Asking the right questions...

Why is it that no one ever seems to drill down on the policy proposals being put forward from the various political party candidates to get specific answers as to how and why their proposals will work in the real world?  Candidates should be asked to connect the dots.  Policy A will induce result B, which will lead to outcome C, etc.

For example, Ms. Clinton, you claim your economic proposals will add jobs and lift the middle class. Please explain to us specifically how a larger government, greater regulations, more unskilled foreign laborers, higher minimum wages, and higher taxes and costs on businesses will actually create jobs?  Seriously.  Walk us through it.  Please.

For the businessmen and women who must wrestle with the encroachment of progressive government largesse, how exactly does adding more rules, and higher regulatory costs help create jobs?   Can you please cite examples of where making life more complicated, more costly, and more risky for entrepreneurs and business people ever created more jobs?   Please.

Do you comprehend in the slightest degree how and under what circumstances actual real jobs are created in our economy?  Do you understand that government doesn't really create private sector jobs?  At best, it can minimize its intrusions and limit the number of artificial barriers it throws up that prevent the private sector from thriving to the degree it should.

And further, Ms. Clinton, please help us understand how your promised liberalization of our immigration laws, which effectively open wide our already porous borders to whomever, fails to deport the actual criminal aliens we capture, increases support for sanctuary cities, and blind support for an artificially high minimum wage will actually work to help the poor and unemployed who are already among us?  

As to your energy policy, please explain specifically how the interests of all Americans are served by creating yet another bureaucratic group to "monitor Climate Change" when there has been no discernible increase in mean global temperature since 1998?  And in light of the current administration's undeniable policy failures with respect to alternative energy, please explain how your proposed continuation of those policies can be expected to produce any different result?

As for you, Mr. Trump, please explain how your form of protectionist international trade policies will have any different economic impact than the ill-fated Smoot Hawley Tariff Act of 1930--which many economists argue was a proximate cause of the Great Depression?

When will someone pose the following questions or challenges to Bernie Sanders:  

Please, if you would Mr. Sanders, name a single example of a country where progressive socialist policies have led to lasting economic prosperity.  Cuba?  No.  Venezuela?  No.  North Korea?  No.  Argentina?  No.  Russia?  No.  Spain?  No.  Greece?  It's a total meltdown.  And as for the most recent example of leftist corruption and failures:  Brazil?  Not so much.

China?  Only when, at the end of the Cold War, China's communist leadership decided to support economic freedoms and capitalist market principles did their economy take off.  Yes, Mr. Sanders, it was capitalism and principles of free enterprise which lifted close to a billion Chinese out of the abject poverty of Mao's failed revolution.  It was never collectivist socialism.  Was it principles of socialism that created the economic powerhouse utopia of Hong Kong?  No.  

With so many examples of failed socialist states, each and every one with their own version of "Bernie Sanders" running around promising the folks something for nothing, what could possibly make us believe that such policies will somehow magically work here in the U.S.?  

And Bernie, please explain specifically how the evil "big banks and Wall Street" have actually ripped off the average American citizen?   What have they done?  Have they broken a law?  Which one(s)?  Please be specific.  And how, exactly, are you going to take them down?  And if you do "bring them down", what will you replace them with?  Who will supply the funds for my next mortgage, my next auto loan, or a loan to expand my business?   Who, Bernie?  

I'm also wondering who is going to actually foot the bill for all the freebies you and Ms. Clinton have been doling out.  Free college education, free healthcare, and more--a "free" handout for every newly created human "right".   Where does it end?

If I have a natural "right" to healthcare, then why not an equal claim on food, on housing, on transportation, energy, internet, clothing, etc. etc.?   Where do my rights and entitlements end, Bernie?  Where?  Where exactly will the money come from to pay for everyone's entitlements, and how will we sustain it?  Why don't you explain to your disciples that there really is no free lunch, and someone always pays.  

In this case, that someone is us--all of us.  We all bear the burden of our neighbor's free lunch, and in turn, they bear the burden of ours.  That being the case, how is anyone better off?   There is no one else!  For too long now, we've been playing the game of pushing forward the true costs of our current expenses onto the backs of future generations.  Eventually, that gravy train will come to an end.  Then what?  Someone should ask.  Surely, the candidates have thought through all of this, no?