I owe Senator Sanders an apology. And a challenge.
For years I stood in front of classrooms and told teenagers that socialism does not work. I was wrong, and I am willing to say so in public. Socialism works fine. It has been working in the United States for generations, on a printed schedule, at places like Fort Jackson, Fort Sill, and Fort Leonard Wood, none of which has a single Bernie sign in the yard.
There is a catch, of course. There is always a catch. The system only works when a specific set of conditions is in place, and every one of them is something @SenSanders has spent fifty years calling cruel. I know he could not survive those conditions, because he already flunked a much gentler version of the test in 1971. We will get to that. Do not skip ahead. It is the best part.
Somebody in the replies will demand one within ninety seconds, so here it is. For this article, socialism means the people inside the system do not personally own their housing, their food, their medical care, or their tools. The organization owns all of it and hands it out according to a plan. Nobody shops around. Nobody negotiates. Bernie has promised the American public some version of that arrangement for longer than many of my readers have been alive.
The United States Army runs exactly that arrangement. Every recruit in Initial Entry Training gets a bunk, three meals a day at the dining facility, boots, uniforms, dental care, and a sick call line with a medic at the front of it (I spent a career as that medic, so I know the view from the front of the line). Pay comes off a chart by rank. Working harder does not raise your number, and nobody in the platoon has ever resented the private next to him for earning more, because the private next to him does not. The schedule is posted down to the minute. Housing, food, and medicine all have the same payer, and the payer is the federal government. Somebody get Bernie a chair.
The rulebook is not folklore. TRADOC Regulation 350-6 governs enlisted Initial Entry Training, and it hands out privileges in phases. In Basic Combat Training the early weeks are tightly restricted, passes within the brigade area open up around week four, and on-post passes around week seven. Trainees do not drive or ride in personal vehicles, and they move under the battle buddy system. Clothing comes out of an issue bag, not a store. Nothing in that system is a right. All of it is earned, and all of it is designed to end. The Army runs a socialist greenhouse so it can produce a capitalist product: a trained adult with a skill who can function without a drill sergeant in the doorway.
And it works, within limits I will be honest about. Army data reported by
in 2025 put basic training washout at about 11 percent for soldiers who skipped the prep courses and about 19 percent for those who needed both academic and fitness prep. That is a completion band of roughly 80 to 90 percent, a figure the American welfare system would trade a kidney to see. Stretch the window to a full enlistment contract and nearly one in four soldiers recruited since 2022 has not finished, which is exactly what you would expect once the drill sergeants stop standing in the doorway. The system works while the conditions hold. It frays the minute they do not.
What Bernie actually convinced me of is that socialism can work, and he managed it without ever once living inside a version that did.
THE MAN WHO LASTED THREE DAYS
Summer of 1971. Bernie Sanders, future senator, working revolutionary, and at the time a Liberty Union Party man, shows up at Myrtle Hill Farm, a 116-acre commune in the northeast corner of Vermont. The residents are young idealists who have decided to grow their own food, build their own shelter, and share the load. A writer named Kate Daloz grew up next door in a geodesic dome (the outhouse was named for Richard Nixon, which tells you what kind of neighborhood it was) and put the whole story in her 2016 book, We Are As Gods.
By Daloz’s account, Bernie came to research an article on natural childbirth for the Liberty Union newspaper. What he mostly did while he was there was engage in endless political discussion. The commune, meanwhile, ran on splitting wood, hauling water, and planting. A resident named Craig got tired of having to pull people out of Bernie’s orbit before any work could happen. By Daloz’s telling, Craig agreed with almost everything Bernie had to say. He still wanted the woodpile split. When the allotted three days ran out, Craig politely asked him to move on.
Read that timeline again, slowly, the way I teach my Juniors to read a lab report. The most influential democratic socialist in modern American politics traveled to a working socialist commune, where the means of production were a hoe and a woodpile, and he chose to talk about it. The hippies, the friendliest people ever to walk the Earth, the people who let anybody crash on the couch, gave him a guest pass with a hard expiration date and then enforced it. Not three weeks. Three days.
This is not a blog rumor. The Washington Free Beacon and the Daily Caller ran the anecdote when the book came out in 2016, and VTDigger later noted it had made its way into the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Daloz told VTDigger she briefly worried the story would be trouble for Bernie. It was not.
What is next? A famous socialist gets asked to leave a commune because he would not do any of the work… wait, that already happened, in Vermont, in 1971.
I want you to hold on to the word politely. Craig was polite about it. Now imagine the same man, sitting around and talking during morning formation at a reception battalion. We have a technical term for that in the Army: a Blue Falcon. Everyone smoked. Extra push-ups, delivered by a professional, in quantities that would have ended the political discussion around rep number six. The ACFT has hand-release push-ups as one of its events. I would like to see Bernie do those before he lectures anyone about labor.
WHAT THE RESEARCH SAYS ABOUT EVERY OTHER ATTEMPT
I did the reading. I went back as far as the Mayflower and read what the people who lived through these experiments wrote down. The patatern is almost embarrassing in how consistent it is.
SubscribedPlymouth, 1620. Their London investors required the colony to put its food and supplies into a common store and hand them out according to need. Governor William Bradford wrote that the young men, the strongest workers, resented laboring for other men’s wives and children without any recompense. Corn production was miserable. In 1623 the colony gave each family its own parcel, and Bradford recorded that it made all hands industrious, and that the women who had claimed weakness before now went willingly into the fields with their little ones. Some historians will tell you Plymouth was a short-term commercial contract more than an ideology, and that is fair. The incentive problem Bradford described is still the same one that shows up everywhere else on this list.
New Harmony, Indiana, 1825. Robert Owen bought a whole town and declared it a community of equality. It dissolved into quarrels and was finished in about two years.
Brook Farm, Massachusetts, 1841. A group of brilliant transcendentalists decided to farm and think great thoughts together. Nathaniel Hawthorne put money in, left within the year, and later wrote a novel that quietly made fun of the whole enterprise. A fire destroyed the big new building in 1846, and the place folded in debt the following year.
Oneida, New York. John Humphrey Noyes ran his community from 1848 until 1881, when it converted into a joint-stock company. The Oneida name survives today on flatware. The socialists’ most lasting achievement was a capitalist business selling forks.
The Shakers took a vow of celibacy, which turns out to be a serious recruiting problem. A handful of members remain.
Soviet collective farms are worth a mention just for the punchline. Farmers were allowed small private garden plots on the side, and those little plots kept outproducing the giant collective fields acre for acre. Quinn’s Law number five says that when liberalism conflicts with reality, reality must give way. Reality did not get the memo.
Then there are the kibbutzim, the longest-running voluntary collective settlements of the modern era, and I want you to notice something. Bernie volunteered on one in 1963. He told an Israeli newspaper in 1990 that it was Sha’ar HaAmakim, near Haifa, a Mapam kibbutz whose members had admired Stalin until his death and celebrated May Day under red flags. A University of Haifa survey found that by the end of 2009, 72 percent of Israel’s kibbutzim had abandoned equal sharing and moved to paying differential wages based on the market value of the work. Only about a quarter still ran the original collective model by then. Bernie’s own kibbutz went private in the early 2000s. Stanford economist Ran Abramitzky wrote the best account of the whole story, The Mystery of the Kibbutz, and he found that these places held together for decades with tools that sound suspiciously like my three musts. Applicants went through long trial periods before they were accepted. Leaving was costly, because you could take your brain with you but not your house or your share of the swimming pool. And everyone lived and worked in close quarters, so a free rider found that nobody wanted to sit next to him in the dining hall. The founding generation believed in it, too. Their children and grandchildren believed a bit less, the high-ability members drifted off to the city, a debt crisis cracked the finances, and the tech boom made outside paychecks impossible to ignore. Economists had long predicted that equal sharing drives out the high producers and rewards shirking among the people who stay. The kibbutz movement’s own history did nothing to embarrass that prediction.
So let me tally Bernie’s field research. One kibbutz that eventually privatized. One commune that showed him the door. He is the only man in America who could go 0 for 2 on collective living and still call himself the expert.
One more finding, and this one is my favorite. An anthropologist named Richard Sosis studied nineteenth-century American communes. Jonathan Haidt summarized the results in The Righteous Mind: after twenty years, only about 6 percent of the secular communes were still running, compared with about 39 percent of the religious ones. Averaged across the span Sosis covered, religious communes outlasted secular ones by a factor of about four. Among the religious communes, the more sacrifice a group demanded of its members, the longer it lasted, and demanding more did nothing for the secular ones. The Hutterites, who have held property in common since the 1500s, are still at it. They are voluntary, they are strict, they have exits, and they are perfectly capable of showing someone the door.
Tell me in the replies which of those collapses surprised you most. I read every one.
Add it all together and the survivors share four things: people volunteered to be there, the rules were hard, the group could remove members who would not follow them, and everybody understood the mission was bigger than any one paycheck. The failures shared a different four: free riders, talent drain, leaders who would not remove problem members, and a promise of abundance that the incentives could not back up.
TWO EXHIBITS THE LEFT WILL POINT TO
Somebody will say Mondragon. Mondragon is a federation of worker cooperatives in the Basque Country with tens of thousands of members, and it is impressive. Read the operating system before you put Bernie’s sticker on it. A worker buys in, at roughly 17,000 euros, paid over time. The cooperatives sell into competitive markets. Pay is capped at a ratio of about six to one from top to bottom. When business turned bad during the pandemic, members agreed to pay cuts to protect jobs, which is the opposite of a federal jobs guarantee. When Fagor, the founding appliance cooperative, went bankrupt in 2013, the members lost their investment and the Mondragon network, not the Spanish treasury, absorbed most of them. And plenty of Mondragon’s workers, especially at plants abroad, are employees and not members. That is worker capitalism with solidarity rules, and it has customers who can walk away.
Somebody else will say Singapore. Roughly 80 percent of Singapore’s residents live in public HDB flats, and about 90 percent of those households own the flat they live in, with a five-year minimum occupation period before the owner can sell. The whole design is a stake in the country, not a bunk assigned by a ministry, which makes it a different animal from a barracks and a different animal from Section 8. The Nordic countries get the same treatment. They are market economies with high taxes and generous services, not places where the government owns the factories. The engine pays for the wrapper. Kill the engine and you get the waiting list, not the postcard.
THE THREE MUSTS
A working socialist system requires three things. Drop any one of them and you get Plymouth in 1622.
MUST NUMBER ONE: DAILY PHYSICAL TRAINING
Every morning, no exceptions, no wellness webinar. There are two reasons for this, and neither is about looking good in a uniform.
The first is cost. Every socialized medical system on the planet eventually gets crushed by its own bill, and the CDC says roughly nine out of every ten dollars of national health spending goes to chronic and mental health conditions. A body that gets worked every day delays a great many of those conditions. A system that pays everyone’s medical bills has a financial interest in a population that can run two miles, whether it admits that or not.
The second reason is that PT is the most honest sorting mechanism anybody ever invented. At 0530 on a track, the free rider identifies himself without an essay. The ACFT has six events: a three-repetition max deadlift, the standing power throw, hand-release push-ups, sprint-drag-carry, the plank, and a two-mile run. Nobody argues with a stopwatch. Bernie’s plan for identifying slackers is a congressional hearing, which is about as useful as an inflatable dartboard. Mine is a track.
MUST NUMBER TWO: NO MONEY, NO BIG CHOICES, NO CONTROL OVER YOUR SCHEDULE
Money is stored choice. The moment members of a collective hold cash, they start to buy, sell, save, and compare, and sooner or later they compare themselves right out the front gate. That is the kibbutz story in one sentence.
In Initial Entry Training, recruits eat where they are marched, sleep where they are assigned, wear what they are issued, and get up when someone else says so. Everybody complains about it, and the complaining is a proud tradition. It is also the reason sixty strangers can become a functioning platoon in ten weeks: nobody spends the first five weeks negotiating.
My RISE proposal borrows the same design. Participants get a stipend of $200 a month for hygiene items and incidentals, meals at the dining facility, base buses for transportation, and personal vehicles locked up Monday through Friday. I know exactly how that reads on social media. I also know that the people reading it on social media have never had to get forty adults through a training program.
Now consider what this does to Bernie’s sales pitch. He offers free healthcare, free college, free housing, and complete personal freedom, all together, forever. A working socialist system gives you the free stuff and takes the freedom in exchange, and that exchange rate has never once been negotiable. Bernie wants the free stuff for you and the freedom for himself.
MUST NUMBER THREE: ANYONE WHO WILL NOT SUPPORT THE SYSTEM GETS PRUNED
Every gardener knows this one. You cut the branch that is drinking the sap and producing nothing, and the tree does better for it. In the Army, the first 180 days are entry-level status, and a recruit who cannot or will not adapt in that window can be separated without much ceremony; a year later, they are still mowing grass in Gulf Company. In RISE, the equivalent is straightforward: counseling, remedial help, a program adjustment, and then, if a participant flatly refuses to engage, dismissal, with one second chance available.
Pruned means dismissed and returned to civilian life with a handshake and a bus ticket. Nobody is harmed and nobody disappears. I explain this only because someone on the left will screenshot the word pruned and tell their followers I proposed something sinister. That is a hobby of theirs.
Notice that every failed commune on my list shared one habit: nobody would do this. Every survivor could do it without apologizing. The hippies at Myrtle Hill pruned a future United States senator in seventy-two hours, which makes them the most efficient personnel department Vermont ever produced.
THE FOURTH REQUIREMENT BERNIE SKIPS
Everybody in Basic Training volunteered, and everybody graduates or goes home. The system is the training and never the destination. That is the whole difference between a socialist boot camp and a socialist country: the boot camp has a graduation date.
Bernie’s version has no exit and no graduation. Nobody leaves, nobody gets pruned, nobody runs at dawn. It has a press conference.
THE RISE ACT
RISE stands for Recovery, Independence, Skills, and Employment. It is the welfare reform proposal I wrote, and I wrote it from a classroom in a high-need district. It is an education program, not a money program, and it runs on two pathways.
TAP, the Temporary Assistance Program, is for the laid-off machinist, the mom whose support check vanished, the family flattened by a hospital bill: people hit by a short-term hardship who need stable footing without digging a deeper hole. It runs about fourteen months. The stipend is pegged to the VA’s 80 percent disability rate, roughly $3,200 a month, and it comes with Tricare-style medical coverage so one doctor visit does not restart the hole, financial literacy built on Dave Ramsey principles, and meals instead of an EBT card. I feed a family of six on about $520 to $560 a month by cooking, and the maximum SNAP benefit for a household of six is $1,421 (actual benefits depend on income). TAP partners with a discount grocer, standardizes a few weekly meal plans, and hands out ingredient boxes with printed recipes. The box has no street value, which is a feature.
CSIP, the Comprehensive Skills and Independence Program, is for people who need a full reset. It runs on repurposed military bases, because the government already owns the barracks, the family housing, the dining facilities, the clinics, the classrooms, the workshops, and the gyms. The base is already paid for and already secured. It is competency-based, so a participant stays until certified in a trade employers actually hire for, such as electrical, plumbing, HVAC, or automotive work, and not until a calendar page flips.
A typical day at CSIP starts at 0600 with hygiene and breakfast. Formation and physical training start at 0700. Classroom instruction in a trade runs from 0800 to noon, and hands-on workshop time fills the afternoon. There is study time in the evening and lights out at 2200, which is a suggestion, since these are adults. Weekends are looser. Families stay together in on-base housing, with on-base schools for the kids and daycare for the little ones. Random drug testing comes with treatment, not punishment. Financial literacy classes use Dave Ramsey principles. Food comes as meals instead of money, so there is nothing to resell.
A note on the name, since Washington recycles acronyms the way the Army recycles gear. Former Speaker Paul Ryan’s American Idea Foundation announced state RISE pilots last month, short for Resources for Independence, Stability, and Employment, with three states targeted for early 2027. His version puts benefits on a programmable blockchain payment system with phase-outs and work requirements. Mine is Recovery, Independence, Skills, and Employment, and it lives on a base, not in an app. His still hands people money. Mine hands them a schedule, a trade, and a graduation date. Do not mix them up.
Now the numbers. The first set is public record. The old talking point that welfare costs about $450 billion a year is dated. A Washington Post opinion analysis this month, built on Office of Management and Budget data, put fiscal 2025 federal spending on the largest general programs for low-income Americans (Medicaid, SNAP, ACA credits, housing aid, and the rest) at about $1.256 trillion. Divided by the official poverty count, that works out to roughly $35,000 per person in poverty, or about $181,000 per family in poverty. That is a spending ratio and not a check anybody receives, and it leaves out state and local dollars, but it tells you the size of the machine.
The second set is mine, so treat it as a proposal and not a promise. I have worked from a success rate near 25 percent and an average stay near eight years for the current system, and I project about $51,800 for the fourteen-month TAP track and about $122,600 over eighteen months for CSIP, with a 75 percent success rate, modeled on the completion rates military training already delivers. The bet is a graduate who can wire a panel instead of a household waiting on the first of the month.
Before the first reply asks about people who cannot work: RISE is for people who are capable of working with the right training and structure. People who truly cannot work stay on the traditional disability programs, SSDI and SSI included.
Bernie will like the next part least. RISE is voluntary. Nobody is drafted. It is time-limited. And it ends with a diploma. It is socialism with an exit door and a graduation certificate.
WHY BERNIE IS NOT GOING TO LIKE IT
Picture Bernie at the reception station. The first thing that happens to him is that someone tells him where to stand. The second thing is that a sergeant asks for the keys to his three houses.
Which brings me to the houses. I keep hearing Bernie say, “Tax the Rich,” and Bernie is rich. He owns a home in Burlington, a home in Washington, and a lake house in the Champlain islands that he reportedly bought in 2016 for $575,000. His 2019 tax return showed income north of a million dollars, and most of that came from books explaining why capitalism is a scam. What is next? A self-described socialist getting rich selling books through the very corporate publishers he says are the problem… wait, I was just told he already did that.
Now set him next to a billionaire. Bernie says he stands for the working class. He owns three houses, and the only paychecks he has ever handed out come from taxpayers and campaign donors, not from anything he built. Warren Buffett has lived in the same Omaha house since 1958, when he paid $31,500 for it, which is longer than I have been alive. Berkshire Hathaway employs roughly 388,000 people who chose those jobs and can quit on a Tuesday, and it makes and sells See’s Candies, Dairy Queen treats, Duracell batteries, Fruit of the Loom underwear, Benjamin Moore paint, Brooks running shoes, Clayton Homes, GEICO policies, and BNSF railroad freight to anybody who wants them, at prices customers choose to pay every single day. That is the only definition of reasonable that has ever counted. Buffett also drew a $100,000 salary for more than forty years. What is next? The self-declared champion of workers getting out-worked on jobs, homes, and humility by a billionaire… wait, the scoreboard already says so, and the Senator does not have both oars in the water to read it.
The travel budget deserves its own paragraph. Federal Election Commission filings reported by Fox News showed his campaign spending more than $221,000 on chartered private jets in the first quarter of 2025 alone, and more than $550,000 for the year, while he toured the country warning about oligarchs. When Bret Baier asked about it, Bernie said charters were the only way to reach thirty thousand people at a rally, and asked whether anyone thought he would sit in a waiting line at United. That is a fair answer for a man who flies. It is a strange answer for a man who wants to tax the people who fly, and an argument dumber than a box of rocks.
I do not want to hear one more word about the rich from the Senator until he leads by example and pays DOUBLE what the IRS says he owes, with no deductions beyond the standard one, no itemizing, and none of the loopholes his own party wrote into law. Then we may start to hear your message, you hypocrite! Right now the lights are on but nobody is home. Quinn’s Law number seven says it is different when you are a Democrat: the same things conservatives get condemned for become résumé enhancements. Nobody in the Senate has more of a résumé than Bernie, and the man seems to have donated his brain to science before he was done with it. In a head that roomy, another brain would be lonely.
While we are on the subject of taxes, how does Bernie pay for all of it? Medicare for All, free college, a federal jobs guarantee, and a housing program all cost real money, and anyone who thinks they do not is a few fries short of a Happy Meal, and the answer is always “the rich,” as if the rich were a piñata that refills itself. A 2018 Mercatus Center study put the new federal spending for Medicare for All at about $32.6 trillion over ten years. Supporters dispute that framing and point to studies projecting lower national health spending, but both sides agree the federal checkbook would get very large. Ask for the funding plan and he looks more confused than a chameleon in a bag of Skittles, and the plan itself is about as useful as a waterproof tea bag, a glass hammer, and a screen door on a submarine put together. That budget is one brick shy of a load, and the brain that drew it is still in beta. Nearly every post the man writes is about spending my money. I have some ideas of my own along those lines. Free ice cream every Monday, and the stores just eat the cost. A living wage for every student who attends class, regardless of age. And since I teach for a living, how about a mandatory socialist grading system, where the students with the highest GPAs hand some of their points to the struggling students, because it will help everyone do better. The idea is about as sharp as a bowling ball. It is just common sense. This is not a radical idea. Quinn’s Law number ten explains why nobody on the left will ever say no to any of it: liberals never think what they are doing is wrong, only that they have not done enough of it yet.
Let me address wages too, because the fixation on the minimum wage and the rich CEO always shows up right about here. A concept that will not fit on a protest sign: wages are a voluntary agreement. A worker accepts what a business offers. If nobody accepts, the business either raises the offer or goes under. That is market dynamics, not exploitation. And the CEO you love to hate? He usually took his own money, bought the equipment, paid for the advertising, and signed the payroll before he made a dime. If the business fails, the employees find new jobs, and the CEO loses everything he put in. That is why the truly wealthy tend to have a few busted businesses behind them: higher risk is the price of higher reward. Anyone who thinks a business owner just prints the payroll eats soup with a fork, and Bernie could not pour water out of a boot with the instructions printed on the heel.
The minimum wage hike is sold as a gift to the working class, and anyone who believes a $17 floor helps a sixteen-year-old land his first job has a leak in the think tank. The wheel is spinning in there, but the hamster died years ago. In practice it prices out the person hunting for a first job, the one who needs that first resume line most, and leaves him waiting on the welfare office. That is convenient for anyone who prefers a permanent voting bloc to a working class. The party Bernie caucuses with needs an underclass, exactly as the antebellum South needed one. Handouts do not lift anyone up. They keep people in the same place, voting for whoever promises the next check. That party wants dependents, and RISE is designed to graduate them.
So here is my question for the Senator, and I would like a real answer this time: what have you done, personally, to help the people that did not route through someone else’s tax bill? Bernie smiles about as often as a total solar eclipse and is wrong about as consistently. He was hiding behind the door when God handed out brains, and after three decades of blatherskite in Congress I am still waiting on the answer. If all you have is handouts, you are pro-slavery in the only way that matters, because you are building a class of people who cannot leave.
So here is my offer, and I would like it noted that I am making it in good faith. I will stand with the DSA. Everyone who cannot get off welfare goes into an education camp where socialism can finally thrive: one bunk, one dining facility, one posted schedule, one running track at 0530, and a sergeant to keep the whole thing honest. No cash, no big choices, no control over the calendar, which are exactly the conditions your movement insists will work. People who truly cannot work stay on the disability programs, and they stay there. Do not bother drafting the outrage post yet, because I already know which word you will screenshot, and I know the crowd that stopped reading at camps is a sandwich short of a picnic. The camp has a door, the door opens from the inside, and the whole point of the place is that people graduate through it. What do you say,
and
? What is next? A democratic socialist organization turning down the only socialist system in America that has ever run on time… wait, I already know your answer. You have never once signed up for the version with a graduation date.
By the way, this country has seen this shopping list before. On January 10, 1963, Representative A. S. Herlong Jr. of Florida, a Democrat, entered a list of Current Communist Goals into the Congressional Record, Appendix pages A34 and A35, at the request of a constituent. The list came from Cleon Skousen’s book The Naked Communist, and you do not have to treat Skousen as scripture to notice what is on it. Goal number 32 calls for supporting “any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture,” and it names education, social agencies, welfare programs, and mental health clinics. I did not write that list, and I am not asking anyone to believe in a sixty-year plot. I am asking you to hold it up next to the Senator’s platform and count the matches: Medicare for All, free college, a federal jobs guarantee, housing as a right, welfare without an exit. I am merely checking off the boxes.
Now,
students, I have a message for you. Somebody at a folding table on your quad is going to hand you a flyer promising free everything. Ask him what happens to the person who does not pull his weight, and watch his elevator stop between floors. Ask him about the commune. Ask him whether he knows Craig.
THE PEOPLE WHO ALREADY EARNED IT
There is one category of American who has paid for every benefit up front. About 54,000 combat-wounded veterans graduated from that very Initial Entry Training, deployed, got hurt, and were medically retired before twenty years of service. The government then took back their military retirement pay dollar for dollar against their VA disability. The Major Richard Star Act, H.R. 2102 in the House and S. 1032 in the Senate, would end that wounded veteran tax. The CBO scored it at $9.75 billion over ten years. Seventy-six senators are cosponsors.
On October 8, 2025,
objected to unanimous consent on the bill and blocked it. He called it a double benefit that the country could not afford. The very next day, he voted yes on a Senate NDAA of roughly $924.7 billion. That is the affordability hoax on a single calendar: a senator who cannot find $9.75 billion over ten years for wounded soldiers had no trouble at all finding another $924.7 billion the next morning. Chairman Wicker is not the sharpest tool in the shed on this one. He is the tool that got left out in the rain.
There is a House discharge petition, H.Res. 1247, whose only job is to bring the Major Richard Star Act to the floor. If your representative co-sponsored the bill, call the office and ask a simple question: have you signed the discharge petition? Sponsoring the bill and refusing to sign is all talk and no action. I am willing to bet that plenty of offices have not been asked. Volume matters here, and so does calling your own representative, since they have the most reason to listen.
The government has proven it can run a socialist system that works. It is the same government that cannot keep its word to the people who graduated from it.
WHAT I ACTUALLY WANT
Bernie has a way of making a very small idea sound enormous. Take the one working piece of socialism America has ever produced, the Army’s initial training. Strip out the war and the weapons. Make it voluntary. Give it a graduation date. Add a trade. Send people back out into an economy that is hiring. That is RISE. The commune gave Bernie three days. The kibbutz gave him a few months and then went private. Congress gave him a career. RISE gives people an exit.
My own view on the Senator’s future contributions is simple. He has a nice speaking voice, a gift for the word “billionaire,” and roughly the practical instincts of a man with delusions of adequacy. Trying to reason with him about incentives is like trying to baptize a cat. The last time he was handed a wheelbarrow, he wrote an article. A man who could not find his own shadow on a sunny day could stand to have someone show him where the wheelbarrow goes.
So yes, Bernie convinced me. Socialism can work, for ten weeks at a time, for people who volunteer, under a sergeant, with a stopwatch, an exit door, and a graduation date. Everything beyond that is Plymouth in 1622.
Bernie is welcome to give it a try. I will even save him a bunk. Reporting time is 0500. Craig says he can stay three days.
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But what do I know, I am only a teacher who has watched exactly one collective system work, and it had a sergeant, a stopwatch, and a graduation date.
Mike Borowski is a medically retired Army combat medic with 23 years of service, including a combat deployment to Iraq, and a high school Anatomy and Physics teacher at a high-need Career Technical district in Northeast Ohio — where he also wrote and published the textbooks for both courses. He runs “Bski’s Classroom,” a platform dedicated to cutting through political noise with data, history, and the kind of blunt honesty that comes from someone who has seen both war and the American classroom up close.
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