Home Depot co-founders Bernie Marcus and Ken Langone say that Sen. Bernie Sanders is an enemy to all entrepreneurs.
Both men recently appeared on Fox Business Network to discuss the challenges they faced getting the retailer off the ground to become the success it is today and the potential pitfalls of socialism.
The co-founders of Home Depot believe if Sanders were president when they tried to open their business in 1978, the home-improvement retailer may never have existed.
"Home Depot is the poster child for capitalism," Marcus told Fox.
The two told Fox they never thought about giving up on their business, even amid the economic downturn in the late 1970s when the home-improvement chain opened. "People needed product. People still had to build houses, fix plumbing," Marcus said.
When asked about Sanders' plan to have Wall Street pay for $1.6 trillion in student-loan debt, the two expressed their disdain.
"[Bernie Sanders] is the enemy of every entrepreneur that's ever going to be born in the country and has been born in the past," Marcus said.
Langone agreed, "if the people in America today ... if they want to know what the future holds for them following Bernie Sanders, go to Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, Eastern Europe. Guess what? It doesn't work."
For his part, economist Art Laffer on Tuesday panned Sanders' plan to eliminate student debt as a "silly, silly proposal" and warned its costs would be catastrophic.
"It would cause a huge collapse in the U.S. economy," Laffer told Fox News' "America's Newsroom." "The very people he is proposing to help, it will hurt them enormously. Just remember, you get rid of that $1.3 billion student loan debt, that goes right on top of the national debt, which is just changing whose hands are holding."
Sanders, I-Vt., said his proposed bill, to be sponsored in the House by Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., "forgives all student debt and ends the absurdity of sentencing an entire generation to a lifetime of debt for the 'crime' of getting a college education."
The bill, Laffer said, would also entice many people to incur the costs of college who should not be there.
"They should be in trade school, learning something productive in the labor market, and they are not," he said. "This is not a time to be rewarding additional people going into college where they are not going to learn very much, and they will be kicked out of the labor force, going into huge amounts of debt."
He added he does not think there is an economist who would agree with Sanders' proposal.
The plan differs from a rival proposal offered by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., whose plan calls for student debt to be eliminated but contains an income cap.
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