Against the violent talk and now actual violence coming out of the Bernie Sanders campaign for president, Bernie's soaring in the polls anyway.

He's doing so because unlike pretty much any Democrat except his probable nearest rival, Michael Bloomberg, he's actually talking about the economy, something TeamTrump has held a monopoly on.

Problem is, he's promising economic paradise, a full creation of 20 million jobs. Via Nate Silver, here's one of his ads that ran in California:

Sanders says he's going to create 20 million jobs? Through state intervention or socialist central planning, presumably? Better living through socialism?

Give us a break. 

For starters, been there done that. Way back in 2008, President Obama declared that he, too, would green the economy and create millions and millions of jobs through the miracle of central planning.

How'd that work out? The weakest economic recovery (and lowest job growth, with collapsing worker participation) in the history of the country, extending well past the recession that began from the time Obama took office. There were a few green jobs all right -- for the crony capitalists of companies like Solyndra, the green energy company presented to us as the wave of the future by Obama's minions. The only green that produced was green that went to well-connected investors at the top who eventually burned through half a billion in federal dollars before driving the company into the ground, leaving the taxpayers on the hook for the bill, but walking off with a pretty penny for themselves. Been there, done that.

It gets worse. Like everything Sanders promises, the promises are extravagant. He's vowing to create not a million, or two million jobs, but 20 million, as he describes on his website here (emphasis mine):

• Ending unemployment by creating 20 million jobs needed to solve the climate crisis. These jobs will be good paying, union jobs with strong benefits and safety standards in steel and auto manufacturing, construction, energy efficiency retrofitting, coding and server farms, and renewable power plants. We will also create millions of jobs in sustainable agriculture, engineering, a reimagined and expanded Civilian Conservation Corp, and preserving our public lands.
• Directly invest an historic $16.3 trillion public investment toward these efforts, in line with the mobilization of resources made during the New Deal and WWII, but with an explicit choice to include black, indigenous and other minority communities who were systematically excluded in the past.
• A just transition for workers. This plan will prioritize the fossil fuel workers who have powered our economy for more than a century and who have too often been neglected by corporations and politicians. We will guarantee five years of a worker’s current salary, housing assistance, job training, health care, pension support, and priority job placement for any displaced worker, as well as early retirement support for those who choose it or can no longer work.

Bernie assures elsewhere on his site that these 20 million jobs will be in place during his four-year presidency.

Let's do some math. Twenty million jobs over the course of five years would be 5,000,000 new jobs per year, no seasonal slowdowns permitted, full Stakhanovite speed ahead 12 months a year, meaning 416,666 newly created jobs per month in each month of the Sanders presidency. That's a figure that not even President Trump, with his truly stellar record of job creation, coming in in the 200,000 to 300,000 range nearly every month, has accomplished, and frankly, no one has. 

So now economic genuis Bernie, advocate of the Cuban, Soviet and Venezuelan model for development, says he can pull that off?

Maybe only if he's thinking of setting up collective farms, which isn't entirely far-fetched, based on some of his debate statements, noted here.

Another problem is whether we would even have 20 million workers for such jobs, given the labor shortages seen now. That 20 million seems to have been pulled out the air, it's quite neat and arbitrary, with little regard for the needs of the economy. Of course, this being Bernie, the wholesale destruction of industry would be one way of creating 20 million unemployed job seekers. But once industry is destroyed, color us skeptical that there'd be anyone except for the state to hire them. Somehow that's where the Soviet-style socialism kicks in.

With the tax base gone as businesses go Galt based on his tax-the-rich plan, whether the suddenly all-powerful Sanders government would have any money left to pay these 20 million workers is another problem. Say hello to Cuban-style $20 a month salaries. 

And with government expropriating as much of the earnings of companies as it takes to fatten the federal government, are companies going to be hiring even if they have money? Color us dubious. The idea that businesses under a Bernie administration will just flock to hiring workers, out of confidence the state knows better than they themselves what's good for their interests -- is cloud cuckoo land. Business doesn't work that way. It hires workers if it feels confident of the future.

Lastly, take a look at that five-year-plan (sound familiar?) for laid off workers, presumably the 20 million who are supposed to get the newly created green Sanders-jobs. Five free years of a free ride plus more for those "unwilling to work" as Sanders' ignorant ally, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it? Sanders claims that's to get workers back to work, but with the government paying for five free years of salary - and energy workers are among the U.S.'s highest paid workers, who would want to? Stay on the dole at full salary or bust your butt every morning in a Sanders green government job? Most aren't going to bother. Left unsaid: How much this five year ride for the 20 million is going to cost.

So many things wrong with Sanders' 20 million jobs claim, and surely Sanders knows it, but the socialist record is never to tell the truth about the real plan. Deception is a given in socialism. Sanders' grand sweeping promises of a worker's paradise are lies, and under socialism, oodles of new jobs have never happened in a private sector anywhere in the world. Never, not once. Investors flee socialist hellholes, they even fled Obama's America, with large numbers moving their assets and even headquarters operations abroad.  It's only under President Trump that they've come back to create the jobs they create out of expectation that there's a future and profits are going to be there.    

Sanders's promise to create 20 million jobs is a typical socialist deception. He ought to be called out on it, anywhere and everywhere he ever goes.

Image credit: YouTube screen shot