not have needed to print their own unregulated paper money. Inflation peaked in 1814, and local banks began to refuse to exchange paper notes for actual gold or silver, pushing the country to the verge of an economic collapse. Treasury Secretary Alexander Dallas pushed Madison to change his tune regarding a central bank, and though Madison vetoed early proposals for a new bank between 1814 and 1815, he cast aside his constitutional objections in 1816 and signed the act establishing the Second Bank of the United States with a 20-year charter. While during his first term, the national debt actually ticked downward from $57 million to $45 Million, the War of 1812 pushed the debt to nearly a hundred million dollars. Once the Second Bank of the United States went into action, the debt ballooned to well over $123 million by the end of Madison’s presidency after 1817.
Presidents James Monroe and John Quincy Adams worked aggressively with highly efficient budgets to reduce the national debt, lowering the debt to below $50 million by the time President Andrew Jackson took office.
Under Andrew Jackson, on January 1, 1835, the U.S. National Debt officially reached $0, but by the end of the year new public borrowing and economic shifts pushed the country back into debt. Unfortunately, while President Andrew Jackson did largely cut federal spending and kept federal expenditures low and aggressively vetoed internal improvement bills (which he correctly believed were expenditures that belonged to the states), the mechanisms that truly erased the debt were high import tariffs and federal land sales. The dismantling of the Second Bank of the United States did not directly assist in paying down the national debt, but it did slow down the increase of public debt. The movement of federal money into local state banks created a separate problem, fueling a credit boom that would lead to the Panic of 1837. During the period between the end of the Second Bank of the United States and the rise of the Federal Reserve, the American economy saw the elimination of unnatural economic distortions, but the Panic of 1907 is noted by some economists as being the motivation for Congress to establish the Federal Reserve.
The National Debt during the period following the Panic of 1837 remained relatively low, with a gradual rise of about $3.3 million for the next twenty-or-so years. In 1860 the debt jumped to $65 million, blamed largely on funding geographic expansion and anticipatory build-up on the eve of the War Between the States. During the “American Civil War” the debt exploded, peaking at $2.7 billion in 1865. By the mid 1890s, the national debt was brought down to about $1.8 billion. Unfortunately, the Spanish-American War in 1898 bumped it back upward, again, with the number topping $2 billion at the turn of the century.
The National Debt did not reach $3 billion until 1916, jumped to over $5 billion in 1917, and the by the end of World War I sat at nearly $26 billion. During the Roaring Twenties, largely under the tutelage of President Calvin Coolidge, the number was down to roughly $17 billion before the Market Crash in 1929.
The National Debt gradually climbed during the Great Depression, and then when defense spending skyrocketed due to World War II, so did the debt – with the debt reaching well over $250 billion by the end of the war. Our debt went up and down during the dawn of the Cold War, the approach of the Korean War and a couple years of recession in 1948 and 1949. It was $255 billion in 1951. Then it climbed to $274 billion by 1955, and then the number dropped to $273 billion in 1956 and $271 billion in 1957… and that was the last time our debt amount went downward.
The National Debt reached $300 billion in 1963, $400 billion in 1972, $500 billion in 1975, and $1 trillion in 1982. In 2008 it hit $10 trillion. $20 trillion in 2017. $30 trillion in 2022. And now, we’re over $40 trillion.
The reality is that the National Debt, as much as some might wish to blame particular presidents as the cause, is not the work of one president, or one political party. In fact, the combination of unconstitutional spending and the Federal Reserve (our modern day central bank) acting as the facilitator of our debt, has been the foundational engine enabling endless government debt and structural deficits. The system creates fiat currency, especially now with the digital option, suppresses interest rates, and provides an endless backstop by acting as a last-resort buyer that essentially removes any natural market discipline that would normally punish reckless borrowing and unconstitutional spending.
And, despite all of President Trump’s attempts to slow down the debt, put a stopper in wasteful spending, and deregulate, as long as the Federal Reserve remains in place, and unconstitutional spending continues at break-neck speed, the National Debt will not only continue to rise, but the speed will continue to increase. By 2036 we will likely be over $60 trillion.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
Socialized Medicine and Abdul El-Sayed
By Douglas V. Gibbs
In a recent exchange between Jesse Watters of FOX News, and Abdul El-Sayed (Candidate for the U.S. Senate in Michigan), Jesse asked Abdul about his support for socialized healthcare. “How much is it going to cost?” asked Jesse.
Abdul responded, “It is going to cost the average Michigander a whole lot less than it does right now. The price of the program is going to be substantially less for the everyday person who can’t afford their healthcare and are worried about losing their healthcare with their job. While you are talking about the broader budget, I am interested in the everyday budget Michiganders are thinking about. A budget that Donald Trump and Mike Rogers are blowing up right now. I don’t see why you are on the side of the billionaires, Jesse, rather than on the side of everyday Michiganders.”
Jesse inserted, when he was able to get a word in edgewise,”I don’t want you guys to blow the country up. Do you know how much the federal budget is right now?”
Abdul admitted he didn’t know, and then shifted to claiming that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth wants to increase the military budget by $1.5 trillion. Abdul then added, “and you don’t seem to be upset about that. What. So that we can fight a war we can’t get out of and raise our gas prices? That doesn’t make sense to me, Jesse.”
Jesse went back to the annual federal budget. “The government spends $7 trillion per year, and your plan to socialize healthcare is $4 trillion.”
Abdul kept hitting the military spending question, returning to his attack against President Trump’s administration and the plan is to use $1.5 trillion for the military. He then went into the argument by the Democrats and the leftist media about how the USS Lincoln crew “couldn’t even get a sausage for breakfast.”
Abdul did everything he could to pivot away from the socialized healthcare discussion.
Jesse said, “If you spend $4 trillion [on socialized healthcare] everything is going to get very expensive.”
As for the USS Lincoln and the claim the long deployment made for bad conditions, I was in the Navy, and it is a false argument. While a normal deployment is about six months, there are provisions and the availability from other supply ships, to make sure everything remains fine on these vessels. And understand, none of the sailors made any of the claims in the news about their deployment. Some family members did, as if they know more about what was going on out to sea better than the sailors did.
Abdul did on the socialized medicine issue what he did during his entire interview with Jesse Watters. He used rhetorical tactics to try to advance economically illiterate policies. Abdul El-Sayed’s performance was more about avoiding a serious discussion about costs and consequences. He was using misdirection, emotional appeals, and outright deflection.
Abdul’s primary claim is that socialized healthcare will “cost the average Michigander a whole lot less” is a political deception that hinges on confusing the price an individual pays at the point of service with the overall cost to the system and society.
Twenty years ago on my online radio program (before I moved to AM/FM radio) the topic of socialized medicine came up, and a listener from Toronto, Canada called in to discuss the cost of socialized medicine. At the time, I was construction, had a very good PPO that my employer paid 50% of my portion, and 25% of the cost of my family. My cost out of my paycheck each month was nearly $1,000 per month.
The caller from Toronto provided how much her taxes increased to cover socialized medicine when it went into effect in Canada, and they explained how as time passed the government began covering less things – so she needed to get supplemental insurance to cover the things the government failed to. Her cost, once we broke it down between taxes and the supplemental insurance, was higher than mine. And, her services were of less quality, and included incredibly long waiting times for appointments and referrals.
When Abdul claimed the cost for the average person would be less, we need to ask, “And then what?” Abdul’s argument stopped at the point where the individual’s insurance premium or doctor’s bill disappears. But what happens next?
The cost doesn’t vanish. It’s shifted from the individual’s direct payment to the collective taxpayer. It’s funded through massive tax increases on income, payroll, capital gains, and even the value of your home. The saying, “if you think healthcare is expensive now, wait until it’s free” comes into play at this point. The “free” healthcare is paid through higher taxes on everyone’s wages, higher prices on goods and services (as corporations pass on their tax hikes), and lower economic growth.
Abdul and his fellow Democrats calling for “Medicare for all” don’t talk about the hidden costs because either they don’t understand them, or they don’t want you to hear the truth. And understand, when it comes to socialized healthcare, the costs go way beyond taxes. Hidden in the nooks and crannies are the non-monetary costs of socialized systems: long wait times for essential procedures, rationed care, government bureaucrats deciding which treatments are “cost-effective,” and a stifling of medical innovation. The “cost” of waiting six months for a heart surgery isn’t captured in Abdul’s budget but is a very real, and often tragic, expense.
Jesse was right to focus on the $4 trillion price tag. That number represents the true outlay that must be funded by the economy’s producers. Abdul wants to ignore that staggering figure and focus only on the illusory “price” of zero.
When cornered on the astronomical cost of his healthcare plan, Abdul immediately pivoted to military spending. This is a deliberate tactic known as a “tu quoque” fallacy or “whataboutism.” The goal is not to debate military spending, but to change the subject and paint his opponent as a hypocrite.
This is a complete intellectual dodge. The question was, “What is the cost of your healthcare plan?” The answer is, “It’s $4 trillion, and here’s how we’ll pay for it.” Instead, Abdul’s answer was, “But look over there at that other big expense!”
It’s a false Equivalency. He framed military spending and socialized healthcare as interchangeable budget items that can be swapped. This is absurd. The federal government has a constitutional, primary responsibility to “provide for the common defense.” Socialized medicine is not a constitutional mandate; it is a policy choice, and one that constitutionally is none of the federal government’s business.
This all brings us to the reality of economics, which is often about trade-offs. You can’t have everything. If you want to fund a $4 trillion healthcare program, you must either cut other spending (including defense) by that amount, or you must raise taxes by that amount (which is also a false argument, because raising taxes reduces revenue because it stifles production). Abdul refuses to engage with this reality, and simply uses military spending as a rhetorical shield to avoid admitting that his program requires either crippling tax hikes that are damaging to the economy, or devastating cuts to other government functions.
The USS Lincoln “sausage” story is a perfect example of using a single, emotionally charged, and a misleading anecdote to discredit an entire institution and its budget. The pivot to the USS Lincoln was designed to make the military seem wasteful and uncaring, thereby justifying cuts to its budget and supporting his complaint there are calls to increase military spending.
Even more concerning is that the USS Lincoln quip was a false argument. Anecdotes are not data. The operational readiness, morale, and logistical support of a carrier strike group are not determined by the availability of breakfast sausage. It was a trivial complaint being elevated to the level of a policy crisis.
As I stated earlier, I spent four years in the United States Navy, and as a sailor I understood that the purpose of military spending was not about providing luxury amenities on a big haze-gray-and-under-way vessel. It’s about maintaining a force capable of deterring aggression and, if necessary, winning wars. The cost of a new fighter jet or an aircraft carrier isn’t just “spending”; it’s an investment in security that allows the rest of the economy to function without the threat of foreign aggression. Abdul’s argument treats this critical function as if it’s just another line item on a budget that can be swapped for a domestic program he prefers.
Abdul El-Sayed’s entire performance was an unserious, typical series of leftist rhetoric. He refused to engage with the most basic economic questions:
How will you pay for it?
What are the trade-offs?
What are the unintended consequences?
Jesse Watters, by focusing on the $4 trillion number, was attempting to force a conversation about reality. Abdul, in response, did everything he could to avoid that reality, substituting emotional appeals and fallacies for a substantive economic argument. This is the core of my basic critique of socialism: it is a philosophy built on intentions (“I want people to have affordable care”) rather than on an analysis of the real-world consequences and trade-offs required to achieve it. The road to economic ruin is paved with such good intentions, and as C.S. Lewis pointed out, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary