Bernie Doesn’t Understand Why People Need to Work

[dropcap size=big]J[/dropcap]ust when you thought Bernie could not get more economically clueless, a post from last June indicates, he wants to not only decrease our work year by 12 entire weeks, but he’s willing to raise taxes on all people to do it. Ignoring what this would do the economy, it seems more apparent each passing day that Bernie is more fascinated with intent rather than results.

In my view, every worker in America should be guaranteed at least 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave. — Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) June 14, 2015

For those who don’t know, 12 weeks in practically a quarter of the year. That means, not only will employers see this as yet another barrier to hiring people, but on top of that, if everyone took 12 weeks off it would be a 25% decrease in work production. That’s a quarter of our GDP down the drain. Not only that, but employers are required to pay people for not generating anything; another hit to profits that could be used to hire new people. Workers are hired to work. Why would employers want to hire someone to go on vacation?

This also raises the question: who’s going to pay for it? According to Sanders, working families. He said in an interview that he will raise the payroll tax to fund this plan. As if taxes aren’t high enough, who knows if this will even be worth it? What does “small increase” mean? 10%?

Sadly, there was no huge backlash like the previous Tweets he posted. Hopefully, people still recognize how harmful ideas like this would be to the finances of our businesses.

Some will say family and medical leave is only for specific instances. Right– people aren’t going to come up with excuses to take advantage of 12 weeks paid leave their employers won’t be able to legally decline.

Businesses should be free to decide what time off, if any, they are going to pay for.

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