While I agree with many of his policy positions I believe he has zero leadership or legislative skill. He would be relying entirely on Nancy Pelosi to enact anything, so essentially Sanders’spolicy positions would have nearly zero political impact. I don’t believe he has the ability to persuade legislators to go along with anything.
Of course it would be better than any Republican.
I think you are misreading the site, confusing odds of having "a majority of delegates "(“no one” leads) with odds of “getting the nomination”. And yes he has almost three times a better chance of that than does second place Biden right now. When the category of “no one” getting the majority leads the two are not the same thing. Silver makes no prognostication on what happens after “no one” gets a majority, even if Sanders has the plurality.
Still your point is valid: while (barely) behind Buttigieg in the delegate count he is in the solid best odds position by many sorts of analysis, including Silver’s model. And there would be no expectation for him to drop out until the delegate count is finished and went against him even if he was in the dumpster. Not while he still has a soapbox to his name.
[quote=“PhillyGuy, post:773, topic:835632”]
… I’m for Warren, but you just can’t convince a lot of swing voters that she didn’t commit careerist affirmative action fraud. I…/QUOTE]
She didnt. She was asked to self-identify as to what she considered herself. That’s fine. I can ID myself as black, and it’s not fraud.
She didnt say she was a member of a recognized tribe, which is fraud.
You’re right, thanks.
Of course its fraud. If I want to lie to people in a bar and tell them I am from the Pitcairn Islands, then that is fine. However, if I say that I am from the Pitcairn Islands so I get preferential job placement or college admissions, then that is absolutely fraud. How could it be otherwise?
If you ID yourself as black (and I am assuming that you are not) for the same fraudulent purpose, then that is, well, fraud.
And further, for all of these “Bernie isn’t a communist” protests, that’s not what matters. What matters is what a swing voter believes. The 10 second sound bite wins; you don’t get a minute and a half to rebut. This holds true whether your rebuttal is correct or not.
Bernie’s platform is full of ideas that are individually disqualifying. National rent control? Rename it the national Slum Creation and Apartment Shortage act. His billionaire taxes will do a lot of damage to investment. Medicare for All would cost almost as much as the entire U.S. budget. His taxes on the rich don’t even cover a third of his proposed spending.
One of the problems Democrats will have with Bernie’s electability is that Democrats are afraid to really engage him on his leftism for fear of angering the base of the party, so he’s going relatively unchallenged. But if he becomes a candidate in the general he’s going to have to explain his support for a series of shitty left-wing dictators, his water carrying for the Soviet Union, and about a hundred other crazy things he’s said in the past.
“It’s funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, that people are lining up for food… That is a good thing!”
Not the way they worded the questionnaire. It asked how she* personally* self-identified. She had been told by her Mom she was native American, and that’s how she identified herself.
No, not if I self identity as black, even if I dont look it. Say I grew up in a black neighborhood, hung out in the hood, had black friends, and my mother told me her Mother was black. If I thought I was part black, how is that fraud?
I’ll drop the hijack after this, but if these identifiers are to mean anything for the people giving out the preferences (affirmative action programs, United Negro College Fund, tribal groups, etc.) then there needs to be a higher standard that one’s own subjective belief which can be easily falsified.
In almost every white family there are rumors of Native American blood somewhere in the distant past, including mine. AFAIK, nobody except Warren has used those rumors for personal benefit. It speaks to her judgment more than anything.
But Sam Stone is right. The GOP will have a field day with Bernie Sanders. People are never ready for radical change, whether that is from the left or from the right.
There is. If they ask if you are a member of a Federally recognized tribe, then either you are- or are not. What you feel you are, doesnt enter into it.
And we have no idea if she benefited from it. In fact, give the date, that’s highly doubtful.
The way they worded the questionnaire, her answer was legit.
So you’re saying that Warren is singularly bad, right? She alone was nefarious enough to concoct this evil plan and put it into action, right? She’s like a fucking supervillian, isn’t she? Clearly heinous and prolly dangerous, too, amirite?
:rolleyes:
Her dog is certainly cute, though: Elizabeth Warren's husband explains how their dog, Bailey, sent him to the ER | CNN Politics
I wasn’t forgetting it. I was intentionally not including the effect because it was completely irrelevant to my point. There is some value to looking at total cost to society. There is also value as looking at only the costs to the government. Ultimately the federal government is going to have to fund federal expenditures. There is value in looking at only those expenditures, and how we fund them, as well. We barely scratch the surface with reversing the Trump tax cuts. There are going to be significant tax increases needed to raise the remaining 23-32 trillion dollars. Warren got chewed up by the Democratic party leaning electorate, and abandoned her full throated support of Medicare for All, when she drafted a plan to raise less than half the new costs.
Sanders has mostly skated by focusing on vague talking points about the billionaire class and focusing only on society wide cost evaluation. He let Warren take the hit by trying to draft a plan to actual fund it. That is crafty politics. I give him that.
That talking point works, with limitations, for generic universal health care proposals that are roughly comparable to those other national programs. Medicare for All
It is a lot harder to justify the savings argument by comparison when there is no comparable system. We could literally throw a dart at a map of Europe to identity a cheaper system per capita than Sanders has proposed. US spending on healthcare in 2017 was 3.5 trillion. That was the same year that the cite I used estimated 3.2 trilliion average per year in the first decade of M4A. We probably shouldn’t ignore that the average cost is pushed down a bit by delaying replacement of current Medicare with the more comprehensive, and costly, M4A. Despite the branding of M4A it is not Medicare as it exists. Most of the cost estimates of M4A put it at or near the 32 trillion across a decade price point. We are not saving half if Sanders’ proposal becomes law . We will be lucky to save anything society wide with the more common estimates around the 32 trillion I cited. If we include the inefficiencies and dynamic effects of the taxes to fund it on the cost side, we could easily be looking at a system that is more costly than what we have now.
Medicare for All is nothing like the current Medicare. It is nothing like any any existing UHC system in the world. It is likely not much, if any, cheaper than the existing systems. We should stop pretending that they give us insight into what Medicare for All would be like.
How are you, or Bernie, going to get the money that currently goes into private health insurance into Medicare? Are you effectively going to say that all of the current fees individuals and businesses pay to private health insurers will instead be paid to the government? That’s a tax. It might ultimately be a more efficient way of charging people for health care, but you’re not going to get around the fact that you’re taking away people’s current health insurance and replacing it with government supplied health insurance, and taxing them or their employer while doing so. Bernie is either going to have to be honest that he’ll have to impose a national health tax in order to pay for national health care, or try to avoid the subject. Doing the former will lose him all the voters who are adverse to increased taxes. Doing the latter will generate accusations that he’s making promises he can’t pay for. And that’s just starting with Medicare for All. There’s also College for All, Housing for All, Post Office Banking for All, High Speed Internet for All,and Jobs for All. At least he’s not touting the Green New Deal with the “For All” tag.
Other countries have had more time to work on their national health systems, realise economies of scale and impose cost controls. You can’t take the benefits of a system that’s been developed over decades and magically transfer them across overnight. Also, those comparisons are usually aggregate comparisons. Somebody with good health insurance in the US is receiving health care on par with almost all other developed countries. It’s great that Bernie wants to expand health care coverage to the poor. But telling the already well-insured that they’re going to pay more for what they’re already getting isn’t going to be a good sales pitch.
it may not be fraud for you, as a guy who honestly feels part black, say, while sharing a beer with me at a bar and listening to black-inspired music.
But if you’re a public figure, expect a higher standard.
Did Warren ever “hang out in the hood” with her native tribal friends? Did she ever have any such friends? Did she ever wear traditional clothing, sing a traditional song, eat a traditional food, learn a couple words of her traditional language, celebrate a traditional holiday?
Did she ever DO anything based on her native heritage?
If not, then she’s making a fraudulent claim. That’s not good for a law professor at Harvard, and it’s even worse for a President.
[on edit: my apologies for the hijack. The tread topic is Sanders.)
In every country with single payer I know of, only poor people feel this way. Everyone else needs a supplementary policy. U.S. Medicare is an example, but the same in true in Britain, and in Canada.
The Affordable Care Act model, with competing insurers, as in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, despite having multiple payers in those nations, results in individuals, and families only having one payer. This is because competing payers compete to provide a care package that avoids need for separate private health insurance.
Google heath care in the Netherlands.
The single payer model, despite being a point of nationalist pride in the UK, doesn’t work well, and isn’t a likely choice for the U.S. Getting to universal coverage will be delayed by having an ideologue president who doesn’t realize that the Obama administration already sent us in the right direction.
Plus, some measure of cooperation from the Supreme Court is needed for any universal plan. And with Bernie as president, the Supreme Court will be increasingly conservative due to his inability to fill vacancies. While this is a risk for any future Democratic candidate, it is worse for Bernie, because he has a lesser chance of coattails that would result in a Democratic Senate.
While true, currently in Canada, we are debating having universal pharmacare, which is the big reason for supplemental insurance. I hope it passes, I view medicare the same way I view other social services. It is something that every person needs at some point, and it is nice to know every Canadian has access to those services. There are innumerable secondary benefits to easy access to medical care as well. I’ve never understood the counterargument to UHC.
septimus wrote in another thread:
‘And — this is very important — even if [Bernie Sanders] is elected, many poorly informed voters who do vote for him, will vote Republican in down-ticket races to “balance” against his leftism. Sanders as nominee means that Moscow Mitch will control the Senate for at least two more years.’
Interesting observation. I just thought it needed to be said in this thread as well.
An excellent article on how utterly despicable Bernie is. Was it written by a neoliberal corporate establishment Wall Street shill like myself? No, it was written by a Black person to the left of Sanders.
Are you from Earth 2?
I don’t listen to anyone who speaks in terms of “owing” votes. There will a choice to make—Trump or the Democratic nominee. That’s it. There are no other possible outcomes. If you don’t vote for the Democratic nominee, that’s a vote for Trump. Period.