If you used your free time on Saturday or Sunday to watch football, you may have seen an ad run by Joe Biden’s campaign in which the narrator says that Biden won’t raise taxes on anyone earning less than $400,000 annually. The ad perpetuates the myth that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was a “tax cut for the rich.” As Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute notes, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act “provided the largest percentage tax cuts to the bottom two quintiles—that is, the bottom 40 percent of U.S. households.”

Nearly every Democratic presidential candidate on stage during the debates on Wednesday and Thursday evening would end private health insurance coverage in the United States. Only a few of them are honest about it.

Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) recently rolled out a proposal to create another new entitlement program, Medicare Part E. This plan would put the federal government in direct competition with private health insurance companies by creating the so-called “public option.”

The first two laws that comrade Sanders would repeal if given the chance? The law of scarcity and the law of supply and demand. Bernie ignores these basic concepts. Humanity has limited resources leaving us with the problem of distributing those resources among individuals. The government can try - and fail - to distribute those resources for us or the market can distribute do it based on the choices individuals make. Every government that has tried to distribute resources for the people has failed - e.g., the Soviet Union and Venezuela. Every government that has allowed the market to distribute resource based on the choices of individuals has thrived - e.g., Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Hong Kong. A few basic inferences can be made using Bernie's two least favorite laws that would help him better understand the consequences of a single-payer healthcare system.

At the moment, California is considering the possibility of implementing a single-payer healthcare system. SB 562, the Healthy California Act, would essentially expand Medicare coverage so that it covered every person in the state of California. Having been approved by the Senate, the bill now goes to the state Assembly where it has a chance of passing. However, if it does pass, it would be a massive problem for the state as it would face significant increased state spending, higher taxes, and decreased quality of health care.

There aren’t too many things economists all agree on; unlike in the natural sciences, one’s perspective on economics often depends heavily on how one understands human behavior, incentives, and psychology. This is why you have such strident differences of opinion between left- and right-leaning economists on issues like the minimum wage, tax policy, and the ability of government spending to stimulate the economy.

Sen. Bernie Sanders has excited the Democratic Party's base with promises of more "free" stuff and emerged from relative obscurity as a legitimate threat to Hillary Clinton, once thought to be the frontrunner for the party's presidential nomination. But the policy agenda the self-identified "democratic socialist" is espousing to fawning audiences on the campaign trail is one that would create severe economic problems for the United States.

Roughly a month before videos surfaced in which he disparaged American voters and bragged about deceptive tactics used to ram ObamaCare through Congress, Jonathan Gruber, the controversial MIT economist paid nearly $400,000 to help craft the law, appeared on a panel with several other healthcare policy experts to talk about its progress and the continuing debate on healthcare reform.