Rebuttals to common attacks against Bernie Sanders
Argument #1: Bernie Sanders is too progressive. He won’t be able to get anything done because he doesn’t have the support of the senate and the house of representatives.
This argument is used by Hillary supporters that agree on Bernie’s ideas, but who are afraid of him delivering on the promises he has made. Contrary to popular belief, the executive branch can modify agency rules, enact executive actions and decide how vigorously to enforce certain laws without the approval of any other branch of government.
The President appoints the cabinet, the cabinet has vast powers over the entirety of the actual day to day working of the government. Most of our existing laws give tremendous powers to the Executive Branch. Regulation of virtually all business is more controlled by the various agencies of the cabinet then congress. Congress passes laws with vast language and the president has enormous power to shape how these laws actually get applied.
Bernie will appoint ethical people who are not economically tied to the same industries that they are supposed to be regulating. Bernie can use the power of the Treasury to greatly shape Wall Street regulation. The Executive has great power over EPA and environmental regulation. The executive alone has vast power over the use of the military. The Executive in some cases can completely eliminate programs that aren’t working. The Executive has great power within the realm of education. The Executive has great power in regulating and negotiating international trade. There is so much that Bernie can do without congress, and that’s before engaging the American people and putting pressure on the system from the outside as well.
Argument #2: She is a women. It will be historical moment for both the feminist movement and women in general.
If you look at both Hillary Clinton’s and Bernie Sanders’ respective past, Sanders has a better record for women than Clinton.
Mr. Sanders is staunchly pro-choice, voted for the reauthorization of the Violence against Women Act in 2013, has always been a proponent for same-sex marriage (unlike Mrs. Clinton) and is a strong advocate for pay equality. Mr. Sanders’ record on women’s rights is well-documented and unequivocally positive.
During Ms. Clinton’s tenure at the State Department, she received large donations to the Clinton Foundation from countries with horrid records of women’s rights violations such as Saudi Arabia, Oman, Algeria and the United Arab Emirates. Ms. Clinton’s supposed penchant for women’s rights wasn’t taken into account when it came to taking money from countries that exhibit some of the worst examples of gender inequality in the world. These donations beg the question of whether Ms. Clinton’s efforts on the behalf of women were more for show than genuinely wanting to make an impact for women today.
People shouldn’t vote for a candidate just to make history, they should vote for a candidate who speaks to the issues.
Ms. Clinton’s stance on abortion, as pro-choice under the conditions that it be safe, legal, and rare, stigmatizes abortion and endangers the protection of the Roe v. Wade ruling. Her moderate stance helps conservatives justify restrictions and defunding of women’s health programs. In contrast, Mr. Sanders has been much more enthusiastic in pushing for not only the protection of women’s reproductive rights, but the expansion of and access to women’s health programs.
Ms. Clinton used her status as a woman to attempt to gain political leverage over Mr. Sanders by falsely accusing him of sexism during the last debate over their arguments on gun control. Her ploy to win women voters over from Mr. Sanders, which she used two weeks after the debate ended, failed miserably. Women’s rights have been at the forefront of issues in the 2016 presidential election, and Ms. Clinton is scrambling to find ways to use it to her advantage. Yet she has not been unable to do so to because of Mr. Sanders’ impeccable record on women’s rights and his integrity demonstrated in refusing to play into her attacks. When his campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, joked with reporters that they would consider Hillary Clinton as a vice president running mate, Mr. Sanders distanced himself from those comments, calling them “inappropriate” in an interview on MSNBC.
Mr. Sanders’ platform is enriched with stances that will improve the lives of every woman in America. His family values agenda which incorporates extended and paid maternity leave is unprecedented in a viable presidential campaign. He has called on men to join women in fighting for closing the gender wage gap, and his plans to tackle income inequality outpace that of Ms. Clinton’s, who only supports a $12 national minimum wage, and is better known for courting wall street — which has made her a multi-millionaire — than holding them accountable for their greed.
Argument #3: Bernie Sanders will dismantle ObamaCare.
ACA , more often referred to as ObamaCare, is now an established law. It is now the baseline. Put Bernie Sanders in and let him try for something better. If it fails — we still have Obamacare. No one need “tear up” anything. Hillary’s argument of Bernie’s plan being a “golden goose” is false. If he fails, the result of his plan and Hillary’s plan is the same.
In addition, their goals are different. Hillary is starting at Obamacare expansion and, if she did manage to get it, is stopping there. Bernie is shooting for single payer, but it doesn’t happen, he’d still try to expand upon Obamacare.
Argument #4: Bernie Sanders is a moderate regarding Gun Control and doesn’t stand up to the NRA
The Clinton camp has accused Bernie Sanders for voting against the Brady Bill. However, he was just doing his job.
According to Sanders’ campaign manager Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ reason for opposing the Brady bill was two-fold. First, he believed implementing a national waiting period was federal overreach. And second, he was doing his job.
“He wasn’t opposed to states having (waiting periods) if they wanted to. The Republicans wanted to repeal waiting periods in states that had them, and Bernie voted that down,” Weaver said. “He said he would be against waiting periods, and he kept his word to the people of Vermont.”
In April 1991, Sanders’ then-chief of staff Anthony Pollina echoed the idea that Sanders was simply representing the will of his constituents.
“Bernie’s response is that he doesn’t just represent liberals and progressives. He was sent to Washington to present all of Vermont,” Pollina said. “It’s not inappropriate for a congressman to support a majority position, particularly on something Vermonters have been very clear about.”
On gun control in general, he advocates for the second amendment, but supports president Obama’s executive orders regarding instant background checks and removing the “gun show” loophole. He believes that gun control legislation should ultimately fall on individual states, with the exception of instant background checks to prevent firearms from finding their way into the hands of criminals and the mentally ill, and a federal ban on assault weapons.
Argument #5: He can’t compromise with Republicans/moderate Democrats because of his progressive views.
This is a lie spread by both the Clinton campaign and the The Almanac of American Politics calls him a “practical and successful legislator.” As chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, Bernie worked across the aisle to “bridge Washington’s toxic partisan divide and cut one of the most significant deals in years,” according to Congressional Quarterly.
As Vermont’s sole representative, Rolling Stone dubbed Bernie the “amendment king” for passing more amendments than any other member of Congress.“He accomplishes this on the one hand by being relentlessly active and on the other by using his status as an independent to form left-right coalitions,” Matt Taibbi wrote in Rolling Stone.
Bernie reached across the aisle to work with Republicans Sen. John McCain and Rep. Jeff Miller in passing a landmark bill to help the Department of Veterans Affairs serve millions of veterans with their earned health care and benefits. The law included $5 billion for the VA to hire more doctors and health professionals.
Argument #6: He lacks experience with Foreign Policy
As Bernie Sanders has risen in the polls, he has been taking increasing heat for some of his apparently vague foreign policy positions and the fact that his campaign does not have a team of establishment foreign policy advisers, unlike typical front-running candidates.
Instead of just questioning Sanders’ choice, we should really be questioning why any of the candidates of either party are employing the same old foreign policy advisers — many of whom not only supported the Iraq war but every disastrous military intervention since. These are the same people who now think that yet another regional war will somehow fix the chaos in the Middle East.
After a series of disastrous wars overseas, we should be looking for someone who has better “judgment” rather than candidates who have “experience” but are calling for more of the same policies in the Middle East that have led us into the mess we’re in now in the first place.
Nothing exemplifies this more than Hillary Clinton seemingly bragging about her foreign policy credentials at Thursday’s Democratic debate by citing her friendship with Henry Kissinger, who Christopher Hitchens called a war criminal. The former Nixon and Ford administration national security advisor and secretary of state is revered in DC foreign policy establishment circles but reviled just about everywhere else for his role in building or perpetuating multiple atrocities in east Asia during the late 1960s and 70s.
As Gawker editor Alex Pareene remarked during the debate: “Never say ‘I was flattered when Henry Kissinger said I…’ unless the end of that sentence is ‘finally made him pay for his crimes.’”
But it’s a far larger problem than the ubiquitousness of Kissinger, who still advises Republican candidates as well. The campaigns of Clinton, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have all been advised by the same foreign policy “consulting” group made up of former defense and intelligence officials who epitomize DC conventional wisdom. A gaggle of former Bush administration officials most known for their Iraq war and pro-torture advocacy advises virtually every Republican candidate outside Donald Trump.
And as you watch the candidates vie for who is the most “tough” when it comes to “destroying” Isis, it shows — there’s little difference in Clinton’s foreign policy versus the Republican candidates in the race besides a few rhetorical flourishes.
In general, the media’s campaign ritual of pretending candidates have “boned up” on foreign policy because they pay a bunch of people to give you a few briefings is largely a charade — not only do voters not care, but it’s not realistic measurement of a candidate’s “experience”. As Vox’s Max Fisher astutely pointed out, it’s usually goes like this:
1. The candidate hires a few foreign policy staffers who are considered credible and experienced by the Washington foreign policy community.
2. The candidate meets with foreign policy graybeards within his or her party. While substantially meaningless, the meetings signal that the candidate has the implicit support of trusted elites.
3. The candidate issues vague foreign policy proposals, or perhaps gives a vague foreign policy speech, reiterating his or her party’s conventional wisdom on a big issue or two.
While it is now a regular attacking point to some, it’s actually quite refreshing that Sanders has refused to play into this game. This doesn’t mean reporters shouldn’t sharply question Sanders about his depth of knowledge on global affairs; some of his policy proposals that do seem quite vague. However, the people who are repeatedly asking Sanders about his “we’ll get Arab country soldiers to fight Isis” talking point refuse to question Clinton’s equally vague “let’s set up a no-fly zone in Syria” policy, which we have absolutely no details on beyond the fact that it will require tens of thousands of US service members andwill almost certainly drag the US into an even larger war in the region.
It’s also true, as his detractors claim, that Sanders often falls back on his opposition to the Iraq war when asked about his foreign policy expertise. But pretty much everything he said before the war did come to pass. He also refused to support the Libyan intervention in 2011, which has led to the chaos that engulfs Libya today and has us on the precipice of yet another war (an intervention, mind you, that Clinton was the key architect of inside the Obama administration). Clinton’s long “experience” as secretary of state doesn’t replace this lack of judgment, which is arguably much more important.
Again, this is not to say Sanders’s lack of detail on some foreign policy issues is not a legitimate issue: it’s certainly something we should question. In place of detailed policies, Sanders often falls back on the status quo as well. For example, Sanders told Meet the Press months ago, when asked about the Obama administration’s controversial drone policy and use of special forces troops in multiple countries, that as president he would do “all that and more”.
These are all well-founded problems. However, the fact that he has not brought on DC foreign policy “experts” to advise him that he needs to start more wars is certainly not one of them.
Argument #7: Sierra Blanca (Environmental Issue)
Politifact recently investigated this after a comparison image by hillary fans mocking bernie. About the waste, they would describe it in context as:
“In 1998, the House of Representatives approved a compact struck between Texas, Vermont and Maine that would allow Vermont and Maine to dump low-level nuclear waste at a designated site in Sierra Blanca, Texas. Sanders, at the time representing Vermont in the House, cosponsored the bill and actively ushered it through Congress.
The low-level nuclear waste would include “items such as scrap metal and worker’s gloves… as well as medical gloves used in radiation treatments at hospitals,” according to the Bangor Daily News.”
In context, not exactly plutonium. Texas does make money by selling real estate for landfills, and was in on this deal. It’s not a good thing exactly, but I think it was a responsible action for the time. A business transaction cooperatively made between states. Vermont in this scenario gad to do something with this waste and Texas agreed to take it. Not that diabolical if you ask me.
Let me address it from the perspective of someone who is an opponent of nuclear power, who opposes the construction of power plants and, if he had his way, would shut down the existing nuclear power plants as quickly and as safely as we could.
One of the reasons that many of us oppose nuclear power plants is that when this technology was developed, there was not a lot of thought given as to how we dispose of the nuclear waste. Neither the industry nor the Government, in my view, did the right thing by allowing the construction of the plants and not figuring out how we get rid of the waste.
But the issue we are debating here today is not that issue. The reality, as others have already pointed out, is that the waste is here. We cannot wish it away. It exists in power plants in Maine and Vermont, it exists in hospitals, it is here.
No reputable scientist or environmentalist believes that the geology of Vermont or Maine would be a good place for this waste. In the humid climate of Vermont and Maine, it is more likely that groundwater will come in contact with that waste and carry off radioactive elements to the accessible environment.
There is widespread scientific evidence to suggest, on the other hand, that locations in Texas, some of which receive less than 12 inches of rainfall a year, a region where the groundwater table is more than 700 feet below the surface, is a far better location for this waste.
This is not a political assertion, it is a geological and environmental reality. Furthermore, even if this compact is not approved, it is likely that Texas, which has a great deal of low-level radioactive waste, and we should make the point that 80 percent of the waste is coming from Texas, 10 percent from Vermont, 10 percent from Maine, the reality is that Texas will go forward with or without this compact in building a facility to dispose of their low-level radioactive waste. -Bernie Sanders
Argument #8: How effectively can President Sanders cajole/convince the Corporations to do the right thing if he is considered anti-Corporation?
You don’t convince/cajole corporations to do shit. You enforce and regulate them so they pay their fair share of taxes and don’t take advantage of loopholes that allow corporations to hide their money in tax havens.
Argument #9: We are going to be turned in to a communist nation with 90% tax rate.
He is not proposing anything remotely like this. He is proposing a marginal tax (MARGINAL) for only the very very rich , or the top 1%. He isn’t even advocating for a 90% MARGINAL tax rate. He has hinted at a 50–60% top rate for income taxes on individuals, possibly with a new bracket.
He has denied the 90% rumor in a CNN interview with jake tapper.
P.S. He is a Democratic Socialist, not a communist.
Argument #10: Sander’s views will create a welfare entitlement state where a majority of the populace live on welfare and unemployment because the socialist economy has drained jobs and drove taxes up to pay those who don’t contribute to the economy.
Actually, his views on healthcare and education will only create a better workforce and increase the quality of life. Bernie describes himself as a democratic socialist in the style of the Scandinavian counties, which all enjoy some of the highest quality of life in the world. It’s not pure socialism, and he’s not really proposing anything really radical. We have one of the largest and most advanced economies in the world, but millions of people don’t have health care, our infant mortality rate is one of the highest in the first world — especially for minorities, millions of people are going hungry. We could do better.
We already have the ACA, why not push for a single payer system if it’s better? Is it more important for large medical and pharmaceutical corporations to make a little more profit, or to make sure everyone in the country has access to affordable health care?
How is this creating a welfare entitlement state? It just helps people live better lives and get out of the constant cycle of poverty.
Argument #11: Sanders advocates for a system that allows complacency & laziness , especially among millennials.
His views on education and healthcare advocates for the opposite of laziness. How is getting an education and receiving healthcare encouraging complacency? Tuition free college is not an expense, its an investment in our future.
“Free College” isn’t some sort of radical and ridiculous idea.
In the 1950s/60s most public colleges were FREE.
The University of California in 1968 cost in state students $300/yr. In 1986 it costs $1,296/yr. Today it costs $12,053/yr!
The rate tuition is increasing is astronomical (one report said it increases about 5% a year) and this needs to be addressed. Just talking about fixing student debt will not help the overall situation.
If we don’t address tuition fees as well, eventually they will get to the point that no one will be able to afford to attend college unless they want to leave it thousands upon thousands of dollars in debt (and I’m not talking $20,000 here, I’m talking like $200–300k).
Even if they only made community colleges free, it would still save all students at least two years off their college tuition bill which can equate to a lot of money.
A common thing I see is the argument it will degrade the value of a college degree because everyone will have one. Everyone already has one, its become almost standard that most jobs require college degrees as a minimum. It’s the new High School diploma only you pay thousands of dollars for a piece of paper that may or may not give you a return on investment.
And it’d be worth noting, this is only to make PUBLIC colleges tuition free. Private colleges (all the big wigs, Harvard, etc.) will all be the same and still have that high college stature and name recognition, but the free public option might help to make them drop their tuition fees down to a more reasonable level.
Harvard currently is $45,278 per a year! That’s like buying a car every single year you attend college! And it’s worth noting here that Harvard’s tuition in 1960 was around $1,520 a year. I’d love to hear someone try to explain that price increase to me.
Sometimes I think the general public, who are either not currently in college themselves or don’t have kids in college, don’t realize how insane tuition costs have grown across the board and exactly how much in debt they are coming out on the other end.
It’s all nice and well to say, get a job while you’re in school, pay for it yourself, except for the fact most minimum wage jobs would in no way be able to pay 100% for most college tuition these days, even working full time.
It’s not just a debt problem, it’s a front end tuition problem as well. Asking for Free College is not asking for a handout. It’s a cry to fix a broken system that is raging out of control, putting millions of students thousands of dollars in debt before they even step foot out into the workforce, all for a piece of paper that has become a standard requirement for many jobs, making it for many people a necessity, not an option. Something has to change.
Argument #12: Bernie Sander’s healthcare plan will face many of the same problems facing other countries; rationing of medical resources, doctors, and a waiting list.
Every country — single-payer or not — has a limited number of dollars it devotes to health care. Those dollars get divided up in a way that, in all international examples available, doesn’t cover all the medical services that everybody wants.
In single-payer systems, the government sets parameters for what services it will and won’t cover. Countries often do this by looking at which treatments are “cost-effective”–health-care-speak for which medical interventions deliver good results at a lower price. Some treatments get left out, which can spark fierce debates. In Britain, for example, an agency called the National Institute for Health Care Excellence is in charge of evaluating what treatments it will pay for — and in which situations. Britain will limit certain treatments to certain types of patients, based on where research shows them to be most effective, which can often touch off fierce debates.
Remember, the United States employs a different kind of rationing: people who can’t afford health insurance often don’t get it. That means these people never get access to health-care treatments regardless of whether it might help. These people are effectively waiting forever, and that won’t show up on surveys about wait times.
Argument #13: (admittedly, I got this one from reddit) Bernie Sanders has consistently voted against any NASA funding increases every chance he gets.
Innovation, Science, Exploration are necessities. So is education. He is all for NASA. However, he prioritizes issues affecting the public in the status quo before innovation. He chooses to use funding for social programs before investing in NASA.
Argument #14: Bernie Sanders is too old.
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders is in “very good health,” according to a letter from the attending physician in Congress released Thursday by Sanders’s campaign.
Brian P. Monahan, who said his office has served as the 74-year-old senator’s physician for 26 years, detailed a history of relatively minor medical procedures, including hernia repairs and the removal of a cyst from his vocal cord, and said Sanders has no history of cardiovascular disease.
“You are overall in very good health and active in your professional work, and recreational lifestyle without limitation,” Monahan wrote in a single-page letter to the senator from Vermont dated Jan. 20.
If elected president, Sanders would be 75 on Inauguration Day, the oldest man to take the oath of office. Ronald Reagan, who currently holds that distinction, took office in 1981 a few days before his 70th birthday.
Hillary Clinton, Sanders’s chief Democratic rival, released a summary of her health records in July that concluded that the 68-year-old was “in excellent physical condition.”
In his letter to Sanders, Monahan said he had last examined the senator in November, at which time Sanders was 6 feet tall and weighed 179 pounds. The examination was “normal,” the doctor wrote.
Monahan noted that over the years Sanders has been treated for conditions such as gout, mild hypercholesterolemia, diverticulitis, hypothyroidism, laryngitis, lumbar strain and superficial skin tumors.
Sanders does not use tobacco and drinks alcohol infrequently, the letter said, also noting that his last colonoscopy was normal and that he is up to date on his vaccines.
Argument #15: Although I realize that Dodd Frank (from the Obama Campaign) doesn’t work, I have also heard that Glass-Steagall (the proposal from Bernie Sanders) doesn’t work either.
The oldest propaganda technique is to repeat a lie emphatically and often until it is taken for the truth. Something like this is going on now with regard to banks and the financial crisis. The big bank boosters and analysts who should know better are repeating the falsehood that repeal of Glass-Steagall had nothing to do with the Panic of 2008.
In fact, the financial crisis might not have happened at all but for the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall law that separated commercial and investment banking for seven decades. If there is any hope of avoiding another meltdown, it’s critical to understand why Glass-Steagall repeal helped to cause the crisis. Without a return to something like Glass-Steagall, another greater catastrophe is just a matter of time.
History is a good place to begin. After the Depression of 1920–21, the United States embarked on a period of economic prosperity known as the Roaring Twenties. It was a time of innovation, especially in consumer goods such as automobiles, radio, and refrigeration. Along with these goods came new forms of consumer credit and bank expansion. National City Bank (forerunner of today’s Citibank) and Chase Bank opened offices to sell securities side-by-side with traditional banking products like deposits and loans.
As the decade progressed, the stock market boomed and eventually reached bubble territory. Along with the bubble came market manipulation in the form of organized pools that would ramp up the price of stocks and dump them on unsuspecting suckers just before the stock collapsed. Banks joined in by offering stocks of holding companies that were leveraged pyramid schemes and other securities backed by dubious assets.
In 1929, the music stopped, the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began. It took eight years from the start of the boom to the bust. Subsequent investigations revealed the extent of the fraud that preceded the crash. In 1933, Congress passed Glass-Steagall in response to the abuses. Banks would be allowed to take deposits and make loans. Brokers would be allowed to underwrite and sell securities. But no firm could do both due to conflicts of interest and risks to insured deposits. From 1933 to 1999, there were very few large bank failures and no financial panics comparable to the Panic of 2008. The law worked exactly as intended.
In 1999, Democrats led by President Bill Clinton and Republicans led by Sen. Phil Gramm joined forces to repeal Glass-Steagall at the behest of the big banks. What happened over the next eight years was an almost exact replay of the Roaring Twenties. Once again, banks originated fraudulent loans and once again they sold them to their customers in the form of securities. The bubble peaked in 2007 and collapsed in 2008. The hard-earned knowledge of 1933 had been lost in the arrogance of 1999.
The bank supporters’ attacks on this clear-as-a-bell narrative deserve a hearing to show how flimsy they are. One bank supporter says you cannot blame banks for fraudulent loan originations because that was done by unscrupulous mortgage brokers. This is nonsense. The brokers would not have been able to fund the loans in the first place if the banks had not been buying their production.
Another apologist says the fact that no big banks failed in the crisis proves they were not the cause of the problem. This is also ludicrous. The reason the big banks did not fail was because they were bailed out by the government. Clearly the banks would have failed but for the bailouts. Bank balance sheets were neck-deep in liar loans and underwater home equity lines of credit. The fact that banks did not fail proves nothing except that they were too big to fail.
Yet another big bank spokesman says that nonbanks such as Lehman and Bear Stearns were more to blame for the crisis. This ignores the fact that nonbanks get their funding from banks in the form of mortgages, repurchase agreements, and lines of credit. Without the big banks providing easy credit on bad collateral like structured products, the nonbanks would not have been able to leverage themselves.
It is true that the financial crisis has enough blame to go around. Borrowers were reckless, brokers were greedy, rating agencies were negligent, customers were naïve, and government encouraged the fiasco with unrealistic housing goals and unlimited lines of credit at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Yet, the fact that there were so many parties to blame should not be used to deflect blame from the most responsible parties of all — the big banks. Without the banks providing financing to the mortgage brokers and Wall Street while underwriting their own issues of toxic securities, the entire pyramid scheme would never have got off the ground.
It was Glass-Steagall that prevented the banks from using insured depositories to underwrite private securities and dump them on their own customers. This ability along with financing provided to all the other players was what kept the bubble-machine going for so long.
It has been a few year since the government has implemented Dodd Frank. You would think that by now at least that problem would have been addressed. But it hasn’t been. Our biggest banks are bigger now than they were in 2008.
A recent analysis by Thomas Hoenig, vice chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., revealed that. JPMorgan Chase, Citibank and Bank of America have become the three largest banks in the world. Together with Wells Fargo, which has become the world’s sixth largest, assets of the four largest U.S. banks amount to an astonishing 97 percent of our 2012 gross domestic product.
Here are some other reasons why Dodd Frank doesn’t work.
•The banks still are gambling with FDIC-insured money. The JPMorgan Chase “London Whale” fiasco was just the latest proof that there has been no change in the casino speculation of Wall Street banks.
•There is still a giant loophole in derivatives trading. Although there are new regulations curbing the kind of derivatives trading that was a key element in the crisis, those regulations do not cover the foreign subsidiaries of megabanks. Banks can easily move trading activities into different offices. He wasn’t called the “London Whale” because he worked in Philadelphia.
•No one has gone to jail. And no one will. There are many examples of criminal behavior during the meltdown, but not one megabank executive has been jailed. Without that deterrent, white-collar crime is not just profitable but inevitable.
•Reform of the credit-rating agencies is a long way off. “Essential cogs in the wheel of financial destruction,” as the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission described them, the credit-rating agencies still operate as they always have, bought and paid for by the entities they rate.
•Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac have not been fixed. In fact, they weren’t even mentioned in Dodd-Frank, despite the fact that everyone agrees they played a role in the meltdown.
This is why Bernie Sanders’ proposal works & Clinton’s is futile.
Argument #16: Bernie Sanders’ immigration policy is basically “open-borders”.
Bernie Sanders isn’t advocating an open-borders policy. He has actually criticized those policies. He wants to reduce illegal immigration by making legal immigration easier. Not persecuting illegal immigrants and militarizing the border.
Argument #17: Where is the money coming from to support Bernie’s plans on Education, Healthcare, welfare, etc.?
There is a gross mismanagement of our resources and taxes by government agencies and officials. Many critics point out that bernie’s ideas are simply unaffordable, that simply isn’t true, even without increasing taxes his goals are achievable. The money is currently there, how we allocate it is the problem, it is a problem due to corruption, and money interest groups lobbying for what they want such as the military industrial complex and the terrible trade deals sponsored by other mega corporations in different industries.
Essentially the deals will continue moving in a direction to a point where they can sue entire countries and the law would be on their side (tpp). Sue the governments in the event that the government realizes the trade deals don’t favor sovereign nations and try imposing tariffs on such corporations. What that means for you and I is that we are the victims because the government’s money is technically our collected taxes.
For example, just by getting rid of the penny and nickel, we could have a $100million/year to invest in infrastructure projects, with $5million a year leftover to invest with workers in the copper/nickel industries to retrain them for other jobs.
https://medium.com/@0rf/how-s-he-gonna-pay-for-it-6e3b0119cab8#.jlqegmgyc
Argument #18: Most of his tax plans will do nothing but chase business/the rich out of the US
it’s actually really difficult to get out of paying taxes by just leaving. Trade deals that allow corporations move their production facilities and sell their stuff back here (without incorporating in a different country) are gonna get renegotiated under Sanders, along with closing a bunch of loopholes. and if we, Sanders supporters, do our job right, the American people will be reminded that we don’t have to just let them screw us over: If they threaten to leave, the reaction should not be just “oh dear well how do we appease them so they don’t leave us”, it’s “you pick up shop and move and you’re getting tariffs slapped on your goods and you’re not getting out of your taxes.”
Argument #19: Berniebros
“I don’t want anybody, anybody, who is engaged in sexism to support me,” Sanders told NBC News’ Kate Snow in New Hampshire on Sunday. “I don’t want that support,” he insisted, calling that type of behavior from some supporters “unacceptable.”
In another Sunday interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sanders called the behavior of so-called Bernie Bros “disgusting,” saying his campaign is working to address the issue on online harassment.
“Look, we don’t want that crap. … We will do everything we can and I think we have tried. Look, anybody who is supporting me that is doing the sexist things is — we don’t want them. I don’t want them. That is not what this campaign is about”:
Argument #20: Free public college devalues a bachelors degree.
I guess it depends on whether you’re basing “value” on a relative scale (“are you better qualified for this job than your peers?”) or on an absolute scale (“are you more qualified for this job than you were before?”). So, does the fact that high school is free to the public lessen the value of having a high school diploma? On one hand, you could say “yes”, having a high school diploma doesn’t really mean much for the vast majority of jobs because almost everybody has a high school diploma. But on the other hand (the way I’d argue), it does have some value, in that it shows you have, well, a high school education and the skills and knowledge that come with that. If I’m looking for a person to keep track of the money at my fast food restaurant, I need somebody with a quick, working knowledge of really basic math (arithmetic, maybe some simple algebra). Of course having a high school education is “valuable” in that sense, because it means that you actually have learned arithmetic and algebra, and the diploma shows the employer that. If I’m hiring somebody to write notices/letters to customers, I need somebody who writes English correctly, with proper grammar and spelling. Again, a high school education is “valuable” in that case, as it shows that you have learned basic grammar and spelling, and probably also know how to organize your thoughts and write coherently. I would argue that it’s basically the same for college. It doesn’t make you less valuable if everybody around you has a college background; it’s just making everybody around you more valuable. I suppose it lessens your relative value.
In addition, we don’t only compete with other Americans, we compete with people around the world. If we have better educated people in America, our economy will be better.
Argument #21: He wants to tax companies’ profits to hell. Profit leads to innovation. No profit, no innovation.
Bernie Sanders wants to close loopholes that allow corporations to hide their money in offshore tax havens. This means they pay less taxes (in percentages) than you. Closing these loopholes means they would repay the debt they owe society.
Bernie Sanders is advocating for three things: stronger social safety net, more accessible education, stronger middle class. Those three encourage entrepreneurship and innovation, increase the chances of success and lessen the impact of trying and failing so more people are likely to try.
Argument #22: Socialism hasn’t really worked anywhere outside of very rich, very small, very homogenous scandinavian countries.
The point is irrelevant. Bernie is not a socialist. He does not advocate government ownership and management of most major businesses, which is what classic socialism is about. Bernie calls himself a “democratic socialist”. and what he means by that, in essence, is actualizing and extending the proposals of FDR, in which government programs, funded by progressive taxation, provide greater security and opportunity for the citizens. If America with social security and Medicare works, then Bernie’s democratic socialism works.
Argument #23: He hates nuclear energy
Bernie Sanders’s issue with commercial nuclear energy is the problem of dealing with the waste.
Politically, storing or taking any kind of action regarding commercial nuclear waste has been horrendously mismanaged for the past 35 years to the point that it has contributed significantly to crippling of the commercial nuclear power industry in the US. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act and its amendments and the subsequent feet-dragging and non-compliance is a national embarrassment.
He wants to invest in other forms of renewable energy, including solar and wind.
Argument #24: He is pro-Isreal
Bernie Sanders has described the entrenched conflict between Israel and the Palestinians as both depressing and difficult, and considers the conflict one of the most important issues in the Middle East. He acknowledges that there is no magic solution to the problem, but Bernie believes in a two-state solution, where “Israel has a right to exist in security, and at the same time the Palestinians have a state of their own.” Finally, Bernie sees many other conflicts in the Middle East as exacerbating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Bernie hopes that the United States will help broker a two-state solution and work with the international community to end the blockade of Gaza, resolve the dispute over the borders of the West Bank, and allow “both the Israeli and Palestinian people to live in peace.” Bernie condemns the use of violence by both sides to gain an upperhand in peace negotiations.
Argument #25: His plans would increase the already huge national debt.
Bernie’s biggest ‘enemy’ that he goes after the most is Wall Street. Well, guess who originally came out with the hit-piece against Bernie, saying his plan will cost 18 trillion dollars and add to the deficit? Wall Street Journal.
There’s many economists that have said Bernie’s plans will actually EAT INTO the deficit — but Trump doesn’t want to hear that. Here’s Robert Reich’s analysis of Bernie’s plan and how the WSJ info is garbage -http://www.salon.com/2015/10/04/robert_reich_why_the_washington_posts_attack_on_bernie_sanders_is_bunk_partner/
