If that’s what you want to call simple human decency, go right ahead.
It’s at best a mixed, you might even say muddled and expedient, record. It’s hardly going to help him.
Expound, please. In what ways should he change his policy positions, in your opinion?
No it means supporting half-assed measures like assault weapons bans and the like that ultimately do nothing to reduce murder while wasting valuable political capital while alienating large numbers of rural voters.
Maybe with the suburban moms and hipsters, it might help with the West Virginians and the Montanans. What I meant, though, was that he has been talking about gun control in recent days-I was at his Boston rally on Saturday and he talked of the need to keep firearms out of the hands of the mentally ill.
He need not change his position on guns, so much as avoid making it his focus.
Nobody is saying that except the gun crowd, are they? Using the same caricatures as the Teabaggers is not really helpful to Sanders, and it’s disappointing to keep seeing it.
That’s as timid a stand as anyone could possibly make.
It isn’t up to him what the focuses of the campaign are going to be. Assuming (and realistically) that gun control keeps making itself an issue, then he’s going to have to address it - and he’ll be at a disadvantage vs. candidates who can do it more credibly and comprehensively and sensibly. That’s already happening.
Its a true statement and I’ve seen quite a few people on the left say it as well. I don’t see how its a caricature to point out that the perception of the Democratic Party’s stance on guns has hurt it among rural voters or that Assault Weapons Ban we had in the 1990s did not make any impact on murder rates
Well what do you want him to do and/or say? He also did refer to his support for an automatic weapons ban which I forgot to mention previously.
It seems to me that gun control is being superseded as an issue by the far bigger ones Sanders is focusing on such as income inequality, protection and expansion of the New Deal/Great Society welfare state, the minimum wage, and so forth. No candidate is going to be able to satisfy everyone on every issue and Sanders’s perception of unorthodoxy on guns is going to help him not hurt him in the general if anything. Nor do I see Clinton making gun control somehow the centrepiece of the campaign-in effect she’s saying the same ting as Sanders.
Nothing of the sort was part of our conversation until you brought it up.
It is a caricature to say that’s *the *party’s stand.
Things that make people want to support him - as long as they’re sincere. Not the NRA line, and especially not if he’s going to claim to be the progressive, people’s choice.
And which you have just derided. So, that’s nice.
Not if the voters, and bluntly the media, want to focus on gun control. The candidates have very limited ability to define the issues. Where is this “supersedure” coming from - people who wish it wasn’t an issue, maybe? It is an issue, and every news day it’s an issue, and it isn’t going away just because you want it to.
If you can imagine a world where he’s the nominee, you can imagine a world where he doesn’t have to be held accountable for all of his positions, I guess.
She’s got specific, enactable proposals that, you could fairly argue, only go around the edges, but would save some lives and would not require the NRA-owned Republicans to agree. Sanders … does not.
Yes because I was making the point that automatically taking the Bloombergian stance on gun control doesn’t constitute “human decency” which all candidates are morally obliged to take.
I agree but I’m concerned with voter perception here.
Being for or against gun control and being a “progressive” candidate have virtually no relation lest we say Ronald Reagan is more progressive than Brian Schweitzer or that Michael Bloomberg is to the left of Bernie Sanders.
Yes I think his stance is silly, unconstitutional, and most importantly a waste of political capital but I could care less what his stance is as long as he does not make it his focus.
Except there’s little evidence that voters themselves (as opposed to the media) are particularly concerned about guns, much more than various other issues at hand. Indeed if there is any voter backlash its from the pro-gun rights crowd since they are more tightly organized and more likely to attribute great importance to the issue.
What is that supposed to even mean?
I actually went and looked at the proposals Clinton has suggested on gun control and on the whole it seems similar to Bernie Sanders-she doesn’t seem particularly concerned with an assault weapons ban for example.
Good point.
Bernie is very civil libertarian, but he doesn’t emphasize that, because that’s not the argument going unheard in the “mainstream.” He runs on economic issues, and for the common man.
Playing up how pro-gay you are is grabbing a double-edged sword by the tip in much of this country.
Talking about subsidized tuition at state colleges, higher income taxes on the upper margins, and a bit of protectionism–that’s not the same problem with social conservatives. When’s the last time you heard a Democratic presidential candidate talk like that?
He’s not the kind of “liberal” we’ve gotten used to, is he? It might work.
A Clintonista is complaining about muddled and expedient positions? 
Sanders is starting to lose me on his proposals that add up to like $2 trillion a year. He claims that he’ll tax the rich and corporations to get that money, but on Day 1 the CBO will explain life to him, and then what does he do? Ending the Bush tax cuts was only good for $70 billion/yr. So just to do some back of the envelope math, if an average 5% or so rise in tax rates generates $70 billion, then to get to $2 trillion, you’d need to make tax rates 150%. I realize that he plans to get some of that from corporations, primarily by taxing foreign corporations on their foreign earnings, which along with his rejection of trade deals is going to do wonders for making the US more liked in the world. The richest nation in the world poaching other nations’ tax bases while protecting our markets from foreign competitors is going to thrill the rest of the world, I’m sure.
That assumes that most of those measures would be able to pass. And of course Bernie’s centrepiece-nationalized Medicare is projected to save enormous amounts in healthcare spending.
Why stop there? Why not raise new taxes?
That assumes, again, that all new funding is coming from only taxes as opposed to cuts elsewhere and/or borrowing.
Who gives a fuck? The American workingman’s welfare is far more important than some neo-Mandarin ChiCom bureaucrat.
Yes, but other countries can poach our tax base in retaliation. We already tax foreign earnings more than anyone. The US will never get rich with a “beggar thy neighbor” economic strategy. Sanders would be Herbert Hoover all over again.
I was attracted to Sanders for his honesty, but now I think I might like Clinton better, now that he’s given some pretty wild proposals.
This is as opposed to the Republicans’ multi-trillion dollar spending projects, for which the funding plan is… wait, look over there! What spending? Honest, I don’t see any spending!
Those aren’t spending projects and they aren’t permanent.
They’re wars. Permanence remains to be seen.
To be fair, when the Republicans use the “better mental health care” line, it’s an obvious dodge - they defund the programs that would actually help the mentally ill, and they only bring up the subject when they’re asked about guns. Sanders’ campaign is heavily focused on the kinds of policies that would help struggling mentally ill people, giving more legitimacy to the plan.
Wars are not permanent except to Democrats, who want to count the wars as part of the baseline and consider not using the money for social programs as a “cut”.
I see you don’t deny that Bush never raised the revenue to fund his war. Apparently, if it’s above the “baseline,” you think it doesn’t need taxes to pay for it, no matter what it costs.
I’ve never endorsed the Reagan/Bush fiscal strategy. I’m more into the Eisenhower/Coolidge model.
The right thing to do with war spending is let it end. There will be more wars and we can’t just plug war spending into domestic spending every time. If we’d done that after WWII and Korea we’d have been broke several times over.
The right thing to do with war spending is* to raise taxes to pay for it when you choose to go to war.* How is this a hard concept?
It took me this long to even understand what you were trying to say. Do you have a cite for Democrats seeking to spend as much as what Bush spent on Iraq?
It doesn’t matter whether Democrats want to increase domestic spending by the same amount as Bush’s unpaid-for, off-budget, irresponsible adventures. It doesn’t matter if it’s more than or less than that amount. What matters is that whatever they’re spending is on-budget and funded. Bush’s expenditures were not, and that was bad fiscal policy.
It’s not that we don’t have the money. It’s that it’s bad for the government to run up that much debt. It makes the government servile to “creditors” that it should be ruling over; and it distorts the bond market.
(It’s not that the money disappears, either. Domestic spending is often stimulative. That money becomes somebody’s salary. We can manage on a high-tax, high-spending paradigm. We might even do better.)
Just raise taxes when you add expenditures! Is that so hard to understand???