As noted, the Democrats are “offering” Kennedy. The others are speaking at their own behest, as anyone can. You could also offer a rebuttal and put it on youtube.
That’s enough of the personal cracks from everybody. I need you guys to throttle it down from an 8 to about a 5.
Does it bother you that there are armies of paid internet entities now that do what you’ve done for free all your life? It must be weird having done all this vigilant lifting to move the Overton window, and no one ever gave you anything for it, a free life time of service. That would bug me.
I wonder if the thought ever crosses your mind - if Bernie constitutes the “looney extreme left” - how do all those countries that are happier, safer, saner, more co-operative, and better governed than the US - like the Netherlands as an example - function? Their mainstream politicians are left of the SUPER LOONEY EXTREMIST MOST LEFT EVER Bernie Sanders, and yet their countries are well-run by any metric, with people having faith in their government, low corruption, and a happy populace?
Does it ever cross your mind, even for an instant? Or is it like the single payer healthcare thing that far better than the US system in every other first world country, and has for decades, but you have to pretend that it’s some sort of radical new untested idea that couldn’t possibly work?
Far from doing it for free, I had to pay $7.98 a year for my Charter Membership.
But I’m not in it for the money.
If a candidate comes forward with an economic plan that will kill 6 million jobs, increase the national debt by tens of trillions of dollars, reduce after-tax income for all socio-economic groups, including the lowest, and come up $17 trillion short on paying for health care, I tend not to be persuaded by the idea that the Dutch want it. But I’m funny that way.
Regards,
Shodan
That article is a silly hit job. It counts taxes for a single payer system but then doesn’t subtract the value that we’d be saving on medicare or Medicaid or private insurance. Well no shit the numbers look bad then, you’re dishonestly engineering the numbers to look bad.
If, hypothetically, we paid $1 trillion per year for health care now, and Bernie proposed a system that would instead pay $800 billion, they’d be saying “OMG $800 BILLION IN NEW TAXES! WE CAN’T AFFORD THAT!” while ignoring the fact that we’re no longer spending the $1 trillion on the programs this superscedes. If you can’t attack your opponent’s positions with honestly, your position probably sucks.
I don’t know what you mean by “subtracting the value we’d be saving”, but Bernie’s idea was single payer - Medicare for all. Spending less on Medicare doesn’t help if you spend more than that but call it something else.
Amount Bernie wanted the government to spend on healthcare = X. Amount Bernie proposed in new taxes = Y. X - Y = 17 trillion.
That’s according to those well-known right wing stooges the Urban Institute, the Tax Policy Center, and the Washington Post. Of course Kenneth Thorpe, professor of health policy at Emory University and former member of the Clinton administration, estimated the shortfall at $25 trillion, but what’s eight trillion dollars among friends?
But hey, at least we wouldn’t be paralyzed by the number of deodorants to choose from.
Regards,
Shodan
Subtracting that part of the cost of insurance premiums in the current that does not go into making people healthier. Which is a helluva lot, but does not appear in your formulation.
Medicare is not medicaid. Medicare is not private spending on insurance. Medicare is not the mish mash of tax subsidies and state programs and employer incentives and all the other complex shit that goes into making our health care payment system convoluted. If, hypothetically, the average American spends $8000 a year on medical costs through insurance and out of pocket costs, but we came up with a more efficient system like literally the rest of the first world nad some of the third world, so that the average American would spend $5000 on health care, that’s a savings of $3000 per American per year.
So how would you scare people away from such a proposal that obviously benefits them? You’d say "OMG! He wants $5000 per American per year of new spending on this new system! That’s 320m * $5000. That’s $1.6 trillion in new spending! Over 20 years, that’s 32 trillion dollars! Bernie wants to pull 32 trillion dollars out of nowhere! His ideas are wild and impractical!!!
Except that this hypothetical proposal actually saves $3000 per person per year. But hey, if you only count the illusory “new” cost, and fail to take into account the money that’s being saved by this change to our system, then you can lie up whatever bill you want and call it pie in the sky. You turn a real world saving of trillions of dollars into “OMG WILD IMPRACTICAL SPENDING COMMUNISM!!!” and all it takes is some dishonesty and ignorance peddling.
Meanwhile every other rich country in the world has been doing it for decades and thinks we’re insane and stupid while we scream about how such a system could never possibly work.
Puh-leeze, Shodan. Dislike Sanders if you want, but he is no “commie”. Fox has been going on the air arguing against Stalinist totalitarianism and calling that the American left for so long that some of you guys can’t make basic distinctions anymore :rolleyes:
I think you’re wrong. Bernie was a despicable jerk. Ok, he wanted to run his failed campaign all the way through every primary and caucus, even though he was all but mathematically eliminated after the New York primary when he was crushed. But that wasn’t enough for St. Bernard. Even after Clinton had enough delegates after the California primary, Bernie continued to pout and promised to, ‘Take it to the convention.’ He did nothing to try to shut down all the idiotic conspiracy theories being thrown around by his Bernie Bots. He appointed Cornel West to the platform committee who then promptly endorsed Jill Stein.
How many votes did Clinton lose because of naive Bernie Bros in Madison, State College, and Ann Arbor? If Sanders would have dropped out earlier, that would have poured water on the Bern and there wouldn’t have been as many people staying home, voting 3rd party, or writing in Bernie in crucial states.
Again: he was very clear that he was running in order to get progressive causes to be part of the conversation. He succeeded in that aim. Your claim–that he cost Clinton votes–is totally unfounded, and to the extent that it’s true, suggests that she couldn’t stand up under criticism of her positions.
You are far more interested in Sanders, at this point, than just about anyone else. Consider letting 2016 go.
I can’t ignore Sanders because I don’t think the dangers from him are over. I can ignore gadflies like Dennis Kucinich since they didn’t do any real damage. If the SDMB would have been around in 1990, I would not have been ignoring Jesse Jackson since he could have hurt the Democrats in 1992 like he did in 1988.
Um, say again?
Then why did he spend so much time pushing the Putin/Trump narrative on Hillary (and Bill as well)?
Bernie did as much as the Russian bots to sell the idea that ‘the Clintons are corrupt and crooked’–maybe more.
If that time had been spent, instead, on actually selling progressive causes (instead of on hammering home the idea that Hillary was an awful person), then many of those who deplore his role in the November 8 outcome would have a very different view of him.
Clinton didn’t become the “presumptive nominee” until the day before the CA primary in June. The NY primary was in mid April. And Bernie said he’d vote for her in the general, and did endorse her before the convention. Bernie did nothing substantively different in 2016 than HRC did in 2008. Politics is a rough game, and if Her Inevitableness couldn’t handle it, she should have dropped out herself. But she eventually won the nomination and promptly proceed to lose the election.
That is not to say that I think Bernie would have won the election. I doubt he would have, but we’ll never know. We only know that Hillary ran and lost.
At any rate, it’s good to finally have a thread where we can discuss this whole thing. I can’t believe we’ve never done this before! (And that’s my last contribution to this hijack of the thread.)
No thanks!
What you see as “real damage” is unclear.
The Clintons ARE corrupt and crooked, I mean, my god, I’ve been watching them since 1992, and neither Bill nor Hillary sees much point to telling the truth about their own dealings, whether it’s who they have sexual relationships with or whether they were under fire in Serbia or whether they know how to wipe a server. While their aims are decent for moderate Democrats, they’re big believers in the sausage-making process of politics. Saying that it’s the “Trump/Putin narrative” to call them crooked is as foolish as saying it’s the Trump/Putin narrative to call Sanders Crazy.
Did you ever watch an interview with him? Dude was a broken goddamn record on his issues, it was very nearly a joke how closely he stuck to his script about what he believed in. On a rare occasion he talked about disliking Clinton’s miasma of corruption, but just as often he angrily dismissed leading questions about the subject (“Sick and tired of hearing about the damn emails”).
People who keep fighting Sanders are doing a terrible disservice to the progressive cause. Unless, of course, they’re not progressive, in which case, well fought I suppose.
Aha, so there were all these millions of people that would’ve just loved to vote for Clinton, except that Bernie fucked that all up by telling everyone that it was absolutely imperative that they must vote for Clinton.
What a weird voting bloc that is. It’s almost as if they make no fucking sense whatsoever and don’t exist.
For heaven’s sake - read the damn article.
See that? More than what we’re spending now. Not less. More. A larger number.
Regards,
Shodan
And where in that analysis do we subtract the current amount that people are paying for private insurance, states are paying for a hodge podge of medical charities, operating costs of free clinics, etc. to see what the net effect of societal medical spending is? It’s not there, because it’s designed to make it look impractical and expensive.
Somehow the entire rest of the rich world has been doing this very thing for decades, with far lower costs and better results than the US, while including every single person in their country in this plan, while not freeing themselves of other deleterious effects like discouraging entrepreneurialship (because people are locked into their current jobs due to healthcare) but in the US we still lie and say that it’s some radically untested wild idea that only communists can dream up and would destroy society. For fucks sake, LITERALLY THE ENTIRE WORLD IS A WORKING MODEL UNAMBIGUOUSLY PROVING THAT THIS WORKS, and you’re treating it like it’s some crazy pie in the sky McDonalds on Pluto plan that only a totally communist nutjob could come up with.
But in your world, if health care reformed saved every family $10,000 per year in out of pocket costs but raised their taxes $1, it would be an unworkable crazy communist idea.
I’m talking to a guy that called a social democrat a “commie” unironically. What the fuck am I doing? I’m out of this thread. Toodles.
This is either poorly-informed or disingenuous. Sanders attacked Clinton relentlessly, sometimes with remarks that referred to her without naming her, such as:
At other times, he was just as happy to name her:
Clinton And Sanders Show Republicans What A Real Debate Looks Like | HuffPost Latest News
If you can provide us links to a reasonable number of pre-June 2016 (and post-May 2015, when Sanders formally announced his run) Bernie Sanders speeches, in which he talks about progressive causes and spends no time on digs at Clinton, then …I’m sure many readers will be surprised.
Sanders wanted to be seen as a More Principled candidate, without a doubt. But, as the Washington Post put it:
WP article excerpted at DVD Talk Forum
I wish Bernie Sanders were more effective than he is, at promoting progressive causes. He’s okay at preaching to the converted, but that’s about it.
That said, I haven’t attacked him for announcing he’ll do a SOTUniom rebuttal; it’s fine with me if he does one. Have at it.
I realize that those who feel guilt over their November 2016 choice (and the outcome of Trump) will never get over their need to defend Bernie Sanders and attack Hillary Clinton. Never, never, never.
But I do wish y’all would stick to the facts and refrain from making unsupportable claims (such as that ‘Bernie spent all or most of his time promoting progressive causes’). It’s such a waste of time and energy for everyone.