Quote snipped and bolded for emphasis.
And another thing…at this point in the 2008 campaign, what “good reason” did we have, other than a lot of big rallies in college town, to think that Obama could bring in mass numbers of usually-don’t-vote folks? Your argument could just as well be, and in fact was, used to support Clinton over Obama in 2008.
Let’s remember: Obama was elected in large part because he ran as hard as he could to the middle. He claimed to want to cut spending in Washington, that he was a fan of private enterprise, a good Church-going middle of the roader like everyone else.
If Obama would have run as a left-wing firebrand calling for 90% tax brackets, wealth confiscation, tearing up big businesses, free education for all, and a greatly expanded welfare state he would have lost in a landslide and we would have been treated to 8 years of Vice President Palin. Please, make the shrieking stop…
The other thing about Obama is that he was somewhat of a cipher. He left no radical paper trail of speeches, articles, or pictures of him engaging in radical activities. Despite being editor of the Harvard Law Review, I can’t think of anything he wrote back then that was publicly available during the election.
Now contrast that with Bernie. He’s spent his adult life in the public eye espousing radical ideas. He’s got a paper trail a mile long of statements that the American people will find outrageous. And do you think he’s willing to sacrifice his principles and suddenly run in the general election on a platform of lower taxes and smaller government and balanced budgets like Obama did?
This is a screwy election year and I already said that I won’t predict who will win because in a year when Donald Trump can be the frontrunner on the Republican side anything is possible. But I would give Bernie very, very long odds. Even against Trump. Maybe even especially against Trump, because Trump has no record of his own and no principled objections to tearing the other candidate apart however he can. Trump is also telegenic and quite popular to the kind of people who just sit and watch TV all night. He has some political talent, obviously. Bernie is currently succeeding in spite of his deficits when it comes to politicking, not because of them.
Also, quite aside from his politics the guy’s age is a legitimate issue. Reagan had to work hard to defuse the age issue, and he was only 68 at this point in the process. A two-term Bernie would be 83 years old at the end. That’s unprecedented. There are reasonable questions to be had about how old a candidate for President should be - it’s a grueling job. Just ask Obama’s grey hair.
Except for an autobiography from the mid-90s, of course. Why does a lack of a “radical paper trail” make him a cipher?
In your reply (post #61), you quote from my post #40:
I’m surprised that you believe that the paragraph quoted says anything on the order of “Sanders will get ONLY the youth vote.” Of course it says nothing of the kind. It’s rather mystifying that you could purport to find “Sanders will get ONLY the youth vote” anywhere in that paragraph. It’s as if you were claiming to find “Sanders will get ONLY the youth vote” inside any random set of six sentences.
I’m at a bit of a loss to explain to you your error. As a general guideline which might aid you in future: remarks about where rallies are held, do not imply (much less state) that only members of one demographic will vote for a particular candidate.
But back to your post #61:
Well, Obama is classified by many (perhaps including himself) as being black.
In an Obama versus Hillary Clinton matchup, it’s certainly true that adherents of either could assert ‘black people who don’t usually vote will vote if Obama is the candidate’ (which actually happened), versus ‘women who don’t usually vote will vote if Hillary is the candidate.’ In the event, we don’t know if the electorate would have contained a higher proportion of females than average, had Hillary been the nominee. But we do know that the 2008 electorate was the most racially diverse in US history. There was an unprecedented jump in voting by non-whites from 2004 to 2008 (20.8% of 2004 votes versus 23.7% of 2008 votes were cast by non-whites). That’s a significant number of votes. As the Pew Research Center reports:
For a Sanders versus Trump matchup, Sanders would have to do what Trump almost surely would: bring sizeable numbers of the eligible-to-vote-but-don’t-usually-vote to the polling places. Trump has the ‘disaffected white dude’ vote. Who would Sanders bring?
Sanders would be better off if he faces Marco Rubio–who would NOT bring the Disgruntled Bros to the voting booths. But then again, there are speculations that Rubio would pick up votes from some Latino voters who might be voting against their own interests, but who would still support Rubio. He’d have the mainstream GOP folks, too. Sanders would have to have someone in addition to the usual Democratic base, to bulk up his numbers. With Obama, it was clear that the ‘in addition’ was black people eligible to vote but who hadn’t been voting in most elections. With Sanders, who is it?
Just look at all this wonderful stuff that will happen if we all Feel The Burn!!!
I mean, just look at it!! Median household income up to $82k, unemployment rate below 4%, poverty plummeting to 6% of the population, the US economy growing at 5.3% per year and instead of a deficit we’ll have a huge surplus (and the side benefit of getting to stick it to Big Business and The Man on top of all of that…squee of joy just for that, no doubt)! Plus no doubt we will all have a unicorn in every pot and peace on earth and good Willy towards man (and woman)!
It’s stuff like this that has the young folks all riled up for Sanders. While Hillary is at least keeping it real, you have Bernie and his faithful flock pedaling this sort of brave new world, coming soon if we merely hire him on for an brief 8 year term, instead of an 8 hour tour. And the young folks (and many not so young folks…my own family is overwhelmingly in support of Bernie) who are fairly clueless are eating it up with their eco friendly and carbon neutral spoons!
So, to answer the OP, could he win? Yeah, he could…gods help us. Consider who he’d be running against and how ridiculous THEIR narratives are, then think about how a unicorn in every pot might not be that far fetched. 
I just hope Hillary doesn’t fold.
Sherrerd, if you don’t think that saying “college age voters aren’t numerous enough to give a candidate the Presidency” could be reasonably interpreted to mean that you think his appeal is limited to that demographic, I’m not sure what to say. If you say that’s not what you meant, I will happily believe you rather than engaging in some hairsplitting semantic argument.
Your point about Obama is well taken. My hope is that Sanders will bring in the cohort of younger voters who realize that the current economy offers them little hope for the sort of long-term secure jobs with benefits that most middle-class Americans have historically taken for granted. But it is certainly true that that isn’t a “demographic” group.
Why do you say all that in a mocking tone, while providing not one single reason to doubt the economics prof’s conclusions?
Because it’s pure fantasy, that’s why. Oh, I suppose it’s possible that unemployment could fall below 4%, but that’s not an unalloyed good thing even if it happens. The rest? It’s so ridiculous that it’s hard to know even where to begin, but just take the proposed 5.3% economic growth per year projection. If we are talking about China or India then that’s reasonable, but for the US?? And all of this posits not only that Bernie boy could make good on these ridiculous fantasy promises AND they would actually work as gushed about, but that he’d somehow be God King of the US in order to get them all through by fiat and over not only the concerns of his own party, some of who have a clue and would resist, but the opposition party who haven’t exactly been stellar in working with even a moderate president like Obama, let alone with someone like Sanders.
Ah, I see that you were assigning to what I wrote, the new meaning generated when an “on their own” is inserted into what I actually wrote. (As in “college age voters aren’t numerous enough on their own to give a candidate the Presidency.”)
But what I actually wrote contains no “on their own.” In a similar vein would be those who hear or see the phrase “Black lives matter” and insert a word which changes the meaning of the phrase–for example “only Black lives matter” or “Black lives matter most.” In general it is not good practice to insert words, and then expect that the meaning of your new sentence or phrase will match what the original speaker or writer was saying.
If you look at all my posts in this thread, including the one from which you quoted, you will see that I’m discussing the topic of candidates who can bring additional voters to the voting booth–additional beyond the traditional electorate of eligible-voters-who-usually-do-vote. My discussion of college-age voters was in that context (of ‘people who might come out to vote though they usually don’t vote’,) rather than being a claim (imagined by you) that “only” college-age people would vote for Sanders.
Well, it doesn’t matter whether a bloc of voters has in common any particular demographic qualities. What matters is that it be a bloc of people who are eligible to vote, but who would not have gone out to vote for some other candidate. If Sanders really can bring substantial numbers of college-age people to the polling stations–while (and this is crucial) bringing just as high a proportion of the other groups (such as non-college-age black voters) as Clinton would bring–then he would be a viable candidate. I admit to being skeptical that this is what would happen. (It would be interesting to see statistics on the proportions of just-turned-18-year-olds who are registering to vote, this year versus every other year.)
Don’t see why not.
Smileys ain’t economic analysis.
Well, of course Friedman’s conclusions are predicated on the assumption that Sanders is not only president but is “able to push his plan through Congress” – an assumption that must be made in making any meaningful estimate of the effects of any candidate’s economic plans. Whether he could get it all through Congress is a different question, and one outside an economist’s field of expertise, as I’m sure Friedman would be the first to admit.
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Don’t see why not.
[/QUOTE]
You don’t see why not what? Why employment under 4% is not all good? Or something else?
One doesn’t need deep economic analysis to understand that the US hasn’t seen economic growth even close to that in the past 50+ years. And we aren’t even talking about the reality of what’s happening right now with crashing oil prices, China’s own economic growth falling as well as their stock market plummeting, the EU still on shaky ground and our own economic outlook falling as well to know that anyone predicting over 5% US economic growth PER YEAR is freaking in pure fantasy mode. Whether you want to accept that or not is really your own affair, and if you want to debate it feel free to start a thread on that or any of the other fantasy figures in the CNN article I posted mainly for laughs.
So, he’s predicting fantasy results based on the real world conclusion they could never be tested because, you know, no one could push through the program anyway. Gotcha. I predict that if only Hillary gets elected AND can do anything she likes that there will be a manned mission to Mars, Mars bars for everyone AND a pony with a red ribbon. Now, I can’t possibly predict how she will get that through, but if she does and can do whatever she whats, well, there you go! It’s like magic!
That. Seems to me that as a matter of public policy we should always be aiming for 0% (of course not counting persons not seeking work because they’re children/students/homemakers/retired/incarcerated/independently wealthy/disabled/etc.).
Wait, I just realized that you didn’t address my actual question, which was
You replied by citing data from the 2008 election, which data obviously wasn’t available during the campaign leading up to the election. IIRC, lots of people eight years ago were saying “We can’t nominate a candidate with a black base, because black people don’t vote!”. And this was accurate based on past history, but proved not to accurately predict the behavior of voters in 2008. It’s exactly the same with those saying that young people don’t vote; it may have been true in the past, but that doesn’t automatically mean it will always be true in the future.
In any case, it’s not a problem for the Democrats. If Sanders proves unable to mobilize mass numbers of new voters, he won’t win the nomination. Much like Obama in 2008, if he does win the nomination by mobilizing new voters, that will suggest that these new voters are also likely to stick around for the general election, meaning that his election will be much more likely than models based on past experience would suggest.
No, most economist say that the ‘natural’ unemployment rate is somewhere between 4-5%, and that this makes the economy healthy. Lower than that causes or can cause inflation, it can increase production costs and cause other negative effects you’d need to get one of the economist 'dopers to go into. 0% would be really bad, but even Bernie’s supposed 3.8% would be sub-optimal from everything I’ve ever seen from real economists.
BTW, I figured I’d link to a cite showing annual GDP growth in the US since the 50’s you could look at to see why projecting 5.3% yearly growth is so silly. Even predicting that for one year during Bernie boys term would be a bit out there, but yearly??
Bernie has to prove that he has Americana values. Stop embracing Islamic speakers at your rallies, and speak about real American values.
Yes, because his nappy head would have made him look less like Huey Long than like Stokely Carmichael, Jesse Jackson, or Martin Luther King, Jr. A lot of white people thought he’d be shot dead as it was.
You’re Canadian, right? Canadians love Tommy Douglas, but would they love a First Nations man who spoke like Tommy Douglas? I don’t know; you tell me.
(Also, Bernie’s presently calling for 77% tax brackets, as I recall. That’s actually in line with Dwight Eisenhower or Jack Kennedy numbers.)
I see what you mean, and somewhat agree. But Bernie is authentic rather than glib, and that helps him.
On the other hand, Reagan was just shy of 77 at the end of his term, and this year Bernie turns 75–I see what you did there! Clever.
:dubious: What, Islamic speakers can’t have those?
Well, at least he’s healthy, for now. But 75 is 75. We can’t all last the way Strom Thurmond did.
Yes, I addressed it directly (in my post #64):
Though it’s true that at this point in 2008 no one had, in any previous election cycle, seen such large proportions of eligible black voters actually vote as turned out to be the case, it’s also true that at this point in 2008 there had been no black candidate from a major party in any previous election cycle.
That’s not a good analogy, because in 2008 we were looking at the possibility of a black candidate and the effect that might have on potential black voters. But in 2016 we are not looking at the possibility of a college-age candidate (for obvious reasons) and the effect that might have on potential college-age voters.
Fair enough.
Who said anything about race? And the only ‘white people’ who thought he’d be shot dead were lefties who thought the right wouldn’t be able to tolerate a black man as President.
If anything, Obama’s race helped him get elected. A big part of his narrative was the historical status of being the first Black man to be elected President. Some Republicans advocated for him and voted for him for precisely that reason - they thought that electing Obama might begin a process of racial healing that would be good for the country. David Brooks and Peggy Noonan come to mind. They should have known better, but whatever. If Barack Obama had been some Democratic white coastal elite guy like John Kerry with the same policies, he would never have won the nomination, let alone the White House. We would very likely have had a President Hillary. So can we please drop this racist nonsense?
I have no idea. Tommy Douglas was a very long time ago. But note that Justin Trudeau campaigned in part on implementing the U.N. declaration of indigenous rights, which will, if followed through, give the First Nations tremendously expanded influence over Canadian politics and economics. That didn’t seem to hurt him.
Honestly, I don’t know where you were going with that, other than that you seem to want to project this debate through the lens of race, for some reason I can’t fathom.
Is he going to bring in all the loopholes they had? And Kennedy actually lowered the top bracket from 91% to 70%, so he actually cut taxes.
Also, what were state taxes like back then? How about Social Security taxes? Property taxes? State sales taxes?
According to this wikipedia page, Americans paid a 6% FICA and no Medicare tax in 1961 when the income tax rate was that high. Today, they pay 12.4% in FICA taxes and another 2.9% for Medicare. That’s a 9.3% increase in income taxes before deductions. And doesn’t Bernie want to do away with the Social Security cap? That means a new tax of 15.3% of income over the cap, PLUS his 70% tax bracket.
Also, the top rate has to be looked at in terms of pay. On this wikipedia page there is a table of tax rates for the revenue code of 1954, when the top rate was 91%. However, that rate didn’t kick in until you hit a personal annual income of over $3.75 million in today’s dollars. That’s very, very few people, and those that had that kind of income no doubt had all kinds of tax shelters.
On the other hand, taxes were quite a bit higher for low income people, with the first bracket starting at 20% for incomes up to $20,000. And there was no EITC or other benefits and subsidies that are available to the poor today. You had to be making more than $300,000 per year in today’s dollars before your tax bracket hit 50%. Is that really what you are advocating? Because it looks to me like that tax system might work out to effective rates that are less progressive than they are today.
The ‘1%’ generally starts around an income of $250,000. A person with a $250,000 per year income today has a top tax bracket of 39.6%, plus 15.3% taxes for FICA and SS up to the cap. The same person in 1954 would have had a top marginal tax rate of 43%, with no SS tax and much lower FICA taxes. He probably also had lower state taxes, no state income tax, and more deductions.
You might also be interested in reading this:
The biggest change since 1979 in terms of where tax revenue comes from is in the lowest quintile, which has had significant tax reduction - from an effective rate of 8% in 1979 to essentially zero today - just FICA and SS.
In short, the notion that the 50’s and 60’s were a time of highly progressive taxes is a myth. The sky-high rates applied to very few people and represented a small amount of revenue. For the other 99% of the population, you could argue that taxes are more progressive today already.
As another data point, the revenue from federal income taxes has always hovered between 8-11% of GDP regardless of where the top marginal rate was, varying mostly during recessions and booms, and not because of tax rates.
I’m not sure what was clever about that - I wasn’t trying to play a game or do some sneaky Reagan trick or whatever you think I did. I’m merely pointing out that 75 is a pretty advanced age for the leader of the free world - a job that seems to take a heavy physical and mental toll on the officeholder. They come out of it looking 20 years older.
So it’s a legitimate question as to whether Bernie’s age is a reasonable risk or not - even if you like his politics. It’s hard to get progressive things done from a hospital bed. At the very least, the stakes would be much higher when choosing a running mate, as there’s a pretty decent chance he’d wind up having to fill the President’s shoes because of illness, exhaustion, or death.