By: George Will – nationalreview.com – July 28, 2019

It will be especially entertaining if the presidential aspirants are asked some questions like these.

The Democratic presidential circus pitches its tent in Detroit this week. It will be especially entertaining if the presidential aspirants are asked some questions like these:

For Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders especially, but others, too: Three of Barack Obama’s few large achievements were the twelve-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, the Affordable Care Act — the most significant expansion of the social safety net since 1965 (Medicare and Medicaid) — and Dodd-Frank, the most consequential financial-sector regulation since the 1930s. You opposed ratification of the first. By advocating “Medicare for All” you are implicitly saying that the second was not much. And by railing against the ongoing “corruption” of Wall Street, banks, capitalism, etc., you imply that the third was not much. Does it not follow that you think Obama’s presidency was not much?

For Joe Biden: Care to defend it, including its deportation of five million illegal immigrants?

For Warren: You paused in your denunciations of crony capitalism, government favors for the well-connected, etc., long enough to vote to revive the Export-Import Bank, which funnels capital to government-favored corporations. Explain.

For Sanders: Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, a liberal in the New Deal–Great Society tradition, notes that you have advocated a top capital gains tax rate of 64.2 percent, which is “substantially higher than in Europe.” And more than double that in Sweden, of which you are famously fond. And you advocate the sort of financial transaction tax that Sweden abandoned as a failure in 1991. Wilentz says that progressives like you “seem to think that economic inequality can be conquered only by confiscating as much as possible from the evil rich. The model they implicitly adopt is the reactionary Malthusian one of zero-sum economics.” How is Wilentz wrong?

For Senator Kamala Harris and others considering reparations for slavery: Are the 1.9 million immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa who have chosen to live in America today eligible for payments? Will you share your formula for assigning degrees of eligibility? Is the first African-American president eligible? Is his opposition to reparations yet another reason to judge him a disappointment?

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Source: 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidates: Questions for the Second Debate | National Review