Message to Millennials: Bernie Sanders Is Intellectually Consistent, Not Intellectually Honest 4
Keep the Tweet going please--the article lays out some truths--mainly about Sanders unrealistic proposals.
Howard Dean ?@GovHowardDean 22h22 hours ago
Message to Millennials: Bernie Sanders Is Intellectually Consistent, Not Intellectually Honest http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2016_03/message_to_millennials_bernie059844.php … via @washmonthly
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http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2016_03/message_to_millennials_bernie059844.php
March 07, 2016 12:15 PM
Message to Millennials: Bernie Sanders Is Intellectually Consistent, Not Intellectually Honest
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2016_03/message_to_millennials_bernie059844.php
By Paul Glastris
.......................It’s in the realm of policy, however, where I find Bernie intellectually quite dishonest, and Hillary pretty damned honest. When you scrutinize his policy ideas, as wonky liberals have begun doing (finally) in the last couple of months, those ideas don’t stand up, on a bunch of different levels.
One of those levels is political—as in there’s no way, in the foreseeable future, there will be sixty votes in the Senate, much less support in a likely GOP-controlled House, to pass single-payer health care, or break up the big banks, or reform the political campaign system, or provide free college tuition for every student. You can excuse that by saying, Well, that’s his vision, his end goal, maybe not achievable in his first term but possible over time, especially if we get the “political revolution” he calls for.
But there’s a deeper level at which these policy ideas are intellectually dishonest. Even if you could somehow get them passed, practically they either wouldn’t work or would be recklessly disruptive or both.
On health care, it’s not just that corporate interests would resist single-payer, as Bernie rightly says. It’s that given the fact that, for historical reasons, we’ve built out an employer-based system, any legislation that attempted to rip up that entire system from the bottom up would lead to logistical and economic chaos and to political backlash that would dwarf what the Democrats got hit with after they passed Obamacare. Why in the world would you do that, especially now that, with Obamacare, we’ve taken a huge step toward making the existing system work for those who’ve been excluded, and made at least some steps toward cost containment (though we need more, as Hillary is calling for)?
But even if you think it’d be worth all the turmoil and stress to at least try to get rid of our cumbersome and expensive health care system and replace it with one on a Canadian or European model—those systems are, on the whole, more cost-effective and of the same or better quality than ours—it’s hard to take seriously Bernie’s specific plan to get there. In fact, it’s pretty clear that Bernie himself doesn’t take his plan seriously. When he first rolled it out—hours before the Iowa caucuses—knowledgeable (and sympathetically liberal) health policy experts were shocked at how sloppy it was. For instance, he promised to save Americans more per year on prescription drugs than we currently spend in total per year on prescription drugs. (By the way, Donald Trump has made the same impossible promise regarding prescription drugs.)
On reforming the financial sector, it’s not just that the big banks will resist Bernie’s plan to break them up and to restore Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law (since overturned) that kept federally insured banks from gambling with their depositors’ money by trading securities and engaging in other forms of high-risk behavior, as uninsured institutions like investment banks are free to do. It’s that breaking up the big banks and restoring Glass-Steagall wouldn’t accomplish the practical task of making the financial sector more stable and less likely to tank the economy.
Remember, it wasn’t the big banks we bailed out that caused the financial collapse of 2008. Rather, it was the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the mismanagement of AIG, and the subprime mortgages being peddled by firms like Countrywide. None of these companies were all that big. None had deposits insured by the government, and hence their behavior wouldn’t have been stopped even if Glass-Steagall still had been in force. They were part of the “shadow banking” system that Dodd-Frank has gone a long way to regulate and that Hillary wants, rightly and sensibly, to tighten the screws on. Big banks remain a problem, but mostly because we’ve allowed the financial sector, as with most industries, to consolidate in a handful of coastal cities (more on this in our next issue, out next week).
On the billionaire class, it’s not just that America has never, since its founding, been able to keep money out of political campaigns (though the problem has clearly gotten much worse in recent years). It’s that campaign donations are not remotely the most important way billionaires and corporations rig the system to their benefit. Rather, it’s through the money that flows into the Washington lobbying machine, and Bernie’s campaign finance reforms won’t do squat about that.
On our bloated prisons and abusive policing in poor and minority communities, it’s not just that progressives blame these problems on Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, and hence on Hillary, even though then Congressman Bernie Sanders voted for the bill. Nor is it that the crime bill, with its stress on community policing, helped lower the crime rate in poor communities while improving police behavior (though to get GOP votes it did increase sentences and incarceration). It’s that Bernie’s pledges to fix these problems are unserious and outright dishonest. At a candidate debate in February, Sanders pointed out, rightly, that America has more of its citizens behind bars than any other country, including China, then promised that “at the end of my first term as president we will not have more people in jail than any other country.” Even some of his strongest boosters, like the MSNBC host Chris Hayes, pointed out that Sanders was making promises he wouldn’t, as president, have the power to keep. States house 87 percent of the nation’s prisoners; even if a President Sanders were to pardon every inmate of every federal prison—the only ones he would control—the United States would still have more people behind bars than China.
And then there’s the issue—.....................
= new reply since forum marked as read
if only all voters were critical thinkers... 
They won't take any of this seriously...sigh.
