Post-New Hampshire Showdown
Purple’s coverage of the most recent Democratic debate. If you want your own politics nerd in your pocket, sign up here :)
Sanders plan would basically expand Medicare to everyone, resembling a single-payer system like the UK has. He says it will save $6 trillion over the next 10 years.
Bernie would fund the plan with some new taxes: Individuals would pay a 2.2% tax and employers would pay a 6.2% payroll tax. Instead of an insurance PREMIUM, a family making $50,000 would only pay $1,100 in health care income taxes.
It is not clear whether Sanders plan gets rid of copays and deductibles which add $$ to costs. Also, remember how his plan is partly funded by a 6.7% payroll tax on employers? Well, in reality that tax will probably come out of workers wages rather than employers’ pockets. Read more pros/cons here.
Deporter-in-chief
Under Obama, America is deporting illegal immigrants at 9 times the rate it was 20 years ago. Nearly 2 million have been deported so far under Obama, easily outpacing George W. Bush. Each year of the Obama administration has seen more deportations than any preceding president
The people the administration plans to deport have already lost their asylum cases. But if the countries they would be returned to are more dangerous than the ones they’d left, that is a serious humanitarian concern, and one that could violate the US’ international obligations not to send anyone back to a country where their lives are at risk. The spike could be because Central American countries are getting even more dangerous, leading people to seek asylum.
Dodd-Frank
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was passed in the wake of the financial crisis. It imposed a bunch of new rules and regulations on the banking industry to try to ensure a financial crisis doesn’t happen again. One major change was implementing the Volcker rule.
The Volcker Rule was part of a bill called Dodd-Frank. It aims to bring commercial banking back into the good old (and pretty boring) days, when all they did was to make loans and take deposits. It intends to prevent banks from making risky (or “speculative”) investments with customer deposits: basically, to separate commercial and investment banking. More on that from our peeps at Nerd Wallet.
Hillary said that an air campaign was necessary but not sufficient. To be successful, airstrikes have to be combined with ground forces actually taking back more territory from ISIS. But she doesn’t want to deploy American troops in combat in the Middle East. Local people and nations have to secure their own communities. She said we can help them and we should, but we cannot substitute for them.
Hillary says we need to:
- Defeat ISIS in Syria, Iraq and across the Middle East;
- Disrupt and dismantle the infrastructure that facilitates the flow of fighters, financing arms and propaganda around the world;
- Harden our defenses and those of our allies against external and homegrown threats.
Here is Bernie back in the day stating his opposition to the Iraq war.
So Russia, the U.S. and the Syrian government under Assad all have one common enemy: ISIS. It’s complicated though because the U.S. also doesn’t really want Assad ruling Syria either, and Russia does because Russia and Assad are allies. So Russia started launching airstrikes in Syria, but instead of bombing ISIS (which they SAID they were doing) they were bombing Syrian rebels who have been fighting against Assad with U.S. support.
This is one of Hillary’s attacks on Bernie that seems to actually be sticking.
“We agree that we’ve got to get unaccountable money out of politics. We agree that Wall Street should never be allowed to wreck Main Street again. But here’s the point I want to make tonight. I am not a single issue candidate, and I do not believe we live in a single issue country….
But if we were to stop that tomorrow, we would still have the indifference, the negligence that we saw in Flint. We would still have racism holding people back. We would still have sexism preventing women from getting equal pay. We would still have LGBT people who get married on Saturday and get fired on Monday. And we would still have governors like Scott Walker and others trying to rip out the heart of the middle class by making it impossible to organize and stand up for better wages and working conditions.
So I’m going to keep talking about tearing down all the barriers that stand in the way of Americans fulfilling their potential because I don’t think our country can live up to its potential unless we give a chance to every single American to live up to theirs.”
Some fact-checks:
- Bernie said his bill on Social Security would extend the life of SS by 58 years. It’s actually 40 years.
- Clinton repeated a claim that “Americans haven’t had a raise in 15 years.” Real weekly earnings went up 9.2% in that time frame.
- Sanders inflated unemployment figures, including the “real” unemployment rate for African American youth, which he says is more than 50%. The official rate for blacks age 16 to 19 is half that.
