Saturday, June 11, 2016

THE OBAMA DOCTRINE: BUILD A MUSLIM-STYLE DICTATORSHIP BY DESTROYING THE WHITE MIDDLE CLASS THAT MIGHT RESIST

"Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist. The influences which form opinions and decide political acts are different in the different sections of the country."

"The Obama administration and federal government generally appear more determined to facilitate and encourage illegal immigration using American taxpayer dollars than to seriously address the crisis. In early May, President Barack Hussein Obama announced his proposed 2017 budget, which included $1.3 billion specifically for resettling unaccompanied alien children in the U.S."


The Center for Immigration Studies found that illegal alien households “receive an average of $5,692 in federal welfare benefits every year,” which amounts to over $1,200 more in welfare benefits than native-born Americans annually receive on average. In Virginia, illegal aliens are suing their former landlords after being evicted from a mobile-home park due to their undocumented status, according to The Washington Post.

DOJ Wants to Hide the Names of Illegal Aliens Granted Amnesty

Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch. (Photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters/Newscom)
Commentary By
The Justice Department is resisting a judge’s order to provide ethics training for its lawyers and is objecting to turning over to the court the names of illegal aliens who were granted what amounts to administrative amnesty (“deferrals”) in stark violation of an injunction issued by the court.

On May 19, Judge Andrew Hanen of the of the Southern District of Texas issued an order imposing sanctions on the Justice Department and its lawyers for unethical conduct, which included repeatedly lying to him in court.

U.S. v. Texas is the immigration lawsuit filed by 26 states against the Obama administration over its plan to provide deferrals, work permits, and other government benefits to almost 5 million illegal aliens. Hanen issued a preliminary injunction in February 2015 preventing implementation of the plan.

His decision was upheld by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and the case is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court.

But Hanen issued his sanction order because of the misbehavior of Justice Department lawyers when the case was before him. He severely rebuked the DOJ for claiming that the president’s plan was not being implemented prior to his issuing his injunction order when the government knew that it was being implemented—to the tune of over 100,000 aliens. When he found out, he ordered the government to reverse its behavior and void these deferrals.

Amongst the sanctions Hanen ordered on May 19 was yearly ethics training for five years for every DOJ lawyer stationed in Washington who appear in any of the courts of the states who filed the lawsuit. He also ordered the Department of Homeland Security to provide him (under seal) with a list of all of the aliens who had been given benefits under the amnesty plan in violation of his injunction.
However, on May 31, the Justice Department filed a motion with Hanen asking him to stay (or suspend) his sanctions order while DOJ appeals his decision to the 5th Circuit. The Justice Department claims in its brief that with regards to the required ethics training, Hanen’s determination that the DOJ’s lawyers engaged in “intentional misrepresentation” was reached “without proper procedural protections” and that there was not “sufficient” evidence of the misrepresentations.

Given the extensive evidence that Hanen cited in his order of the misrepresentations made by the government lawyers, as well as the extensive opportunity he gave the DOJ to present its side in the briefs it filed with the court, the claim that the DOJ was somehow unfairly judged or unable to present its defense is extremely dubious.

The DOJ also claims that the “sanctions imposed exceed the court’s authority.” Given the severity of the violations of the code of professional conduct that govern lawyers, including government lawyers, this is another problematic claim by the department.

Given that the judge could have imposed even more severe sanctions, such as dismissing the defensive pleadings filed by the government (which would have caused them to lose the case) or making the government pay the attorneys’ fees of the states, the sanctions imposed seem almost mild.
Of course, they are highly embarrassing given what they reflect about the behavior of DOJ lawyers. But according to the Justice Department, Hanen is interfering “with the attorney general’s executive authority” in imposing ethics training and the other requirements that Hanen laid out, such as filing a comprehensive plan within 60 days “to prevent this unethical conduct from ever occurring again.”
Apparently, that is too much to ask of the attorney general.

The strangest claim made by the Justice Department is that Hanen’s order to produce a state-by-state list of all of the illegal aliens unlawfully granted deferrals would “breach the confidence of these individuals (and of others who submit information to USCIS) in the privacy of such records.”
An affidavit filed by León Rodriguez, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services at the Department of Homeland Security, claims this would violate the internal privacy policy of DHS even though he admits the federal Privacy Act “does not apply to non-U.S. persons.”

Not only does the Privacy Act not apply to “non-U.S. persons” (Illegal aliens), but federal law (8 U.S.C. §1373) specifically requires the federal government to provide “citizenship or immigration status” information on any individual in response “to an inquiry by a federal, state, or local government agency.” And this requirement applies “notwithstanding any other provision of federal, state, or local law.”

Thus, states are statutorily entitled to this information and the DOJ’s claim that it is confidential has no basis in the law whatsoever. Of course, this very inconvenient federal provision is not mentioned in the Justice Department’s brief.

This action by the Justice Department makes it clear it intends to appeal Hanen’s sanctions order. Whether he will grant the requested stay is unknown, but he had ordered a hearing on the DOJ’s request for June 7.

So far in this litigation, the Justice Department and the Obama administration have had a steadily losing hand. We will have to see if that continues.

AMERICAN THINKER:

OBAMA'S SABOTAGE OF AMERICA'S BORDERS


Under the Obama administration, illegal alien families caught at the border are quickly released after being given a summons to appear in immigration court.


MEXICAN: AMERICA’S MURDERING UNREGISTERED DEMS


HALF THE MURDERS IN MEX-OCCUPIED CA ARE NOW BY MEX GANGS

CA HAS THE LARGEST AND MOST EXPENSIVE PRISON SYSTEM IN THE NATION, HALF THE INMATES ARE MEXICANS

THERE HAVE BEEN MORE THAN 2,000 CALIFORNIANS MURDERED BY MEXICANS THAT FLED BACK OVER THE BORDER TO AVOID PROSECUTION.

MORE THAN 90% OF THE MURDERS IN MEX-OCCUPIED CITY OF LOS ANGELES ARE MEXICANS.

OF THE TOP 200 MOST WANTED (MURDER) CRIMINALS IN MEX-OCCUPIED LOS ANGELES, 186 ARE MEXICANS.

SEE POLICE IMAGES OF THESE WANTED MEXICANS HERE:





OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS:


The rich get much richer, cronies stay out of prison and illegals get millions of jobs and billions in welfare…..



Poverty has become more concentrated under Obama



By Nancy Hanover




 2 May 2016


Under the Obama administration, more Americans
have found themselves consigned to economic ghettos, living in neighborhoods where more than 40 percent subsist below the poverty level
.

Millions more now live in “high poverty” districts of 20-40 percent poverty, according to recently released report by the Brookings Institution.




WILL MEXICO ELECT ALL FUTURE

BRETBART VIDEO OF THE INVADING MEXICANS

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/04/bretbart-video-mexicos-invasion-of.html


IMAGES OF AMERICA AFTER THE FINAL SURRENDER TO NARCOMEX AND THE LA RAZA DRUG CARTELS

HEROIN!

MEXICO’S GIFT FOR A PRICE TO AMERICA.

THE NARCOMEX CARTELS HAUL BACK FROM $40 TO $60 BILLION FROM DRUG SALES.

OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS HAVE BEEN ONLY TOO PLEASE TO LAUNDER THE CARTELS DIRTY MONEY. HOW MUCH WAS SPEND INVESTING IN CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS OR PHONY SPEECH FEES TO OBAMA, OR THE CLINTONS?


FORMER NARCOMEX PRESIDENT FOX HAS ENDORSED LA

RAZA HILLARIA…. HE SAYS AMERICA SHOULD

LEGALIZE DRUGS. GUESS HE’S FILLED HIS SWISS

BANK ACCOUNTS WITH DIRTY CARTEL MONEY!

 
Obama expanded his power domestically far more than any other president in memory. His executive action on immigration is a good example of legislating from the bureaucracy by implementing policies directly contrary to existing law and anything Congress would be willing to do.The server scandal is a metaphor for the old Hillary — opaque, controlling, paranoid, ruthless and power-hungry. It's proof that she hasn't changed.

Now we have Candidate Clinton promising even more aggressive executive immigration amnesty than Obama. Not only has Hillary vowed to defend Obama's executive immigration actions, she said "if Congress continues to refuse to act, as president I would do everything possible under the law to go even further." She added, "That is just the beginning …"

ROBERT RECTOR: Importing poverty…. WE

ALSO IMPORT ALL THEIR CRIMINALS


Obama Administration Looks to Cement Ethnic Divides With Language Mandate

The administration warns that “not recognizing children’s cultures and languages as assets” may be hurting them with school work. (Photo: Pete Souza/ZUMA Press/Newscom)


The Obama administration seems to live in a parallel reality, oblivious to the racial animus that has become the hallmark of late-stage Obama and to the ethnic strife that wreaks havoc on the rest of the world. Inside its own Platonic cave, the thinking is: Over half the world is polyglot, so why not us?
Its latest policy statement, issued jointly late last week by the departments of Education and Health and Human Services, advises states to instruct early childhood students in home languages different from English, and to help them retain separate cultural attachments.

The administration warns that “not recognizing children’s cultures and languages as assets” may be hurting them with school work. “Over half the world’s population is estimated to be bilingual or multilingual,” the statement lectures almost plaintively.

The answer is to celebrate and preserve the differences of dual language learners, or children who speak a different language at home.

The policy statement calls for a range of practices, from creating curricula and educational systems that “support children’s home language development,” to urging states to hire more teachers who “speak the language and/or share the cultural background of children who are DLLs [dual language learners] in the community.”
 
States must move with alacrity because these children will soon make up a “sizable proportion of the workforce” and their linguistic and cultural assets will be needed in an “evolving global economy.”
“The growing diversity of our nation’s children requires that we shift the status quo,” says the statement, in order to “build a future workforce that is rich in diversity, heritage, cultural tradition, and language.”

Tolerance and respect are not sufficient—early childhood programs must “embrace and celebrate their diversity.”

If this last bit of compulsive affirmation finally perks up your ears, it should. So should hearing for the umpteenth time about this administration’s zest for shifting the status quo.

In a Heritage Foundation issue brief published this week, I argue that policy statements of this sort raise generalized concerns because they may be deemed coercive and intrusive into areas of primary state and local jurisdiction.

The administration has no authority under the federal statutes governing education, such as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the implementing regulations, to require bilingual education or retention of “cultural assets.”

But the problems with this policy approach are much more fundamental. Speaking a second, third, or more foreign languages is indubitably a bonus for an individual, but it is far less clear that societal bilingualism or multilingualism helps cohesion or economic success.

>>>To Read Mike Gonzalez’s Full Issue Brief:

New White House Policy Promotes Ethnic Separation—Congress Should Reject It

The administration disregards a whole field of academic research that finds a high correlation between ethnic stratification and conflict.

One of the papers, by Alberto Alesina and others at Harvard, considered the gold standard study in the field of ethnic fractionalization, finds that countries with high linguistic and ethnic divisions have many societal dysfunctions.

Well before Harvard, the ancients (or if you’re a believer, a Higher Authority) drew a distinction between individual wisdom (which Proverbs 8:11 rightly says is “better than rubies”) and fracturing society linguistically, which was the punishment for the hubristic planners of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:7—“let us go down and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech”).

If Harvard studies or Revealed Truth don’t convince you, here’s what liberals have said on the matter.

More than a century ago, John Stuart Mill warned that:
Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist. The influences which form opinions and decide political acts are different in the different sections of the country.
And closer still to our time, the historian and eminent public intellectual Arthur Schlesinger, also a liberal, asked in 1991, “In the century darkly ahead, civilization faces a critical question: What is it
that holds a nation together?”

A few questions later, Schlesinger answered himself: “If separatist tendencies go on unchecked, the result can only be the fragmentation, resegregation, and tribalization of American life.”

This is why American leaders from the time of the founding, in recognition that it was even then a land with a high number of immigrants, have pursued an approach that is actually more inclusive than what the administration proposes today: It encouraged the foreign born to feel as though they were natives. They knew that a polity needs a single language.

America has seen higher rates of foreign born and of globalization, and its leaders had hitherto stuck to their desire for E Pluribus Unum.

This administration, always seeking in haste to

“shift the status quo,” is only too happy to

overlook the carnage that divisions between so

many Hutus and Tutsis, Serbs and Croats and

Pashtuns and Hazaras have created.

Even in industrialized allied nations like Belgium and Spain, or our northern neighbor Canada—which are high gross domestic product per capita societies with concomitant high levels of education, health, and other advantages—official bilingualism has pitted region against region, neighbor against neighbor.

Perhaps Congress can take a look at this new Tower of Babel and ask some questions.
 


ANOTHER BANKSTER CAUSED ECONOMIC MELTDOWN: Bond yields fall as fears rise over global economic growth

OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS AND THE FINAL

FALL OF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS


"The country is now at the edge of an abyss following years of

obfuscation, unaccountability, subterfuge, and law evasion by the

Obama administration that have numbed much of its citizenry into

a kind of base “group think acceptance” of government corruption

and abuse of power. Resetting Americans’ trust in government

needs to start with holding people in high office, like Hillary

Clinton, accountable."


"Paralleling the ever more extreme concentration of wealth, American politics is acquiring an increasingly dynastic and nepotistic character, traditionally a hallmark of the decay of bourgeois democracy. In a country of 350 million people, the Democratic Party could do no better than nominate as its presidential candidate an individual whose political career is based, to start with, on the fact that she is the wife of a former president."



AMNESTY: THE PLOT AGAINST THE

AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS TO KEEP

WAGES DEPRESSED AND PASS ALONG

THE TRUE COST OF MEXICO'S

OCCUPATION, LOOTING, WELFARE AND

CRIME TIDAL WAVE TO THE SAME

MIDDLE CLASS.


Average Family Today Has Less Income Than When Obama Took Office: The President is actually arguing that he’s done a good job with the economy.


EVERY DAY, IN EVERY WAY, BARACK OBAMA HAS SABOTAGED AMERICA'S BORDERS AND LAWS TO BUILD HIS LA RAZA PARTY BASE OF ILLEGALS.

 

Average Family Today Has Less Income Than When Obama Took Office


By Daniel Mitchell | June 10, 2016 | 4:19 PM EDT

(Screen Capture)
What’s the most important economic statistic to gauge a society’s prosperity?
I often use per-capita economic output when comparing nations.
But for ordinary people, what probably matters most is household income. And if you look at the median household income numbers for the United States, Obamanomics is a failure. According to the Census Bureau’s latest numbers, the average family today has less income (after adjusting for inflation) than when Obama took office.
In an amazing feat of chutzpah, however, the President is actually arguing that he’s done a good job with the economy. His main talking point is that the unemployment rate is down to 4.7 percent.

Yet as discussed in this Blaze TV interview, sometimes the unemployment rate falls for less-than-ideal reasons.

Since I’m a wonky economist, I think my most important point was about long-run prosperity being dependent on the amount of labor and capital being productively utilized in an economy.

And that’s why the unemployment rate, while important, is not as important as the labor force participation rate.

Here’s the data, directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
As you can see, the trend over the past 10 years is not very heartening.


To be sure, Obama should not be blamed for the fact that a downward trend that began in 2008 (except to the extent that he supported the big-government policies of the Bush Administration).
But he can be blamed for the fact that the numbers haven’t recovered, as would normally happen as an economy pulls out of a recession. This is a rather damning indictment of Obamanomics.

By the way, I can’t resist commenting on what Obama said in the soundbite that preceded my interview. He asserted that “we cut unemployment in half years before a lot of economists thought we could.”

My jaw almost hit the floor. This is a White House that promised the unemployment rate would peak at only 8 percent and then quickly fall if the so-called stimulus was approved. Yet the joblessness rate jumped to 10 percent and only began to fall after there was a shift in policy that resulted in a spending freeze.


In effect, the President airbrushed history and then tried to take credit for something that happened, at least in part, because of policies he opposed.
Wow.
One final point. I was asked in the interview which policy deserves the lion’s share of the blame for the economy’s tepid performance and weak job numbers.
I wasn’t expecting that question, so I fumbled around a bit before choosing Obamacare.
But with the wisdom of hindsight, I think I stumbled onto the right answer. Yes, the stimulus was a flop, and yes, Dodd-Frank has been a regulatory nightmare, but Obamacare was (and continues to be) a perfect storm of taxes, spending, and regulatory intervention.
And even the Congressional Budget Office estimates it has cost the economy two million jobs.
Daniel J. Mitchell is a top expert on tax reform and supply-side tax policy at the Cato Institute. Mitchell is a strong advocate of a flat tax and international tax competition.

Bond yields fall as fears rise over global economic growth

Bond yields fall as fears rise over global economic growth

By Nick Beams
11 June 2016
Amid rising concerns over global economic growth, global bond prices surged to a record high on Friday in a “flight to safety” as equity markets in Japan and Europe experienced their worst day since the turbulence at the start of the year.

Yields on German, UK and Japanese government bonds, which move in an inverse relationship to their price, all reached new depths, with the yield on the German 10-year Bund, regarded as a benchmark for the euro zone, going as low as 0.01 percent.

The head of sovereign capital markets at Citigroup, Philip Brown, said to see the yield on the Bund so low was “shocking.” “Equities are falling and fixed income is rallying in a flight to quality—there are real fears in markets about global growth.”

The surge in government bond prices came as the European Central Bank began buying corporate bonds in addition to its purchases of government debt of €80 billion a month. The extension of debt purchases, the result of an ECB decision last March to step up its quantitative easing program aimed at pumping trillions of euros into the financial system, has been accompanied by deepening criticism from Germany.

The bond-buying program, which started on Wednesday, had been expected to only involve high-grade bonds. While the ECB has not disclosed which corporate bonds are being purchased, market analysts quickly discerned those involved. Contrary to expectations some of them are of “speculative grade” status.

One of the most prominent was Telecom Italia Spa, whose bonds are listed as below investment grade status by two of the major credit rating agencies and only qualified because of the higher grade status afforded them by the Fitch rating agency.

The new phase of ECB action was greeted with a 12-page report by Deutsche Bank chief economist David Folkerts-Landau denouncing the central bank’s program. The criticisms have been voiced before but the latest report is the most strident yet.

Folkerts-Landau said the ECB had “lost the plot” and its desperate actions—bond purchasing programs and the establishment of negative interest rates—raised the risk of a “catastrophic” mistake.
“ECB policy is threatening the European project as a whole for the sake of short-term financial stability,” he wrote.

“The benefits from ever-looser policy are diminishing while the litany of distortions, perversions and disincentives grows by the day. Savers are punished and speculators rewarded. Bad companies survive while good companies are too scared to invest.”

The report compared the ECB’s mistakes to the German Reichsbank in the 1920s which printed money, leading to hyperinflation and economic collapse. “That was a hundred years ago but mistakes keep happening despite all the supposed improvement in central banking.”

Tracing out the evolution of the ECB policy, he said that after the failure of the lowest interest rates in 20 generations to boost investment, the central bank embarked on a massive program of purchasing euro zone member government debt. But the sellers of that debt did not use the money to invest but just placed their money at the central bank, after which the ECB went to the “next logical extreme” by imposing negative interest rates on deposits. He noted that almost half of euro zone sovereign debt was trading with a negative yield, meaning that a bond purchaser who held it to termination would make a loss on the investment.

Folkerts-Landau also bought into a political row that erupted in April. At that time, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said the impact of the negative interest rate regime on small savers was at least 50 percent responsible for the rise of the right-wing German populist party, AfD, which made considerable gains in recent regional elections.

“The longer policy prevents the necessary catharsis,” Folkerts-Landau wrote, “the more it contributes to the growth of populist or extremist policies.”

These comments point to the underlying reasons for the strident opposition within the German financial system to the ECB policies. A large portion of the German financial system consists of smaller regional banks whose business model, based on investment in secure government debt, is being hammered by negative rates. The operations of these regional banks form a part of the social base of the ruling party, the CDU.

The criticism of the ECB goes beyond Deutsche Bank. This week Commerzbank, which is partly government-owned and second only to Deutsche Bank, indicated it was looking at the possibility of hoarding its cash rather than placing its funds with the ECB where it is charged at a negative interest rate of minus 0.4 percent. As one commentator noted, such an action “would be the most flagrant bank protest against central bank policy yet seen.”

The policy agenda of Deutsche Bank and much of the German financial establishment was indicated in Folkerts-Landau’s indictment. Despite its “good intentions,” he wrote, the ECB had removed the incentive for euro zone government to revamp their policies through “structural reform.” Together with the reference to a “necessary catharsis,” this points to the growing clamour in financial circles for the initiation of further sweeping attacks on the social and employment conditions of the working class across Europe—a deepening of the measures which the French government is seeking to implement through its new labour laws.

The official rationale for the actions of the ECB and other central banks is that lower interest rates are needed to boost inflation and investment. But the euro zone remains in the grip of deflation and the ECB has lowered its own 2018 forecasts for growth in the region.

Opposition to present policies is not confined to criticism of the ECB. This week the Fitch rating agency reported that negative yielding government debt globally had now risen to more than $10 trillion following a 5 percent increase in bonds with a sub-zero yield. This means that the price of the underlying bond is rising, as yields and the price move in an inverse relationship.

Initially negative yields only affected the shortest-term bonds but the phenomenon is spreading and now encompasses seven-year German Bunds and 10-year Japanese government bonds. This is impacting heavily on insurance companies and pension funds which rely heavily on positive rates on government bonds to finance their operations.

Commenting on the $10 trillion mass of negative yielding sovereign debt, Bill Gross, the former head of the world’s largest bond trading firm, tweeted: “Global yields lowest in 500 years of recorded history … This is a supernova that will explode one day.” This refers to a situation in which interest rates begin to rise, leading to a fall in the price of bonds, thereby creating massive losses for investors who have purchased them at inflated prices.

Gross is by no means the only one warning of a possible financial catastrophe. Capital Group, which manages about $1.4 trillion in funds, has warned that negative interest rates are distorting financial markets and might lead to “potentially dangerous consequences.”

The head of the Los Angeles-based bond house DoubleLine, Jeffrey Gunlach, recently described negative interest rates as “the stupidest idea I have ever heard of” and warned that the “next major event” for financial markets could be when the ECB and the Bank of Japan cancel the experiment.
Larry Fink, the head of BlackRock, one of the world’s biggest hedge funds, recently wrote in a note to investors, that there had been plenty of discussion about how low interest rates had contributed to the inflation in asset prices. But, he continued, “not nearly enough attention has been paid to the toll these low rates—and now negative rates—are taking on the ability of investors to save and plan for the future.”

In other words, out of the horse’s mouth so to speak, comes the warning that the parasitic policies which have proved so beneficial to the hedge funds and other multi-billion dollar financial speculators are undermining the central foundations on which the financial system has rested for decades.

Bernie Sanders Wins, Even While Losing

Bernie Sanders Wins, Even While Losing

A Commentary By Michael Barone in Political Commentary

Friday, June 10, 2016
 
Bernie Sanders is not going gently into that good night, at least not yet.

After hearing Monday from the Associated Press that Hillary Clinton had clinched the nomination, after absorbing Tuesday night a solid defeat in the California primary and losses in three other states, Sanders was still pledging to go on campaigning for the District of Columbia's 20 delegates in its primary next Tuesday and to fight on until the Democratic National Convention opens in Philadelphia July 25.
It's possible to ridicule Sanders' protests that he can still win the nomination of a party of which he's never been a member. But give him credit. He won 42 percent of the popular vote in primaries against Hillary Clinton and a whopping 62 percent of the votes cast in caucuses.
He carried 23 states, from Maine to Hawaii, and came within 2 percent of carrying five others. He carried or came close to carrying white Democrats nationally.
More importantly, he moved Hillary Clinton -- and the Democratic Party -- well to the left.
Clinton reversed previous positions and came out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement and against the Keystone XL pipeline. She promised that she would effectively end fracking, which has sharply reduced oil and natural gas prices, and would discourage the mining of coal.
She came close to matching Sanders' promise of free college. She repudiated her husband's 1994 crime bill and his support of financial deregulation. Yes, a second President Clinton could and probably would welch on some of these promises.
But she's not going back to the first President Clinton's policies.
Sanders can claim credit for moving the Democratic Party closer to his own political creed, socialism, than any Democrat has cared or dared to do before. He did so with the critical help of young voters, the millennial generation, who voted about 80 percent for him against Clinton -- and for whom, multiple polls suggest, his self-proclaimed socialism is not a bug but a feature.
A YouGov survey in January, for example, found that 43 percent of under-30s were favorable toward socialism and only 26 percent unfavorable. A 2015 Reason-Rupe poll in 2015 found 48 percent of under-35s positive toward socialism. A 2010 Pew Research poll found 43 percent of under-30s positive toward socialism, nearly twice the 23 percent favorable among those over 30.
The promise of what Mitt Romney infelicitously called "free stuff" may account for some of the attractiveness of socialism to Americans too young to have any living memory of the collapse of communism and to have been taught a history that emphasizes the iniquities of oppressive Western societies. Hey, free college and free health care don't sound so bad.
Those who have actually had experience with government-run economies feel differently, as one can see from recent political results in Latin America.
In Venezuela, the socialism of the late President Hugo Chavez and his chosen successor, Nicolas Maduro, has destroyed the oil-rich nation's economy, to the point that toilet paper, groceries and medicines are simply unavailable, crime has soared to world-high rates and pro-government thugs crack down on protesters. Voters elected an opposition legislature, but Maduro is defying the law to stay in power.
In Argentina, voters in December repudiated leftist President Cristina Kirchner and elected businessman Mauricio Macri. In Brazil, leftist President Dilma Rousseff was impeached last month and removed from office pending trial in the Senate amid record unemployment and revelation of multimillion-dollar bribery conspiracies.
Peru has just had a close presidential election between two candidates both described by Reuters as "business friendly."
Or look at Sanders' favorite example, Scandinavia, where governments have, as Emily Elkins and Joy Pullman write in The Federalist, "opened their economies to free market forces in the 1990s, sold off state-owned companies, eased restrictions on business start-ups, reduced barriers to trade and business regulation and introduced more competition into healthcare and public services."
You didn't hear much about these developments in the Democratic primaries and caucuses. Nor did you hear much about the dismal performance of government here in everything from veterans' hospitals to Washington's Metrorail. You just heard bland assurances that an expanded government could provide free goodies without perceptible costs or glitches.
Hillary Clinton's leftward lurch in response to Sanders may not prevent her from beating Donald Trump. But it may not serve America or the Democratic Party well in the long run.
Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.


See Other Political Commentary

See Other Commentaries by Michael Barone.

Views expressed in this column are those of the author, not those of Rasmussen Reports.