By Bill Maher

The conventional wisdom from the pundit class is that Bernie wants to give everybody free stuff but can’t/won’t say how he’ll pay for it. But of course he does say how he’ll pay for stuff; as a socialist, the concept of taxing people for the greater good is kind of the whole point – it’s not something he’s trying to hide.

Meanwhile every Republican in the last 50 years has run on a campaign of giving out free stuff without paying for it. It’s not a stretch to say that the fundamental principal of the modern GOP is deficit spending. Case in point: Louisiana, which now faces a $3 billion budget shortfall thanks to Bobby Jindal gutting the state’s tax base in a futile attempt to impress a Koch Brother or two. Yes, Bobby tried the same experiment that Sam Brownback tried in Kansas. And the result was the same.

If it’s true, as conservatives love to say, that the states should be “laboratories of Democracy,” then why are they wasting their lab time replicating failed experiments? I thought the idea behind science is that if you tried something and if it didn’t work, you tried something else.