Ro Khanna’s Economic Fantasy Gets Shredded on CNBC [WATCH]

Democrats are losing the economic plot, and the trouble becomes especially glaring when their sweeping promises collide with basic questions about federal spending.

California Rep. Ro Khanna received exactly that kind of reality check while presenting his agenda on CNBC.

Khanna proudly describes his economic program as a “Next, New Deal.”

The label alone signals the scale of government intervention he is proposing, even as Washington already faces enormous debt and annual deficits.

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His blueprint includes wealth taxes targeting billionaires, a federally run industrial investment bank, and the redistribution of venture capital from California to other states.

It also calls for expanding some of the nation’s most dysfunctional entitlement programs.

Joe Kernen quickly focused on the central problem.

Whatever revenue Khanna hopes to collect through new taxes would first confront the huge gap between current government spending commitments and available funds.

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Kernen warned that Khanna’s approach appeared to mean still more federal programs and spending.

He said, “You’re going to just expand more social programs, expand more spending, expand, expand, expand, not try to maybe pay down what we already have or narrow the deficit that we run every year.”

The problem, in Kernen’s telling, is not finding another shiny purpose for tax revenue. It is dealing with the obligations Washington already has piled up.

“Any new taxes, you’ve already got a place to spend them. And we know how well the government spends them,” Kernen said.

Khanna answered by arguing that government could redirect money from areas he considers wasteful and invest it in programs intended to create jobs.

He also acknowledged the daunting fiscal numbers confronting the country.

Khanna said, “We’ve got, as you know, a $40 trillion debt, $2 trillion deficit.”

He then pointed toward wars, Medicare Advantage practices, drug costs, and fossil fuel subsidies as possible areas for savings.

“But why are we wasting money on wars that we are not winning, on insurance companies that are upcoding on Medicare Advantage, on drugs we’re overpaying for, on fossil fuel subsidies?” Khanna asked.

The California Democrat maintained that he had identified enough cuts to make a major reduction in projected deficits. “I have a plan where I list areas where we can cut spending to reduce the deficit over $4 trillion,” he said.

Kernen was not persuaded by the list.

“You didn’t get me on any of these,” he said plainly before pushing back on Khanna’s examples and returning to the size of entitlement and welfare spending.

“Obviously, we need to spend money on defense. Maybe you don’t like this war. A lot of people don’t. But we need to spend money on defense,” Kernen said.

He also questioned whether fossil fuel subsidies represented the central fiscal challenge Khanna suggested.

Kernen argued that the programs Democrats want to expand are themselves where many of the government’s biggest problems reside.

“The fossil fuel subsidies, is that really the big thing? The things that you’re talking about expanding are where most of the problems are,” Kernen said.

Kernen then named Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, entitlements, and welfare as programs demanding attention.

“We’ve got to fix Social Security, got to fix Medicare, got to fix Medicaid. We’ve got to fix all those things,” he said.

WATCH:

That exchange exposed the contradiction at the center of Khanna’s proposal.

Democrats continue to promise more supposedly free services while taxpayers are left to discover the actual cost once the political sales pitch is over.

Results matter more than good intentions.

The failures and inefficiencies surrounding universal health care proposals, Social Security, Obamacare, and the sprawling welfare bureaucracy do not disappear merely because Democrats package another expansion as compassion.

These policies also deepen the dissatisfaction consuming American politics.

Younger workers are taxed to provide services for older Americans while regulatory systems make housing more difficult and expensive to build.

Families face higher costs, while young people encounter greater difficulty finding work, building wealth, and starting families.

Democrats then appear surprised when those voters conclude that the system is failing them.

That is the final contradiction of Khanna’s “Next, New Deal.”

Democrats see a country already burdened by the cost and complexity of government, then prescribe still more government, more programs, and more spending as the cure.

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