I_Like_Dirt wrote:dckingsfan wrote:So policy and policy outcomes make a difference. Bernie supporters are backing bad policies that will have bad policy outcomes - like the GND. Not sure what we are arguing about here.
BTW, killing duplicative private health coverage is in fact the same thing. If the government offers it - private insurance can't. If government offers it there can be no supplemental insurance to that insurance. And don't get me started on the cost drivers - in time Bernie's plan will be no less expensive than what we have today - his plan doesn't take on just a few of the cost drivers - again, not a great plan.
And yes, history does have a way of repeating itself as much as we want to think otherwise.
I'm not a fan of a lot of Bernie's policies and feel he's one of the weaker candidates. The issue I have is that he's setting an extremely low bar and a lot of candidates aren't even meeting that. Is it really better to have no policies at all than to have a bad policy with your heart in the right place? I'm not so sure that's true. No policies at all are a great way of avoiding criticism, though. That's where I feel Bernie does deserve credit - he at least owns what he believes and comes up with solutions he wants to attempt. That's as far as the credit goes but it's also not something I'll dismiss entirely even if I won't get behind those particular bad ideas.
Warren leads the fight against him in terms of actually coming up with solutions as far as I can tell. And while I don't like all of her policies either, I do like some of them and she's created a rather sizable gap on Bernie in terms of policies that might stand a hope in hell of making a positive difference. I feel it's a bit disingenuous of a shield and not necessarily the main reason but you'll get a lot of Bernie supporters critical of Warren for not being 100% committed to immediate M4A. Sure, it's because she appears to be rational about the actual political potential for such a thing to come to pass and more focused on other concerns first as a gradual lead-in but that's lost in the equation as it shifts his supporters towards that single issue and ignoring the nuance involved. Warren isn't perfect, either, but she's in another galaxy from Bernie in that sense. Yang has been a touch superficial in some respects but also hasn't been shy on his ideas.
It's the centrists, though, that have a particularly difficult time putting out actual policies. And this is where the arguments tend to fall apart a bit. At heart, a lot of centrists would prefer to allow economics to dictate things as they have in the past. It's clear now that a lot of the calculations involved in that kind of thing are actually way more expensive than people realized, though. The costs that environmental issues pose today are absolutely massive and are the result of economic gains from past decades that pale in comparison to what these costs are actually going to wind up being. We can't foresee the costs of failing to act precisely which is what makes this so hard but the idea that scientists might be overestimating things is a big problem because the reality is that it seems more likely that they're actually underestimating things. This is a position where the costs are going to be absolutely massive no matter how a person wants to look at it and anyone who is playing the vague policy game to avoid having financials attached to their plans, or who come out with plans with costs that seem achievable are candidates who are assuredly being disingenuous in terms of where the actual costs are going. Though again, that's where I wind up even more frustrated with Bernie's supporters because they really should just hand Warren the nomination already.
Well said.
