Not knowing unintended consequences of legislation and not having business plans for the new banks that would be created is policy?
Maybe you guys real problem with Bernie is that he's honest, because if all he had to do was make something up (which is literally the only way to answer a hypothetical) and it would have been okay for you guys then your heads in the wrong place.
Quite frankly if Bernie had plans for the banks after being broken up, or claimed to know of all unintended consequences , then I'd be worried. Because it's impossible.
You're clearly an apologist for Sanders, but I'll try to explain this in as clear a way as possible.
1. No serious POTUS candidate should state a major policy platform they haven't carefully considered, researched, and bounced off educated experts and think tanks. As a result of that self-reflection and peer review you would wind up with a potential list of pluses and minuses (to use the language of the interview) that such a policy would bring with it.
The interviewer asked Sanders to give those pros and cons. He demurred, deflected, and changed topics. This is the central plank to his platform that he has been stumping on from day 1. Break up the banks. But he can't say even one potential result of that other than "stronger national economy". That isn't acceptable for any elected official, let alone someone wanting to be POTUS.
2. If he has no idea of the business model resulting from his breakup of the banks then how can he actually break up the banks? I'm talking about simple questions like.....
a. How big is too big? A question Barnie Frank has frequently brought up and Sanders has never been able to answer.
b. What businesses can stay with others? He's a proponent of re-instituting Glass-Steagall so obviously he wants some kind of business based divisions. Why can't he provide any? Why can't he say anything more on this topic than "re-institute Glass-Steagall" when every economist worth a shit has derided his depiction of Glass-Steagall as the source of the lending crisis as blatantly wrong?
c. What provisions would these new entities have placed upon them with regards to foreign branches and divisions? Chopping down a JP Morgan on this side of the Atlantic doesn't solve anything if they're a massive and overreaching entity on the other side setup for failure. We've seen more than a few cases of a foreign market failure directly impacting the U.S. branch of a major bank.
These are the three off the top of my head that are so fundamental to his proposal that not having answers on these points while still claiming we need to break up the banks is just irresponsible.
As for his policies not having substance, that's more a talking point for his opponents than anyone else. Because he has a plan for all of his "crazy policies", just everyone magically tunes out when he says how it would work or guffaw at the hypothetical he proposes and say " see! He doesn't actually have a plan" which is utterly ridiculous to me because he is constantly having to answer these accusations, and does so CONSISTENTLY.
You aren't accurately describing me here. I know his plans and policies. I'm not saying he doesn't have them. I'm saying they'd be worth more if he wiped his ass with them first.
1. Healthcare - his entire model is, at it's core, reliant on trickle down economics. For anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan that is simply unacceptable. He wants to increase taxes on everyone, including businesses, then assumes the money saved by businesses will be given back to employees as part of their compensation, not to off-set their losses from the new taxes he would impose. We can set aside whether it could even get passed because that is at the core of how he wants to fund Medicare for all and it fundamentally DOES NOT WORK. The end result would be a nationwide recession as the middle class basically watches thousands of dollars disappear from their annual income in new taxes.
2. His free tuition for all plan is flawed at every step along the way. First, it requires states to opt in for a 1:1 funding match. In a nation where many states have refused a 90% funding handout from the government for the ACA to expand medicare. So right there it's a non-starter for anyone who has been paying attention at all for the last eight years. Beyond that the reality is that most states couldn't even afford the billions of dollars in matching funds required. What you would really be constructing is a method by which already well off states like CA, NY, MA, WA, and a few others could effectively take billions of extra funding from the federal government at the expense of poorer states.
Next, we have the reality that he's proposing to basically just cut checks for states in exchange for removing tuition. This shows a clear lack of understanding on the variety of costs associated with college. Many states assess high enough tuition taxes on Universities to where they live primarily off of fees for example (MA is an example of this) and his plan does nothing to address this. He also at no point ropes in any kind of controls to ensure we aren't going to end up footing the bill for a nation of Lib Arts PhDs serving coffee in 8-10 years after implementation.
Lastly, his method of payment is supposedly from a transaction fee on Wall St., itself a dangerous thing to just randomly throw out since most people's retirements are 401Ks, something that would be hit with this transaction tax (though Sanders said they'd figure out some kind of waiver). He cites a pro-Sanders economist (I say pro-Sanders because Pollin writes Clinton hit job op-eds in his free time) who claims this would make $340 Billion a year. The Tax Policy Center says it would make one tenth as much. Other analysts have expressed concern that traders would find workarounds on this and effectively pay nothing. The problem here isn't the transaction tax itself mind you, which isn't a horrible policy idea if done right. The problem is Sanders claiming something with an estimated income generation potential between $0.00 and $340 Billion will pay for a pretty much set in stone $75 Billion annually. This is the equivalent of claiming that you'll make your car payment off of scratch off tickets. It is bad policy to chain a fixed cost social program to an unknown new income source period but it is especially bad policy to do so when that income source may or may not exist and likely wouldn't survive the next recession even if it did produce meaningful revenue.
His failure to spell out even broad strokes on how to regulate Wall St. has been shown already, so I won't go into that again. Other than campaign finance reform, which the POTUS plays zero substantial role in, those are all the things he ever wants to talk about. Even on those core elements a cursory review indicates massive issues with the thought process, or more accurately lack thereof, by Sanders and team.
Yet you laude over the hypothetical proposals and plans of whichever candidate you choose to like because less good things happening must = more realistic.
That's how I see it anyways.
The only three candidates I've ever seen people "laude over the hypothetical proposals and plans of" are: Bernie Sanders (free tuition, free healthcare, breaking up banks), Donald Trump (everything he says), and Ted Cruz (repeal Obamacare, end abortion). That is the real insanity of this election cycle. People are letting populist sentiment distract them from asking for real policies and understanding of what those policies mean. Just because Sanders doesn't pepper his populist ideology with hate speech doesn't make him any more of a legitimate candidate than Trump or Cruz.
Isidewith puts me with Hillary and I still choose to like Bernie because his proposals and policies are the changes I want to see most and his plans to make them happen do not sound unfeasible to me. Which really, is the debate we can have. You can try to argue against the viability of his proposals, but saying he has no substantive plans or doesn't know what to say just shows you were never listening.
If they do not sound unfeasible to you then you should crack some books. The lack of substance, coupled with the half-baked ideas that are given, combine to make his plans worthless.
I can spout good policy ideas and even outline some of the framework on my own with a pen and a cocktail napkin. Bernie Sanders has been a Congressman or a Senator for decades and yet when he runs for POTUS he puts up something on par with the rantings of a PoliSci undergrad who barely finished reading Das Kapital. They're unbecoming of a POTUS candidate. But it just goes to prove that low information populism works on the left just as well as it does on the right.
show me
