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Berning down the house!

Trakar said:
There is a difference between "not understanding," and "not agreeing with your perspective of" framing and marketing issues concerning the electorate.
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Those are the same blinders Sanders wears.

Bloomberg: U.S. Voters Don’t Want Socialist or Very Old President: Poll
Americans are least favorable toward a presidential candidate who’s a socialist or one who’s older than 75, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll that said President Donald Trump’s approval rating ticked up in the past month.

Only 25 percent of respondents ranked “socialist” as a desirable trait for a candidate. ...

Republicans in the White House, Congress and in the media have made “socialism” a significant point of attack as the election draws closer, ripping proposals for expanded access to Medicare, the so-called Green New Deal, and other Democratic priorities. ...

The NBC/WSJ poll of 900 adults was conducted Feb. 24-27 and had an overall margin of error of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points. The survey also measured 720 registered voters including primary voters from both parties with higher margins of error.
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The GND is already stumbling over marketing. Like Clinton's intelligent complex policy plans, voters don't read them. That makes the voter susceptible to negative sound bites against the candidate or policies. The GOP is already marketing heavily, painting the GND as "central planning" "like the old Soviet Union" what "Chavez implemented in Venezuela". Unless the Democrats do a better job marketing the specifics of the GND, the public will associate Democrats like Sanders as pushing the policies of communism.


What evidence do you have the majority of the voting public are attracted to 'socialism'? Or don't see it as negative?

Current polls only looking at Democratic Primary comparisons aren't valid unless they also include a generic candidate because most of the new candidates haven't yet marketed their brands.
 
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Trakar said:
Racist comments are not funny, even if they were intended as a sarcastic parody of a racism. This isn't being PC it is merely being respectful of the damages and harms which are daily inflicted upon 10s of millions of US citizens due to institutional racism codified into US law and common practices, which I'm sure you will agree is also not funny.
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Do you feel this also applies to black comedians who do sarcastic parodies of racism?
 
Trakar said:
Until a finalized version of M4A legislation is worked out, we really won't be able to say much about any of the unknown details.
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So the details of how his 'medicare 4 all' legislation will work are not known, yet people are getting almost giddy with the thought of it.

Plus, Sanders has been a politician for decades. He had the 2016 election, plus the last 2 years to come up with a plan.

We know that such systems are possible and feasible, whether or not it will be possible to successfully pass and enact such legislation will largely depend upon several of these currently unknown details.
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And don't forget... you also don't know the ability of the government to defend such legislation in the courts.

Sanders wants to enact some sort of single payer/all government system. When Obamacare went to the supreme court (regarding the individual mandate), it barely survived the court challenge. What Sanders wants to do is much more far reaching, and there is now Drunky McRapeface on the supreme court, further tilting the court to the right. Even if Sanders manages to 1) come up with an actual plan, 2) get congress to pass his plan, 3) get it actually implemented, it may all be for nothing in a few years once the supreme court rules on it.

We can probably get the best rough idea of what Sanders himself would like the legislation to look like, by looking at what he has said, and the legislation he has already sponsored, but even this is likely only a general approximation of what the final sausage will look like.

I'd expect the M4A legislation to take the general form of the 2017 Senate bill he sponsored entitled Medicare for All
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The 2017 senate bill he sponsored appears to be substantially different than what he is proposing this time (at least from my non-legal expertise).

Section 303 of the bill seems to allow people to continue to use private insurance if they so choose.

Yet earlier this year, Sanders seemed to indicate that such private insurance would be banned.

https://www.vox.com/health-care/201...payer-private-health-insurance-harris-sanders

Highlights:
(current cost of private Health Care in US = approx. $3.5T/year)

Costs of the Sanders M4A bill have been estimated at between $1.38T and a bit more than $2.5T/year.
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Earier on you have suggested that the details of Sanders Medicare plan have not been finalized, yet now you're claiming that we can actually figure out how much it would cost. There seems to be some contradiction there.

And here's something you might want to think about... where exactly would those cost savings come from?

Yes, the U.S. health care system is extremely expensive. There are several reasons for that (so you can't assume going to "single payer" will fix all those problems, or if they do fix the problems, won't cause other problems.)

- Medical experts in the U.S. (e.g. doctors) often earn higher salaries than in other countries. How are you going to fix that? Make all medical people 'government employees'? Limit the amount they can charge? Either of those options may have the side effect of reducing available staff, causing an increase in waiting times

- Over-capacity, which means that some infrastructure is not fully utilized. It drives up costs, but it also means faster response time. Get rid of the extra infrastructure and wait lists may appear

- Medical lawsuits (which drives up insurance costs), and those have the secondary impact of forcing the doctors to order multiple tests (in order to avoid those lawsuits). Are you going to do anything to limit malpractice claims? What if a doctor actually does make a mistake?

- Administration overhead... Ok, this is possibly one area where single payer might make a difference. (Although not as much of a difference as you might think, since even in an all public system you need staff to handle the paperwork for claims.)

Unless you get in there and tackle those issues, you may find that health care costs don't really drop all that much, and if you DO try to address some of those issues, you may find that things like health care responsiveness suffer as a result.

And here's one more question you should ask yourself:

Lets say he gets elected in 2020. Sanders wants a "single payer/government covers everything/no private insurance" system. Lets say he manages to get it past congress, gets it implemented, and keeps it from getting overturned in the courts... You've reached nirvana, with your "free" health care covering everyone.

Eventually the Republicans will end up back in power (either winning the presidency or congress, or both). Do you really want the republicans (the party filled with anti-abortionists, anti-science creationists/global warming deniers, and tea partiers) to have that much control over your health? The minute they gain power, they may decide to cut funding specifically for abortion. Or they may decide that the government has more important things to spend the money on, and needs to cut health care funding in order to spend more on the military. Without the private options that Sanders seems keen to ban, you'll be stuck.

And before you scoff at that, that same thing happened here in Canada (the place you seem to think is some sort of health care paradise). Back in 90s, the LIBERAL Prime Minister cut health care funding (partly to tackle the deficit, but largely to fund various pork-barrel projects). And that was a left-of-center party cutting spending. Who knows what the republican party would do in the same situation.
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Segnosaur said:
Plus, Sanders has been a politician for decades. He had the 2016 election, plus the last 2 years to come up with a plan.
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He has had a very solid, if general, plan for the systems he wants to transform, and this is an acceptable state for most major public policies, ahead of the creation of a legislatable, majority-supported plan to actually expect to pass into law. Until there is a will for a majority of law-makers to actually get down to the effort of crafting the details we won't know what all will be required to get to a congressional voting majority as these members haven't yet determined exactly what they want and need to be able to publicly vote for any given piece of legislation. You have to know what individual legislators are demanding before you can craft acceptable legislation for them to vote for. Increasingly the functional details of the proposed legislation isn't as important as the question of how will this legislation and its reasonably likely impacts will be perceived by my campaign sponsors and voters (its a big help if your campaign sponsors and voters are equal sets, thus the big push to make sure that your sponsors are also your voters and that you don't have any sponsors who can't vote for, or against, you directly - e.g. corporations, PACs, or Super-PACs). Until we get to the point where there is as high a level of support for the legislation as there seems to be among the electorate, or at the least, as strong as would be needed to pass and defend the potential legislation, most such legislative proposals are the way the legislators use more to judge the support, concerns, and reservations of their congressional colleagues rather than actual attempts to enact a specific piece of legislation. This is a big part of the sausage-making recipe.

Segnosaur said:
Sanders wants to enact some sort of single payer/all government system. When Obamacare went to the supreme court (regarding the individual mandate), it barely survived the court challenge.
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That is more the result of trying to create a system of corporate welfare for Health companies (for-profit insurance, but largely pharma, hospitals, testing facilities and most importantly physicians who order a lot more tests and procedures than they need to. This, at best, is a constitutionally dubious public policy issue involving citizens being forced to pay a private, for-profit, company in order to exercise a basic human right to get essential health care.

Segnosaur said:
The 2017 senate bill he sponsored appears to be substantially different than what he is proposing this time (at least from my non-legal expertise).

Section 303 of the bill seems to allow people to continue to use private insurance if they so choose.

Yet earlier this year, Sanders seemed to indicate that such private insurance would be banned.

https://www.vox.com/health-care/201...payer-private-health-insurance-harris-sanders
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Before we get into discussing what private insurance would look like under the type of plan Sanders has proposed and discussed, perhaps you could point out where in the linked piece Sanders claims what you assert? The only statement I see in your linked piece is this:

The Sanders plan permits supplemental private insurance, the type that covers things that the public system doesn’t. But because the public insurance plan pretty much covers everything, it’s difficult to see what role it would play.
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Personally, I don't see how this equates to "Sanders seemed to indicate that such private insurance would be banned."

There will undoubtedly differences in the types of health insurance which would be economically viable under the types of eM4A that Sanders has envisioned and we can talk more about this if you would like, but there is a big difference between banning something and changing the basic structure of the health care delivery system so that private, for profit health care insurance is financial inviable (more expensive primarily, with more limited benefits). Boutique health resort systems is representative of the types of terms I've heard discussed in reference to private for profit, health insurance's role in an enhanced M4A setting.

Segnosaur said:
And here's something you might want to think about... where exactly would those cost savings come from?
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Actually, there is quite a bit already out about this issue, and most of it is on pretty firm ground, economically. There are several different converging pathways for this. Many of them already been mentioned in this thread. The most oft discussed issue (which is actually one of the smaller expenses) revolve around administrative fees and expenses involved with having multiple insurance coverages and systems and their independently negotiated contracts with different care providers. One of the largest sources of cost savings is in addressing Pharma's costs, and nudging it for first place are physician/specialist and Hospital/clinic fees.

Again there are ways to address these, some involve addressing the costs of professional education and training (for instance, free-tuition at public universities and loan forgiveness/payback and benefits if Graduates sign-up to work multi-year contracts for designated focus areas/providers that would go a long way toward eliminating the pressure young physicians feel leaving med school with a mountain of debt, very little experience in their field and very little job security in an increasingly expensive world to live in). Likewise, Tort and regulatory reform are likely a necessary part of reducing hospital, clinic, and even a part of reducing Pharma, costs and fees as well as greatly simplifying the billing systems and their costs. We don't need to be woke to recognize and address the issues which have demanded addressment for decades now, but addressing them to help make eM4A which is already a cheaper proposal per capita, more efficient, and a more effective alternative to what we have currently with regard to health care delivery speaks for itself. But you are correct keeping these issues in mind will also make continue to make eM4A more politically viable and more societally embraced system, which is why many medical and health professionals have been in favor of such systems and actively working on these systems and focused on these issues for a long time now.

Segnosaur said:
Yes, the U.S. health care system is extremely expensive. There are several reasons for that (so you can't assume going to "single payer" will fix all those problems, or if they do fix the problems, won't cause other problems.)
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eM4A isn't a solution to the reasons the U.S. health care system is so inefficient, ineffective and ridiculously overpriced. eM4A is a more efficient, cost-effective means of providing guaranteed health care services to everyone in U.S. lands and territories. Even without addressing the cost issues involved in current U.S. health care, eM4A is still a better alternative to the current system of hyper-expensive partial care for some and the overburdening expenses of eating those costs (and risks) of treating those without insurance or PCPs in ERs, not to mention the lost potential in premature deaths and unnecessary chronic debilitating disease/injury resulting from the lack of access to basic health services.

Current average U.S. citizens health care expenses are right around $10K/yr., estimates put mid next-decade expenses (given current trends) at around $15K/yr.. Even the Libertarian Mercatus Institute's estimates of the Sanders M4A program seem to indicate that the costs of eM4A health care would be an averaged $10K/year ($32.6T/population size/period = est. average annual cost), or roughly $5K/yr less than what we would be paying for health care without eM4A. Most individuals would likely very much appreciate not only a $5K/yr savings in their pocket plus full coverage health care access benefits without co-pays! Most people notice net changes much more than rearrangements of debits and credits to individual payroll tax categories and corporate benefit accounts. As I recall, the additional taxation to help cover the expenses of eM4A had every working individual and business (except for the two lowest individual income brackets) paying some additional marginal amount progressively on their income taxes, it starts out at 2.5% and I want to say there was also some adjustment to all of the marginal rate categories as well which effectively neutralized or minimized the actual change in taxes owed by most people earning under $250K/yr. I think I posted a reference link on this a few days ago but that may have been elsewhere
 
The_Animus said:
Do you feel this also applies to black comedians who do sarcastic parodies of racism?
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To be honest, I don't know.
If racism in the U.S. were merely the issue of different people always fearing and denigrating the "other," type of issue, then I probably wouldn't have as strong feelings about the issue. Unfortunately, I don't see compelling evidence that this is the primary driver of most U.S. racism, currently or historically. Additionally, I am seeing a lot of people that I've known for a long time starting to reveal some very concerning perspectives, so perhaps I have become a bit more sensitive to high-pitched noises, than I used to be.
 
Looks like the Democratic Party is taking its charter and bilaws more seriously

Apparently - part of the Democratic Candidate loyalty oath saying that the candidate must:

"...be a bona fide Democrat whose record of public service, accomplishment, public writings, and/or public statements affirmatively demonstrates that the candidate is faithful to the interests, welfare, and success of the Democratic Party of the United States who subscribes to the substance, intent, and principles of the Charter and the Bylaws of the Democratic Party of the United States, and who will participate in the Convention in good faith.
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Senator Sanders submitted his signed copy yesterday.
 
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Venom said:
:rolleyes:
are you parodying someone in these forums, Travis?
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I am genuinely upset at the ridiculous harassment Chelsea received and even worse Berners are defending this all over Twitter saying they have a right to attack anyone named Clinton.


But I am curious as to who I am suspected of parodying......I have a few guesses.
 
Travis said:
So a Bernie supporter decided that the real culprit behind the New Zealand massacre was Chelsea Clinton. She confronted her for daring to show up at a vigil.


Yet more evidence that the entire Bernie movement is toxic and should be marginalized.


https://twitter.com/_Jordan_J_/status/1106730904779673600
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I like how you pretend to hate the current state of US politics and that you want change, but at the same time you are opposed to the people who are actually trying to change things.

It's obvious that you are rooting for the status quo, you want more of the same. How on earth do you think that is going to make things better?
 
Lambchops said:
I like how you pretend to hate the current state of US politics and that you want change, but at the same time you are opposed to the people who are actually trying to change things.

It's obvious that you are rooting for the status quo, you want more of the same. How on earth do you think that is going to make things better?
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It's a false dichotomy when supporters insist if you aren't for candidate X you must not be for change.

And I fail to see how publicly badmouthing Chelsea Clinton moves any cause ahead.
 
Lambchops said:
I like how you pretend to hate the current state of US politics and that you want change, but at the same time you are opposed to the people who are actually trying to change things.

It's obvious that you are rooting for the status quo, you want more of the same. How on earth do you think that is going to make things better?
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Well that's certainly not what I got from what he said.

He's just disgruntled with some Sanders fans' hyperbolic attacks. I think it's irrational to abandon support of politician based on the actions of his supporters alone, but don't read much more than that into Travis' comment.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
It's a false dichotomy when supporters insist if you aren't for candidate X you must not be for change.

And I fail to see how publicly badmouthing Chelsea Clinton moves any cause ahead.
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Yes, poor little Chelsea Clinton. How dare anyone critize her.
 
Venom said:
Well that's certainly not what I got from what he said.

He's just disgruntled with some Sanders fans' hyperbolic attacks. I think it's irrational to abandon support of politician based on the actions of his supporters alone, but don't read much more than that into Travis' comment.
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At this point, I think it would be interesting to hear what Travis really thinks of Bernie Sanders and his policies. Not his fans, but what Sanders is actually proposing.

@Travis? Care to enlighten us?
 
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Lambchops said:
I like how you pretend to hate the current state of US politics and that you want change, but at the same time you are opposed to the people who are actually trying to change things.

It's obvious that you are rooting for the status quo, you want more of the same. How on earth do you think that is going to make things better?
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Lambchops said:
At this point, I think it would be interesting to hear what Travis really thinks of Bernie Sanders and his policies. Not his fans, but what Sanders is actually proposing.

@Travis? Care to enlighten us?
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Sure. I fail to see how his proposals are appreciably different from what Harris, Warren, or Yang are proposing. Bernie is not the only one running with a fairly large list of proposals to try and eliminate inequity. In fact he is somewhat too focused on economics when others, like Harris, are proposing sweeping criminal justice along with huge changes in the way schools are funded/organized to try and eliminate the disadvantages so many marginalized communities experience and canceling student debt which has hindered an entire generation of recent graduates.


In fact it is incredibly specious to say any of the Democratic candidates don't want to change things. Even old Biden would take climate change seriously which would be better than the current situation where the EPA barely acknowledges that anyone believes in it.


In fact no one really wants to maintain the status quo. The Democrats want to move forward with expanding health care coverage though their plans on how to do this vary. They want to do something about climate change though their plans vary. They want to do something about rising economic inequity though their plans, again, differ.


Against that we have the current GOP who want to eliminate environmental regulations, who want to eliminate the minimum wage, who want to eliminate public education, who want to eliminate child labor laws, who want to eliminate public health care, who want to make it legal to discriminate against the LGBT community, who want to make Protestant Christianity a mandatory state religion, who want to privatize the prison system turning increased incarceration into a money maker.


I mean America is all sorts of messed up right now because no one wants to keep things the same, one party wants to make things better and the other wants to turn it into a soul crushing dystopian authoritarian miasma of awful.
 
d4m10n said:
Generally criticism involves making some sort of point, though.
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I thought there was a pretty straightforward point. Chelsea Clinton was publicly critical of Representative Omar's criticism of the Israeli lobby in the US.

Clinton's criticism contributes to an anti-Muslim climate which inspires and energizes killers like this guy.

Clinton is participating in a culture of hate that leads to death.

That's the point of the criticism of Chelsea Clinton that we're talking about here. Personally, I think it's a pretty weak criticism. But it is in fact a pointful criticism.
 
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