Bernie Sanders Has an Audacious -- and Hugely Expensive -- Climate Plan (technologyreview.com) 586
Senator Bernie Sanders, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination in this year's presidential election, has put forth the most audacious climate plan among the contenders. But there are doubts about the political and economic feasibility of his sweeping vision, as well as the wisdom of some of his particular technical proposals. From a report: Notably, the plan restricts tools that could help rapidly cut greenhouse-gas emissions, including nuclear power and technologies that can capture carbon dioxide. Sanders wants to pump more than $16 trillion into a version of the Green New Deal that would eliminate emissions from the US power sector, as well as all ground transportation, within a decade. To pull it off, he wants the government to play a much larger role in the electricity sector. His plan would direct new or expanded federal agencies to build nearly $2.5 trillion worth of wind, solar, geothermal, and energy storage projects.
The plan would also force major changes on the fossil-fuel sector, including ending federal subsidies, mountaintop-removal coal mining, and the import and export of fossil fuels. He'd also direct federal agencies to investigate whether companies broke the law in covering up their role in climate change, or owe damages for the destruction they cause. In addition, Sanders wants to invest more than $2 trillion to help families and small businesses improve the energy efficiency of their homes, buildings, and operations; and more than $1 trillion to retrofit or construct bridges, roads, water systems, and coastal protections in ways that will stand up to harsher climate conditions. He says the plan will create 20 million jobs, while offering wage guarantees, job training, and other assistance to displaced energy workers. His broader goals for the Green New Deal go beyond climate and clean energy as well, boosting funding for affordable housing and rural economic development, and enhancing protections for civil rights, environmental justice, and labor.
The plan would also force major changes on the fossil-fuel sector, including ending federal subsidies, mountaintop-removal coal mining, and the import and export of fossil fuels. He'd also direct federal agencies to investigate whether companies broke the law in covering up their role in climate change, or owe damages for the destruction they cause. In addition, Sanders wants to invest more than $2 trillion to help families and small businesses improve the energy efficiency of their homes, buildings, and operations; and more than $1 trillion to retrofit or construct bridges, roads, water systems, and coastal protections in ways that will stand up to harsher climate conditions. He says the plan will create 20 million jobs, while offering wage guarantees, job training, and other assistance to displaced energy workers. His broader goals for the Green New Deal go beyond climate and clean energy as well, boosting funding for affordable housing and rural economic development, and enhancing protections for civil rights, environmental justice, and labor.
Would it get any votes in Congress... (Score:4, Interesting)
...if Bernie were in the WH instead? Not many of his fellow congresscritters are this far out there.
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We live in a luxury economy. Long gone are the days of handing out food and running out of food. We essentially have play money. We have resources to spare, money only represents a means of distributing those resources.
Since we live in a luxury economy, funny things can happen, like in the past when we "spent more money than we had" on the war machine because not being taken over by
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We live in a luxury economy. Long gone are the days of handing out food and running out of food. We essentially have play money. We have resources to spare, money only represents a means of distributing those resources.
To quote an old joke that seems less funny right now: What we, white man?
If you were right, the middle class wouldn't be getting squeezed out, and we wouldn't be having problems with food security.
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Food security will always be with us as food is a commodity that decays easily and rapidly. Availability? No problems there.
You're still very solidly prompting me to ask "What we, white man?" The current food security issues in the US are pretty much entirely an issue of availability: People are having trouble affording to have food at all, and/or having food available around where they are. A lot of the Green New Deal is going to just make it worse for those who are already having trouble affording basic necessities by raising prices even higher--and it's not going to produce more jobs. Raising the minimum wage isn't going t
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No, you are wrong. The food is grown, it is not in the stores, because people wont buy it.
Why?
Because it's ugly.
https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]
That is TOTALLY a distribution problem. Nothing to do with "White man". Everything to do with rich people wanting to maximize the high-sale-price items, and excluding others from the market, coupled with an oligopoly based distribution system.
There is nothing wrong with that produce that we leave to rot. It just looks ugly. Every other country in the world thin
Am I taking crazy pills here? (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't get it. How many multi-trillion dollar plans can you announce, then hand-wave away the costs from with "the rich will pay for it"? Seriously, what the fuck is this shit? If he just said "OK, we'll focus on getting health care under control, and the rich will pay for that" then fine. That's cool, a single payer system wouldn't cost the government much more than we pay now.
But all this other shit? What kind of a rube do you have to be to buy that bullshit? I for one can't wait until he pisses off the
Re:Am I taking crazy pills here? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Am I taking crazy pills here? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Bankrupt" as in you can't buy the goods and services you need because your hyperinflated currency is worthless and producers are demanding something of actual value instead—which you don't have.
Re:Am I taking crazy pills here? (Score:4, Insightful)
100%. On the other hand, try passing meaningful, reasonable measures and it will go nowhere. They, the left, are in meltdown mode that he is enforcing _existing_, rational policies that are actually less stringent than most other nations' - for example the requirement that immigrants be unlikely to become a public burden. "OMG that Nazi hates poor people!!! I am literally shaking!!!"
I'm a tree hugging hippy liberal compared to most on the right in terms of immigration, basically if you're here and not committing crimes or sucking up welfare dollars then it's cool, else get the fuck out. But to the left wing I'm Literally Hitler.
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I'll ignore your complete ignorance of the vernacular.
Anyway, no, they aren't. And even if they were that's like saying being a pirate who eats oranges laced with a tiny bit of arsenic but not getting scurvy is better than being one who eats no oranges and gets scurvy. Ideally you find enough oranges to throw out the bad ones.
We can, amazingly, pick and choose which immigrants make our country better (most of them) while keeping out those who don't (a small but notable number of them). 100 working immigrant
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Well, here [wikipedia.org] it mentions for 2018 "$617 billion for the base budget and another $69 billion for war funding.""...so, no, it isn't trillions for military.
Billions is a lot, but Trillions gets you in trouble quickly.
The TOTAL [wikipedia.org] US budget: "During FY2018, the federal government spent $4.11 trillion".....so, hope t
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And China tarrifs.
Probably (Score:5, Insightful)
It's amazing to me how you guys can call him a con man and grifter and whatnot, but not realize that he hoodwinked you with the old trick of "talking past the sale."
Meanwhile he used military funds to build a wall instead of blowing up more of Iran or something.
Speaking of which, where is that WWIII you guys were talking about?
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Re:Am I taking crazy pills here? (Score:5, Insightful)
left out in your shit analysis, like most people, is the timeframe of the spend. its not just "2.5 trillion? where will we get the money!" it is easily achievable when you spread it over a number of years, and necessary when you compare it to the cost of no action.
if you think 2.5 trillion is a lot of money, wait until the impacts of doing nothing come to bear. or will we just ignore those costs too? i think that's the current plan, let the poor people and those without power suffer.
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Re: Am I taking crazy pills here? (Score:2)
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doubling my taxes halves (and more) my health insurance bill.
your analysis is short sighted.
Re:Am I taking crazy pills here? (Score:5, Interesting)
I like Bernie, I think he's got his heart in the right place and his eyes on the right issues, and having both of those features is in my opinion unique to him as a candidate. But I also think he's got his head in the clouds. His plans to deal with the very real problems that we really do need to address are often not realistic at best and would have significant negative repercussions at worst. He needs to take a real look at his plans and do two things: first, triage them and scale them back so the costs are realistic, and second, come up with realistic plans to pay for them including implementation details. A realistic plan to pay for any one of these plans would need to combine several different strategies because they're insanely expensive. You need a plan to grow the economy so that the source of your taxes doesn't evaporate when you try to raise them.
And raising taxes comes with its own set of problems. It doesn't just hurt spending as people tighten their purse strings to make up for the loss in available money, it also hurts investment as people have less money available to take risks with. There's (almost) no such thing as money that just "sits around," even if it's in a bank it's being invested somewhere, providing starting money for businesses taking new chances. Less investment means fewer chances get taken as people consolidate into less risky assets. So maybe that medical R&D company that would have cured cancer cut the program responsible because they didn't have space in their budget to take the risk on it. This is putting aside all the direct problems with taxing the rich (e.g. that they'll use every means at their disposal to try and get around it, some of which are very difficult to mitigate or even detect).
So yeah, I like that Bernie actually understands the problems people deal with, and I like that he gives a shit enough to want to fix them. That puts him better than probably like 98% of US politicians period. But he's an extreme idealist who either lacks a fundamental understanding of macro-economics or does understand the shortcomings of his plans and thinks it's an implementation detail he can worry about later on. And maybe it is, but considering the numbers he's talking about here, something more substantial then "we'll tax the rich and pay it off over a number of years" would go a long way. I don't want my grandchildren suffering under a slump economy paying heavy taxes for programs from 70 years ago while Russia and China rocket ahead any more than I want to see Florida underwater from climate change or people paying thousands of dollars for minor medical treatment.
With all that said, Bernie's still my favorite of the declared candidates, though I usually vote Libertarian in the end (I don't identify as a Libertarian, they're just closest to where I'm at).
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The GDP of the United States is about $20 trillion. In a lump sum, $2 trillion is one tenth of that. That is a lot of money no matter how you look at it. So you want to spread it out over a number of years. How many years? Even 1% of our GDP would be a huge sum, and that'd be spreading it out over 20 years. How do you reclaim that? How do you reclaim that for multiple programs with similar costs?
In 1933, the GDP was $57 billion. The original New Deal cost $41.7 billion in 1933 dollars. How do you reclaim it? By massively increasing the GDP through double-digit percent increases over the following four years.
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"How do you reclaim that?"
Improved infrastructure, reduced climate impacts and lower energy costs (most green energy has high upfront cost, but lower maintenance costs).
Business reporters regularly say that these days there are an excess of money looking for investments, but a lot of going to things to don't actually build things, like real estate speculation, derivatives, etc. There is no shortage of money for investment.
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He already said the green new deal is the right track and really he raised AoC another one hundred trillion on the crazy wager.
The DNC might be crooked, but I don't believe they are crazy enough to let him get into the primaries.
If they have any sense they will start to cleanse the far left from their platform and get back to a semblance of what appeals to the non-fringe.
I do have to wonder how many craze statements he can make before even the pro-bernies start asking themselves if they made the right choic
Re:Am I taking crazy pills here? (Score:5, Insightful)
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/2... [cnbc.com]
Nobody asked where it would come from.
Re:Am I taking crazy pills here? (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, when it comes to climate change, it will cost us even more later if we do nothing now. This has to get fixed and twiddling our thumbs pretending it's not there is not going to work.
If you think $2 trillion is alot, I suggest you go look at the national debt. It's not that much and frankly, Trump will have increased the national debt by more than $2 trillion in his 4 disastrous years.
The U.S. government's public debt is now more than $22 trillion — the highest it has ever been. The Treasury Department data comes as tax revenue has fallen and federal spending continues to rise. The new debt level reflects a rise of more than $2 trillion from the day President Trump took office in 2017.
Frankly, if we can have hte wealthy pay off the things you mention and use debt to fund climate change issues it will just be business as usual. I frankly would rather tax the ultra wealthy. I don't think Bloomberg will miss $10 billion if you took it away from him.
Re: Am I taking crazy pills here? (Score:3)
$22T also happens to be the non-government surplus to the penny.
Re:Am I taking crazy pills here? (Score:4, Insightful)
Frankly, when it comes to climate change, it will cost us even more later if we do nothing now. This has to get fixed and twiddling our thumbs pretending it's not there is not going to work.
Probably true, but the old folks in Congress don't really care about "later" because (a) it doesn't help them get re-elected and (b) they'll probably be dead by then. In addition, their constituents seem fine with their Representatives twiddling their thumbs, 'cause it means they won't have to do anything and also (b).
Expensive? Compared to what? (Score:5, Informative)
Time (Score:5, Insightful)
The main (real) problem with building out nuclear capacity is that such construction is slow; the plants are complex, they are subject to significant progress retardation from regulation and (not inappropriate) inspection, and there are always NIMBYs fighting siting issues and further delaying progress.
The problem with addressing climate change effectively by changing power sources is that it most likely needs to be done in the short term, that is, way sooner than any form at all of later, or remediation will fall much further short of actually doing what needs to be done.
I'm all for nuclear power, fission or (hopefully someday) fusion, but as a "we need to fix this now" solution, it's really not in the running.
Sanders is focused on the right issues, the ones that can work. However, getting both houses of congress on board... that's entirely another matter.
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He's focused on like 10 different expensive issues. I would agree that climate is #2 after health care, but free college? child care? green new deal? housing?canceling existing medical debt? free everything US citizens get for illegals? Seriously? What the FUCK? It boggles the mind that someone could be this stupid.
And to pay for it? *hand-waves* the rich. With a, fucking LOL, 'wealth tax' (unconstitutional wealth confiscation that is not an income tax or even a tax on any other transaction, and which requi
Re:Time (Score:4, Insightful)
Incorrect on the speed. 100%. Nuclear power could easily be quick. The process needs to change. This is what a LEADER should do. If he is really interested in "saving the planet" then fix the process! The reason it takes so long, and is so expensive is opponents of nuclear power made it that way. If you can't stop someone from making a nuclear power plant, then make it take so dang long and make it so dang expensive to build they won't.
Also, NEVER claim we have to do something only because we don't have the time. (Ok, almost never, like the asteroid that will for sure smash into the earth) How many bad choices are made because we have to get it done NOW?
But I digress. Who the hell in politics knows anything about how to be efficient? Or figure out how to pay for something. Or has ever worked a job? (politics doesn't count)
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I agree that building nuclear is extremely slow but the other technologies also seem far to slow for Sander's timeline.
We would need to more than double the production of cars, and transfer all of that to electric. We need a vast amount of high speed rail, and California's recent experience doesn't make a 10 year timescale seem possible.
Solar cells - maybe 20X current world production. Similar for windmills.
Just buying right of way for rail and power lines will take years - with endless "environmental" qu
Re:Time (Score:4, Insightful)
Nuclear power is necessary and you all have to get over your oogabooga irrational fear of them.
Tax and spend isn't a plan (Score:2, Insightful)
Bernie's plan is nothing more than tax everyone you don't like and spend on everything you do like... He doesn't have any actual "plan", just a dream to tax all the companies and individuals he views as evil, and then to spend carelessly on everything he thinks could be beneficial. No actual planning has gone into any of it.
Re:Tax and spend isn't a plan (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you looked at what the National Debt has done since Trump took office?
And just ask anyone in the 99% what has happened to their taxes since Trump cut taxes for the 1%.
No, don't spout Breitbart and Faux News "facts." Nobody believes that crap.
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You can't even pay for Bernies plans if you take away all of the money from ultra wealthy.
Look at the loose economics of what he is proposing you nutter.
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I'm in the 99%, and my taxes went down.
More accurately I was in the lower 80% and my taxes went down about 10%. I have since retired, so further comparisons are not going to be valid.
It's your numbers that are invalid. The IRS approved mine.
Re:Tax and spend isn't a plan (Score:4, Informative)
Calm down there cowboy, how about the hard left New York Times?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0... [nytimes.com]
"Ever since President Trump signed the Republican-sponsored tax bill in December 2017, independent analyses have consistently found that a large majority of Americans would owe less because of the law. Preliminary data based on tax filings has shown the same."
"Experts are divided on whether the tax law was a good idea. But there is little disagreement on this core point: Most people got a tax cut. The Tax Policy Center estimates that 65 percent of people paid less under the law and that just 6 percent paid more. (The rest saw little change to their taxes.) Other analyses reached similar conclusions."
I know, I know, never let the facts get in the way of your narrative. Back to your drug induced delusions....
This is probably what is necessary (Score:2, Insightful)
Doing nothing would be more costly.
Either way, someone is going to pay for it. The industry and the rich don't want the climate disaster. They are not stupid. They just don't want to pay for its prevention.
Not just about climate change (Score:5, Insightful)
It is impossible to calculate cost because much of what he proposes will reclaim funds. Much like this healthcare plan, you can't put a real number on it until you see how much fat they are able to cut from healthcare costs where cost estimates of the plan more or less assume none he assumes reduction of cost to be comparable with other western nations.
This will result in sweeping infrastructure update at the same time and most of the funds will go into the US economy but disproportionately to California so the key here is going to be making sure he doesn't restore the tax deduction for state income tax paid alongside rolling back any cuts. Not that I'd suggest highlighting that until after winning the election since these are populous states who had enjoyed diverting income tax funds from the federal government to their state level programs.
We desperately need that infrastructure update. This is the united states, we should be leading the world but we had built excellent infrastructure that lasted quite a while back and have neglected it limping along and skimping for decades. Now the bills are finally coming due.
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Example: Solar panels
https://i1.wp.com/www.freeinge... [wp.com]
In economic speak:
In the short term, a subsidy results in an artificial decrease of
Planning ahead. (Score:2)
When you need to borrow 10 bucks from your Uncle Sam, you ask him to borrow a 20, and accept when the 10 dollar loan is 'his' idea.
Bernie will never win in FL or PA (Score:2)
This is the socialist who praises Castro and criticizes Israel. Florida's large Cuban and Jewish populations will either vote Republican or stay home.
This is the candidate who openly says he will ban fracking. Good luck with that messaging in PA.
I'll admit -- he's one of the most honest presidential candidates I've seen. Unfortunately for him, honesty, though an admirable trait, doesn't win elections.
I've never seen more of a circular firing squad than the shit show the Democrats having been putting on t
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I wouldn't say honest...
This is the guy who chastises everyone for riding in first class and in the same a week a picture surfaces of him sitting in first class with an oh shit look on his face.
Everything about his proposals is dishonest because there are no facts behind it. He is a soap box preacher saying things to the crowd.
Actually cheaper than current energy policy (Score:4, Informative)
Look, right now you are in a system where fossil fuels get an effective 90 percent subsidy.
You're paying too much for too little, and most of it is foreign backed.
Bernie would invest in American renewables nationwide, dropping the cost of electricity and heating dramatically.
Time to wake up and smell the fact it's 2020, not 1950.
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Look, right now you are in a system where fossil fuels get an effective 90 percent subsidy.
What "subsidies" for fossil fuels amount to "90 percent"? Specifically. With numbers.
I think this is utter nonsense.
Re:Actually cheaper than current energy policy (Score:4, Informative)
It's simple, you just make up ridiculous numbers for what everyone else calls externalities including mass crop failures, every respiratory ailment death, and the cost of all natural disasters and then stick that big ol number into the "indirect subsidy" column.
Yeah, that is stupid. Using realistic estimates for all of those externalities and putting those numbers into the "indirect subsidy" column, however, is perfectly legitimate. Of course, you have to do the same thing for the alternatives as well. Internalizing externalities so the market can optimize correctly for overall economic efficiency is a crucial responsibility of government.
This could actually be a good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember the Moonshot? It created a lot of jobs and gave the economy and the population a boost in income. Not to mention that it meant that the US were the leading technological country of the planet for decades to come. And this time it could actually even have a use other than a dick-measuring contest with some rival.
Considering that this is going to be technology that everyone on the planet will want, the US could finally take the technology lead again, backed by international patents that ensure that they decide who can produce competitively. Using the UN to push stricter environmental standards, US corporations could well be the only ones who can keep them without breaking their back and get back the leading role in production too. International pressure to adopt those standards would be pretty high, so you can't simply ignore it even if you're a dictatorship that doesn't give a fuck about poisoning their population.
And the left can't even complain this time because their lord and saviour had the idea!
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
We can always afford wars (Score:5, Insightful)
Cost of the Middle East wars (including future medical costs) = 6 Trillion. The same amount of money would have bought 200,000,000 million made-in-America Tesla Model 3s.
Funny, it's OK to murder brown people with taxpayer money, but buying everyone an electric vehicle and telling the Middle East to F' off, that socialism. Not just socialism, it's booga booga socialism.
/ There's always money for war.
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So the total cost of all of the Middle East wars being waged for the past 20 years amounts to little more than HALF what this single Bernie plan would cost, and he still has a dozen other $10 trillion dollar plans?
And you think that's a persuasive argument FOR Bernie?
You folks crack me up. Every. Time!
You've got this backwards (Score:5, Insightful)
The main problem (Score:4, Insightful)
other than the cost, the main problem of this plan is that it is centrally planned. It would be a lot more efficient to just tax carbon (or use a cap and trade scheme) and let the market decide whether it's worth it or not to continue to run coal power plants. My bet is that all coal power plants would shut down given a high enough tax to address the climate change problem.
Hugely audacious Problems (Score:4)
Hugely audacious solutions.
Even critics have acknowledged that doing it NOW is orders of magnitude cheaper than doing nothing and spending what it will cost later.
Snowball's chance in hell (Score:3)
Like every president, including Trump, he would have policies and send legislation to the hill. Which the hill would promptly ignore. Doesn't really matter who is in the White House, their priorities and policies do not translate into legislation without 51 votes in the Senate. There aren't 51 votes in the Senate for much of anything.
Nuclear power (Score:4, Insightful)
US has made two big mistakes on nuclear power, which still is the safest and cleanest method we know of energy production:
1 - We focused on weapon making capability, instead of safer alternatives (like so called "molten salt" reactors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] )
2 - We let the public hysteria run rampant, even though there was no actual long term risk (Chernobyl is no teeming with life: https://www.theguardian.com/tr... [theguardian.com])
In mortality rates (US), nuclear is safer than hyrdo, wind, or solar:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j... [forbes.com]
(It looks like more people fall of rooftops, than dying the Fukishima nuclear plant).
We need to change the "perception" of nuclear to something actually clean and safe (as it is). Otherwise we'll we wasting time and resources on otherwise not ready technologies.
Nothing will come of nothing (Score:3)
Or... it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Not a Trump fan, but if Sanders gets the nod the attack ads will practically write themselves. Almost anybody who doesn't live next to a major body of water is either not going to vote, or hold their nose and vote for Trump.
If Sanders were to get elected, there is no way 90% of this, especially the energy sector stuff, gets enacted in the US. Even if both houses of congress flip, between Senate filibuster rules and red state dems, stuff like the transfer of energy sector production to the federal government isn't going to happen. What is more likely to happen is utter gridlock, and the environmental problems will only worsen.
As far as "but there's jobs" argument, if I'm reading TFS correctly, we'll spend $16 trillion to get 20 million jobs. If my pre-beer math is correct, that's $800k we'll be spending per job. There are other benefits to be costed out, like lower spending because people aren't breathing fumes/particulates, maybe lower military costs because we'll be less invested in securing oil drilling/transport in hostile parts of the world, but those seem difficult to predict objectively. There might be some additional money coming in from lawsuits, assuming Sanders can get the judiciary to play along, which seems like a stretch with the Supreme Court being what it is.
Still think the best thing here is to let things play out, and have humanity end itself before it can infect the rest of the cosmos...
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the tl;dr version of his book:
How not to have a heart attack when advertising free pudding to college students.
Re: Excellent book by Bernie Sanders (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: Excellent book by Bernie Sanders (Score:3)
Umm wot?
You know they pay you things called wages right, and those can be used to.. You know.. Repay your loan?
Surprising I know
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You know they pay you things called wages right, and those can be used to.. You know.. Repay your loan?
Wages are subject to deductions for SS, Medicare, unemployment insurance, and income tax.
The extra payments for college loan payoff are also subject to all these deductions, but Congress is considering making student loan disbursements exempt.
Employer student loan contributions [wikipedia.org]
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I mean, if you confiscated every penny the top 1% have currently in their possession....you'd not fund any of this for even one year.
After that, where does the money come from??
I will give you this....I do believe Bernie believes in what he's saying and doesn't change his schtick to pander to a crowd he's with, he has a message and it consisted with it.
I just happen to disagree
Re: Excellent book by Bernie Sanders (Score:5, Informative)
I'm still wondering where he'll get all this $$ to have the govt pay for everything of this ON TOP of the Medicare for all, etc.
Taxes. Specifically, by reducing spending on some current programs, and then making sure that the top earners and corporations are paying more taxes.
I just happen to disagree fundamentally with pretty much 99.999% of everything I've heard of it, as that it fundamentally changes what the USA has meant to me all my life and well before me.
This basically comes off as "portions of our country resemble third-world countries, but let's keep doing what we're doing and not solving any of those issues". We have some serious problems. I'd rather not live in a country where my neighbors are destitute. Is this the "change" you fear so much?
I truly feel I can do better with my hard earned money than the govt can do with it.
This shows that you're unfamiliar with concepts such as collective bargaining.
I don't mind the safety net for the elderly and truly infirmed, or even those temporarily out of luck, but aside from that, if you are able bodied, it isn't the responsibility of the government using MY dollars to support you.
We've let the gap between the very poor and the very rich widen by way too much for way too long. That needs to be reigned in a bit.
Re: Excellent book by Bernie Sanders (Score:3)
And as for neighbors, we give to charity because the government does a piss poor job at it.
This. Non-sociopathic people tend to help out others, and have been doing so - without the need for an "authority" to get involved -since the beginning of fucking time.
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Per another post on here, the US military is about $693 Billion last year, and I think the TOTAL US federal budget for 2018 was $4.x Trillion....
But do keep in mind, that our military doesn't just protect us, it is spread all over the world protecting other countries and allies, some of which don't really seem to appreciate it.
I think we could pull back on that.
But the Federal government, is actually charged with providing for
Re: Excellent book by Bernie Sanders (Score:4, Insightful)
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"I'm a bit hard pressed to find where in the US Constitution the feds are charged to battle climate change?"
It's in the second line of the preamble: "promote the general Welfare".
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"But do keep in mind, that our military doesn't just protect us, it is spread all over the world protecting other countries and allies, some of which don't really seem to appreciate it." Interesting: this was the viewpoint of the majority of the Republicans prior to Pearl Harbor; the Democrats back then were much more in favor of intervention in what was seen as a European war. FDR managed to get Lend Lease and Destroyers for Bases through before Pearl, but there was plenty of push-back from the Republica
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Have you really thought about what climate change means? It's not just things getting warmer and lots of plants and animals going extinct.
It's regular famines during the change, as weather patterns become too unstable to predict what crops you should plant where, and when. Not to mention that both droughts and floods are predicted to continue getting worse as the polar-equator thermal engine driving weather patterns continues to weaken and become more chaotic. And of course the crop-processing plants can'
Re:Excellent book by Bernie Sanders (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't agree with a lot of his politics but I respect him for not taking corporate money. He seems to be one of the few politicians who wants to change things and not make a buck.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
They lack actual skills, they lack economic sense, they lack an appreciation for what it takes to do things, and they have an abundant interest in all the batshit globalists memes that have been pushed for decades - all the ones the DNC knows they just made up to make republicans look bad in the eyes of the haughty and ignorant millennials and in turn don't take serious
Re: Everything he proposes is hugely expensive (Score:2)
Re: Everything he proposes is hugely expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Everything he proposes is hugely expensive (Score:5, Informative)
I'm amazed the both of you don't really get how US politics works.
No president can "put all his plans in place". US politics is a matter of momentum and direction, then some concessions and bribery of corporate interests.
Much like ACA, this plan would be driven forward, and turn into some cluster fuck amalgamation where 70% of it would be paying off large corporations, but some part of it would go towards environmental good.
So either vote if you want to go towards the goals Bernie represents, or vote to go towards goals others represent. Whatever - but if you think a president "gets to put his plans in place" - you haven't been paying attention to how anything works in this country.
Re: (Score:3)
The ACA was largely unpopular and got put through and still is in effect and caused a major slowdown in the economic recovery. And that is just one of Bernie's plans. The ACA was Obama's only plan.
Re: (Score:3)
But if you get him in, and, God forbid, Dems win the Senate and hold the house...you CAN bet they will start removing legal citizens' 2A rights...hurting the law abiding, and not solving any of the gun violence issues
Re: (Score:2)
Reap what you sow!
I don't know what exactly what they were thinking when they made all of this messaging.
Re:Everything he proposes is hugely expensive (Score:5, Interesting)
Millenials are almost 40 now. Some of us got STEM degrees. Some of us are ever 1%ers and realize we're still one major illness away from the poor house.
Some of us have been to other countries where people don't die because they can't go-fund-me enough insulin for the month.
There is a massive amount of polling data that shows the demographic of his base, but don't let that get in way of a good rant.
Re: (Score:3)
No, no, no...
Someone else makes more money then him and they should pay!
Clearly they didn't work for it and don't deserve it.
Re:Everything he proposes is hugely expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm always amused when people make comments like this like they're being insightful.
why aren't you giving all of your money to those less fortunate?
Because a person shouldn't have to give all of their money for the welfare of society, everyone should contribute their fair share which is determined through the democratic process.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Everything he proposes is hugely expensive (Score:5, Informative)
He's both oulined how much it is expected to cost as well as the mechanisms by which those costs would be obtained. It won't be a free lunch, but it's certainly doable. The only people who will get disencfranchised by his proposal are people with an overinflated sense of entitlement, feeling that the government owes them something far beyond what they may actually need.
Unless you have a specific reason to think that it will actually cost significantly more than he is saying, I'm unsure how you think it will crash the economy.
Re:Everything he proposes is hugely expensive (Score:4, Informative)
It's also 16 trillion over ten years, so $5k per citizen per year. And quite a bit of it is infrastructure development and upgrades that have to be done anyway.
Re:Everything he proposes is hugely expensive (Score:4, Informative)
Well since he only wants to tax the richest 1%, that's closer to 5 million per person...
The cost of doing nothing is not something that can be reasonably estimated.
Re: (Score:3)
Unemployment is already at an all time low.
Extra $1250,000 per household cost (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, there are 128 million households in the United States. He wants those 128 million to pay $16 trillion, so that's $125,000 per household more in new taxes.
With a median income of $61,000, the cost of his plan is pretty much that all Americans starve to death. If that seems like an exaggeration, look at the Soviet Union or anywhere else big communism has been done - people actually starve.
The benefit to his plan is that with the US gone, global warming would be delayed a few years.
Overall, even doing
Re:Extra $1250,000 per household cost (Score:5, Informative)
Well, there are 128 million households in the United States. He wants those 128 million to pay $16 trillion, so that's $125,000 per household more in new taxes.
Did you forget how marginal tax rates work? Or that the top margical tax rate used to be 90% for quite a few years when america was "great" at building roads, bridges, etc.
Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett have more wealth than half the population of the US combined.
I honestly want to know what went into your critical thinking that got that $120k was going to come out of someone living paycheck to pay-check.
communism has been done
Can you point to the 'communist' policy on his web page? You guys keep throwing out the 'isms' but the most radical idea he has so far is that the US should have health care like all the other first world countries.
Repeating a word like socialism or communism doesn't suddenly change the definition of the word. Hell, single payer isn't even setup as 'socialism' since Hospitals wouldn't be owned by the state and doctors wouldn't be employed by the feds. It's just, as it says, a single payer.
Pay checks come in handy (Score:3)
Making up numbers is fun, isn't it.
Yep, Jeff Bed and Bill Gates have a lot of wealth, combined about $239 billion, or enough to pay for Sanders' plan for several days before it's your time to pay.
Their wealth is of course that they own Microsoft and Amazon. Sanders proposes liquidating that wealth to pay for his plan. Guess what happens when you liquidate Microsoft, Amazon, etc? Guess what happens to your paycheck when the company is liquidated?
There is no free lunch, my friend. There is no "one
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If you confiscated 100% of the wealth of the top 5% in the US that would be enough to run the country for about 4 months at current spending levels. Where will you get the rest of the money to just maintain the status quo, much less give everything to everyone on the planet for free?
I like my idea better: learn to support yourself and leave the rest of us alone.
Re: (Score:3)
Anybody watch/read One Punch Man? Bernie bros are exactly like the bald dudes who stole the high tech armor and preach about taking money from the rich. In the end he admits he just didn't like working and finally goes to get a job.
Re: (Score:3)
Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett have more wealth than half the population of the US combined.
I'm going to examine that next, but first let's go bigger: there are 2200 billionaires in the united states. Their combined wealth is about $9 trillion [wikipedia.org]
. So, forget about taxing their income, if you actually took everything they own, and left them with nothing, and could do that without decreasing the value of their wealth in the sell-off, it would still not pay for that $16 trillion.
Now, let's address your other point. $109 billion + $122 billion + $86 billion = $317 billion. The bottom 50% of US households
Re:Did you know he didn't have a job until he was (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Did you know he didn't have a job until he was (Score:4, Insightful)
It starts becoming really clear when you see old people still espousing "classroom" ideas, that they've probably lived a very sheltered life in academia or a wealthy family. I see this regularly in well educated people who look down on, say, Trump voters, when from my perspective the Trump voter sees reality far better than the other.
Re: (Score:3)
Trump voter sees reality far better than the other.
If it's the same perspective as what Trump tells them to believe, it's objectively not-reality.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/04/trump-has-told-more-than-10000-lies-since-being-inaugurated-washington-post/ [vanityfair.com]
Re: (Score:3)
This is such nonsense--I'm not a particular fan of career politicians, but people against doing anything different about the climate will find ANY excuse to write off the people proposing solutions.
Bernie Sanders: Didn't have a job until 40! Doesn't understand the concerns of working people!
AOC: She was a bartender! What does SHE know about how the economy works? She was poor too long to have an opinion!
Warren: Lawyers, amirite?
I'm sympathetic to those of us in the middle class—it's where I've been al
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> anything is better than more of Trump
I disagree. It's really not that bad under Trump in fact it's arguably been good. A platform built around "anything but that guy" isn't a good platform as it rejects anything that can be argued as good. There are plenty of things that have improved.
>round them all up and toss them in an oubliette
Stunning and brave. Speaking of boogaloo. Are Bernie Bro's still planning to burn Milwaukee when the DNC shafts them, again?
Now go a head and mod me down to -1. I have an