Maybe even 4? I’d assume that RBG and Breyer will retire if the Dems win in Nov, and Kennedy isn’t young either.
What are the chances that the Democrats take back the Senate? I imagine that getting above the filibuster limit isn’t likely, but a majority should be.
Much as watching the world burn might be grimly entertaining, I don’t really want to have to.
I have enough faith in people to cross party lines to work for our country that I believe the Scalia vacancy will be filled.
Here’s the thing nobody seems to have grasped: peeps should all be threatening to vote Trump if Bernie isn’t nominated, because being that fed up with mainstream Democrats is halfway plausible, and there’s no way to know for sure whether it’s an empty threat.
Bernie or bust, fucken.
So which one of us is playing chicken?
There are a few possible solutions. One of which I can support.
well, that is approximately why I called you on it.
What there are other places to go hang out?
I was talking specifically to Al from Canada and Kimmo from Antipode land, but there are other sutherlands amongst us.
And us other countries pay for it with higher taxes. Sanders is assuming that unprecedented economic growth will do the trick. He’s being either dishonest or inept, neither is a good quality to have.
Well for one the Vox article I keep posting points out that he makes a lot of unrealistic assumptions in his campaign and shows little sign of realizing they’re unrealistic.
Well yes.
To stand unwavering against the stream because you’re that much smarter or wiser is exceptionally difficult, almost impossible.
To be that way because you’re ignorant and overconfident is easy.
Even someone who went steadfastly against the grain and was right I’d be tempted to think they were lucky before I thought they were wise.
For Sanders to claim he wants to change that much that quickly is foolhardy.
Hillary has successfully maintained a high profile for a much longer period. Less capable politicians tend to fall away before long. She was a leading member of her party in the Senate, which is damn critical if you want to push your platform (remember passing the ACA?). And pretty much the entire party establishment has endorsed her, true it’s a bit corrupt, but insider knowledge matters. Not to mention she was Secretary of State which is really a position for people who really know what the hell they’re doing.
As for Sanders I love his moral compass, I just don’t think he’ll be able to execute. Also remember he’s a 74 year old man who just became prominent on the national scene in the primary. Do you realize how stressful and exhausting a job President is? How many meetings there are, how many critical decisions you have to make, interviews you need to do, how carefully you need to watch your words?
Even ignoring the significant possibility of an age related health or mental decline we’ve seen no evidence he can handle that level of responsibility for an extended period. I think there’s a major possibility he’ll just get burnt out and overwhelmed while in office.
Hillary is terribly flawed, but she’s been deeply involved at the top level of the national scene for 24 years and survived ridiculous levels of scrutiny. As much as it’s possible to have proven competency she’s done it. And yes, age is a risk with her as well though slightly less so though and we know she’s starting at a good level.
Have you read Piketty?
I’ve felt for decades that the key to growth is simple - don’t strangle most of the people with poverty. Sanders is (quite obviously to me) on the right track proposing massive (and long overdue) investments in infrastructure and mandating a living wage. When the average person has a bit of cash to splash, society thrives. Fucking simple.
Trickle-down, my arse. What a massive con-job. So very fuck Milton Friedman et al.
And us other countries pay for it with higher taxes.
Wow, we’re so crazy to pay the oh-so innately corrupt and inefficient public sector to take care of shit instead of the fucking pin-striped hyena brigade, right.
Remind me, what’s the factor the US pays over the odds for health ‘care’ again? What is it, 5x…?
The US needs to nationalise all its infrastructural services, and then an army of leeches folks working bullshit jobs will have to find something useful to do.
No, he’s assuming that people will see that paying $5,000 in tax for universal healthcare is better than paying $15,000 in insurance for spotty and inefficient healthcare. And that undoing the excesses of the Reagan/Bush/Bush administrations will return some sanity to the balance of the income tax burden.
And, yes, that putting more money in the pockets of the working class grows the economy. Because it does.
This is obvious from both economic history and basic logic. Poor people spend their money; they don’t have a choice if they want to eat. Rich people spend some of their money, and stash the rest.
Keep the money moving, and the economy grows. Let wealth ossify and the economy fades. Consumption drives economic growth, and a hundred poor people spending all of their money on food/housing/education/etc does more good for the economy than one rich prat dropping half of their multimillion salary on a yacht.
[quote=“funruly, post:146, topic:74046”][quote=“Kimmo, post:144, topic:74046”]
Here’s the thing nobody seems to have grasped: peeps should all be threatening to vote Trump if Bernie isn’t nominated, because being that fed up with mainstream Democrats is halfway plausible, and there’s no way to know for sure whether it’s an empty threat.
[/quote]
My hatred for Trump isn’t a fucking political stunt.
[/quote]
But you know Trump has a chance against Clinton, and Bernie would crush him by 10 points.
It’s just a gambit, man! Hide your visceral hatred for Trump and while the primaries are undecided temporarily refocus all your rage on sell-out scumbag Republican-lite Dems like Clinton, so you can convincingly make the argument you’re not gonna be coerced into voting least worst anymore. Make like you’re playing a long game when the real one is short: spreading the word that it’s Bern or Burn, meantime drawing attention to the actual fact of Bernie’s better poll numbers against the Republicans.
That’s the thing that might even sway some superdelegates.
If only there were a correlation between overall tax rates and take home incomes this would matter. It doesn’t matter. Lower taxes don’t give people more money to spend, things aren’t that simple. American health care is a great example of why this is. Americans who are lucky have substantial fractions of their wages reduced or garnished to pay into health care plans that are far, far more expensive than national health care would be, while everyone other country spends to fund public health care that covers everyone than America does to cover public health care that covers only some people. Plus, results of income inequality suggest that higher taxes might be a net positive in and of themselves even if they were paying for no services at all.
I look at their records in senate - committee they sat on what for durations, bills they sponsored that became law - and it seems superficially like Bernie was getting more things done. I’m not claiming to understand all the nuances, but you are saying that we should be very sure Clinton is competent and very unsure Bernie is, and I don’t see anything in their Senate record to evidence that. If anything, the fact that Clinton has only served 8 years as an elected representative and Bernie has served 34 suggest to me that Bernie is a better choice for reliability.
Some people think Clinton’s senate record is great, others do not. She’s said that her vote for the Iraq war was a mistake, that’s a $1.7 Trillion, half a million lives mistake that Sanders did not make. For that alone I would rather have Sanders in the white house - you talk about having to make tough decisions as president. On the toughest, most presidential decision of her career she was wrong and Sanders was right.
Survived? She polls as the least trustworthy candidate. Less trustworthy than Rubio, less trustworthy than Trump. People know her and they don’t trust her. I don’t see how that’s “surviving” politically. And counting 24 years of public scrutiny seems a little rich. I’m sure being first lady prepares one for being president in a unique way, but counting Bernie’s lack of first lady experience against him seems to have an obvious problem.
I know what you think. But as far as convincing anyone but yourself, it’s just wild speculation, and it reads like you decided on Clinton first and started thinking of reasons after.
And, while Clinton has less of a lead on Trump than Sanders does, much more importantly, she polls behind every other possible. Just behind Cruz, well behind Rubio, even further behind Kasich. If the Republican leadership manage to blackmail or death threat their way into a two candidate race in the next couple of weeks and the anti-Trump vote is stronger than the Trump vote, then polling suggests Clinton loses the election.
And @aluchko is right about something, she’s been on the national stage for more than a decade. While we have every reason to think that in an actual election the Sanders numbers might fluctuate greatly, we have much less reason to think that Clinton’s numbers will. In a contest vs. Rubio or Kasich, it’s a choice between Sanders who might or might not hold on to his lead and win and Clinton who we can count on to hold onto her deficit and lose.
The OECD has a yearly Taxing Wages report, comparing taxes and social security fees.
I live in one of the more expensive countries, but I think the public services here are worth the 15 percentage points I pay more.
So do I, I’m happy to pay them and would even pay more.
But I don’t think Americans are going to vote for a middle class tax hike, and I don’t think Sanders is proposing enough of one to pay for his proposals.
And yeah, Canada is about even with the US so I can’t say I’m paying more, but we don’t have the military obligations that Sanders will mostly sustain.
Those are good things. But the question is do the numbers add up? The 5.3% growth figure Sanders is pushing (his campaign didn’t create it, but they’re promoting it) is nonsense and they should know it’s nonsense. That’s what I’m criticizing.
Public healthcare isn’t his only proposal.
Free post-secondary not only costs a lot of money but also removes those young people from the labour force while they’re in school. I think it’s far from established that post-secondary education for that extra tier of students is going to add enough productivity to pay for it.
I really feel like you’re underestimating the effect of profile, it’s pretty easy for inept people to hide in congress or as mayors. In 2012 people thought Rick Perry would be a juggernaut who would steamroll the Republican primary after being a two-term governor of a major state. His campaign barely started when his “oops” moment derailed it. Now I think Sanders has shown better than that but he still has a ton of proving to do.
As for Palin she was ridiculously popular among Republicans and it took years of major exposure for the bulk of the party to stop taking her seriously.
He’s also relatively ignorant of foreign policy now, what do you think he knew in 2003? Does he vote the same way when he has a bunch of advisors whispering in his ear? Did he vote no for the right reason or out of ignorance?
Of course on the whole Bernie still wins that round (just not enough to change my conclusion).
What’s wrong with first lady as experience? She wasn’t elected personally but she was politically involved, if Bernie really wanted first lady experience he could have helped his wife get elected!
Besides, it’s 24 years and people still take her very seriously. That’s not true of a lot of politicians.
So here’s a summary of my reasons.
Change is hard and always has more complications than you realize. Proposing to go fast suggests you don’t really understand how complex it is.
Slow and steady is a good precedent for when the Republicans eventually regain power.
He’s new enough on the national scene to be fairly unproven and he likely still has a lot to learn at that level.
President is a tough job and 74 really is quite old, do you really think he has the energy to keep up the pace for an entire term? A seemingly robust judge just died at 78. People can decline quite rapidly at that age.
If he does make it though the term with faculties fully intact you enter 2020 with him being 78. Are you going to have a 78 year old candidate or another primary? If you have another primary you’ve just had 12 years of Democratic Presidents and a new candidate going in with no incumbency advantage against a Republican party who’s still suffering from whatever the hell has happened to them and motivated to undo whatever Bernie accomplished. Changes are your new President is whatever nutjob the Republicans nominate (rather than a 72 year old Clinton).
Look at Obama, how many black kids were inspired by his success? How many nations thought that much better of the US for electing him? His identity was an actual asset to the country, just like Hillary’s would be.
There’s still a dearth of potential female presidential candidates, if you don’t elect Hillary you might wait decades for the next potential candidate to show up. Think about how many young girls she’ll inspire, how many working women will feel confident to take on leadership roles, how many men will be forced to come to terms with the reality of a female leader? I think that’s important and it’s something that Bernie can’t supply.
Free public tuition and proportion of young people in college are separate issues; not all people are capable or interested in tertiary education, and lecture halls do not magically increase in size as soon as tuition drops. You do expect to see some increase in people going to college, but you have to remember that most of the people who want to go to college are already going to college; they’re just accumulating a huge debt while they do it.
While we’re discussing possible side-effects of free tuition, though, here’s another one: basing college admission upon academic merit rather than ability to pay means that you get smarter, harder working students. Fewer trust-fund kids killing time before they take over the family company, more poor-but-smart kids with a burning desire to become something or other.
In turn, this means better scientists, engineers, doctors, etc etc etc. More scientific progress, fewer bridges falling down, less dead people. All because you moved towards a meritocracy and away from a financial caste system.
You forgot the Senate.
If Bernie has somehow managed to hide this based-on-nothing I’m-just-sayin’ hypothetical incompetence throughout his multi-decade career at all levels of US governance, he’s a world-class chameleon.
That’s certainly a bold attempt at turning a megabuck mass-death catastrophe into a positive. Particularly since that catastrophic decision was so obviously dumb that it caused worldwide street protests of record setting size.
Nothing about what happened in Iraq was the tiniest bit surprising to anybody who was paying attention to reality in the lead up to the war. At the time, my assumption about the Democrats who voted for war was that they were so corrupt and cowardly that they were unwilling to take the political risk of opposing it, even though they knew it was unjustified and headed for disaster.
If someone voted for that war because they genuinely believed the Bush case for war, that does absolve them of those charges of corruption and cowardice. But it also clearly marks them as a complete idiot.
There’s also a lot of kids who are even more disengaged in class and wasting productive years because it doesn’t cost them anything. I’m not sure which factors win.
It sounds like you’re arguing from ideals, not from evidence. That’s what makes me nervous.
There’s a difference between incompetence and the level of competence required to be President. He doesn’t have experience with that level of administration or press coverage and 74 is a tough age to learn it.
Look how competent Obama was (yes, he had less experience than Bernie though I did support him over Hillary) and see how many times he came close to disaster on the administrative side (Exchanges, IRS, Veterans Affairs, etc) and how much difficulty he had managing congress.
Do you think Bernie would have a better shot?
[quote=“Wanderfound, post:160, topic:74046”]
Nothing about what happened in Iraq was the tiniest bit surprising to anybody who was paying attention to reality in the lead up to the war. At the time, my assumption about the Democrats who voted for war was that they were so corrupt and cowardly that they were unwilling to take the political risk of opposing it, even though they knew it was unjustified and headed for disaster.[/quote]
Really? I was surprised. I figured Sadaam would have had at least a few semi-functional chemical weapons and an amateurish Nuclear program. I also knew nothing about the potential Sunni/Shia conflict because the media never really mentioned it.
Well I don’t see evidence that Bernie disbelieved the Bush case for war. Bernie said the risk was that a war would provoke Sadaam to use his WMDs, not that there was insufficient evidence for WMDs.
He also didn’t mention anything about the possibility for ethnic or religious conflict, instead talking in terms of moderates vs fundamentalists.
It doesn’t mean he was ignorant of those things (a well informed senator may have said the same thing), I just don’t see any evidence of him not being ignorant. He’s pretty much just repeating what any mildly informed opponent of the war would say, if you’d asked me I probably would have given a similar speech.
Free post-secondary not only costs a lot of money but also removes those young people from the labour force while they’re in school.
This is the kind of asinine “analysis” that serves no one. Is the “removal” of people who shouldn’t be in the work force (to develop their abilities without debt and the never-ending distractions of dealing with the Financial Aid office) a bad thing? You do know that mild wage inflation isn’t Brazil of the 50s, right?
Who should be removed from the labor pool are b-school idjits. Take some macro classes.
