With the government shutdown, Democrat politicians are in rare form these days.  

The talking points of the Left this week are that the shutdown fight is necessary, or 50,000 people will die, and 15 million people will lose health coverage, and 20 million will see their health insurance premiums double. 

Politicians always like using superlatives; it makes them feel important.  

And there’s no time like a government shutdown for speaking in superlatives. 

Even without exaggerating, the numbers they have to work with are enormous. The federal government employs about 3 million people, making it the nation’s largest employer, almost double the size of Walmart’s 1.5 million, the nation’s largest private sector employer.  

The federal government currently spends about $7 trillion per year, while taking in only about $5 trillion in revenue (“only $5 trillion.”  Twenty years ago, could you imagine the federal government taking in $5 trillion – and it not being enough?).  This creates an annual deficit – not the total annual debt, just this one year’s contribution to it – of about $2 trillion per year. 

But different statistics mean different things to different people.  All these numbers horrify conservatives, but leftists see them and are undeterred.  The modern leftist likes an enormous federal government, so such figures don’t bother him in the least.   

If you want to get a modern leftist excited, just tug at his heartstrings, as Bernie Sanders did this week: 

“Some 50,000 Americans will die this year!” because of Trump’s agenda, the socialist Senator from Vermont declared, successfully netting him headlines around the world. 

That certainly excites the Democrat rank and file.  And perhaps it should, if you don’t dig too deeply. 

But when we pay attention to the underlying truths below such numbers, we find that they don’t really support the Democrats’ position at all. 

The only reason anyone would lose health coverage if there’s a government shutdown is if they depend on the government for their health care. People who don’t depend on the government for health care aren’t losing coverage. 

Hasn’t the effort to make the entire country dependent on the federal government for health care always been a Democrat goal?  The Republican party has always worked for a robust private sector, and a huge variety of affordable private insurance plans. It’s the Democrats who took that away in 2010, by passing Obamacare, more than doubling the cost of health insurance in America in one fell stroke. 

In addition, a huge number of those whose health coverage Democrats are trying to fund are actually illegal aliens.  

The main sticking point in the current federal shutdown is this fundamental disagreement: the Republicans want to deport criminal illegal aliens, and the Democrats want to give them free unlimited, no-copay, no-deductible health insurance, a benefit we working American citizens cannot obtain. 

The 50,000 number, however, is especially interesting, because while it is certainly a gripping figure, there is no real data to support it.  

Democrats chose that number to be high enough to be scary, but low enough to be believable. And sure enough, it has gathered global attention – even though it makes no sense under current U.S. law.   

American hospitals are required to provide emergency services regardless of a patient’s ability to pay, so the kind of people with needs so urgent that they would die if unserved during a week or two long shutdown are guaranteed their care.   

Yes, guaranteed.   

With or without a shutdown. 

But as long as they have brought it up, perhaps this might be a good time to ask where the Democrats normally stand on the question of human life, when there isn’t a political battle over government funding in the news. 

Remember the early months of the COVID-19 “pandemic” in 2020 -- when Democrat regulators literally shut down hospitals, scaring doctors and nurses out of going to work, scaring patients from going in for treatment, refusing to allow necessary checkups and surgeries?  We will never know how many cancers and other conditions went undetected when they were operable, only to be discovered later when it was too late.  The Democrats have never apologized for that. 

And remember how Democrat governors in multiple states – most infamously in New York – directly ordered contagious COVID patients to be placed amongst the most vulnerable elderly patients in nursing homes, quickly spreading the disease and causing countless unnecessary deaths as a result? The Democrats have never apologized for that, either. 

Perhaps we should consider the murder rate in our nation’s big cities.  The United States sees some 23,000 murders per year, primarily in our large cities. Numbers like 800 per year in Cook County, Illinois, or 660 per year in Los Angeles County, California are not unusual, and there are many smaller metros with (proportionally) even higher murder rates than those. 

Not only do Democrats show no interest in reducing these numbers, they fight every Republican effort to remove killers from society. They oppose prosecutions, empty our prisons, reject capital punishment ... the Democrats even demonstrate against the current White House’s offers to bring in the National Guard to help control crime.  They attack ICE officials in the process of rounding up foreign drug dealers and other gang members.    

Shocking as it may seem, one can only conclude that these 23,000 murders each year don’t upset the Democrat party a bit. How else can they look at the Trump administration’s current success in cleaning up Washington, D.C. and not demand the same help across the country? 

Not all avoidable deaths are from homicide; we should consider one of the world’s oldest scourges: starvation.  The United States could be the world’s agricultural powerhouse. With our fertile land, supportive climate, and modern technology, American farms could feed the world. 

But our agricultural output is intentionally reduced further and further below its potential, due to Democrat policies.  Corn is unnecessarily repurposed as ethanol instead of food.  Punitive federal land management policies have reduced available grazing for cattle. The outrageous Green New Scam of inefficient windmills and solar panels has removed hundreds of thousands of acres from planting.   

Instead of getting our power from efficient nuclear, coal, oil and natural gas plants, we increasingly rely on inefficient sources that reduce the amount of food America can grow for ourselves and for the world.  

Today’s Democrats champion their devotion to an imaginary climate theory at the expense of the world’s poor and starving millions. 

Finally, one can hardly address the issue of unnecessary human deaths without facing the issue of abortion.  Over the past 50 years, the killing of the unborn has become the universal goal of the Left; the Guttmacher Institute estimates the current number at more than a million lives extinguished per year, in the United States alone. 

Yes, a million. 

Senator Sanders and his colleagues will continue to score political points by claiming to protect 50,000 lives by their budget fight, but those who pay attention know better. 

In fact, the Democrats have not only become longtime advocates of Zero Population Growth and similar anti-human theories; they have found numerous ways to twist public policy toward aggressive population reduction, not just in the U.S. but around the globe. 

If one truly values human life, one would be best advised to listen carefully to whatever today’s Democrats advocate, and then do the exact opposite.