Millennials like socialism — until they get jobs. Or until a pollster tells them that it would mean tax increases but doesn’t tell them, for example, that the tax increases would replace healthcare insurance premiums and out-of-pocket medical expenses. And doesn’t tell them that “more government services” means something other than, say, trash collection twice a week instead of once a week.
Okay, so the title of a Washington Post op-ed piece today by research fellow and director of polling at the Cato Institute Emily Ekins is “Millennials like socialism — until they get jobs.” She knows that this is do because a recent Reason-Rupe poll—that’s libertarian magazine Reason, and some polling organization they hired—found that:
When tax rates are not explicit, millennials say they’d prefer larger government offering more services (54 percent) to smaller government offering fewer services (43 percent). However when larger government offering more services is described as requiring high taxes, support flips and 57 percent of millennials opt for smaller government with fewer services and low taxes, while 41 percent prefer large government.
Ah, yes; the ole, reliable, generic smaller-government-with-fewer-services-vs.-larger-government-with-more-services polling gimmick. Because of course everyone absolutely definitely, completely understands what the generic “services” are. Like, say, trash pickup twice a week rather than once a week?
The survey was, by this writer’s undoubtedly accurate account, prompted by a recent Gallup survey that, to quote Ekins, found that an astounding 69 percent of millennials say they’d be willing to vote for a ‘socialist’ candidate for president — among their parents’ generation, only a third would do so.” Spilling the beans about the motive for the Reason survey, she continues, “Indeed, national polls and exit polls reveal about 70 to 80 percent of young Democrats are casting their ballots for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who calls himself a ‘democratic socialist’.”
Uh-oh. And that was before Bloomberg released a poll yesterday showing Sanders’s support with a 1-point lead over Clinton nationally, with almost no undecideds: Sanders has 49% to Clinton’s 48%.
Ekins writes:
Millennials are the only age group in America in which a majority views socialism favorably. A national Reason-Rupe survey found that 53 percent of Americans under 30 have a favorable view of socialism compared with less than a third of those over 30. …
Yet millennials tend to reject the actual definition of socialism — government ownership of the means of production, or government running businesses. Only 32 percent of millennials favor “an economy managed by the government,” while, similar to older generations, 64 percent prefer a free-market economy. And as millennials age and begin to earn more, their socialistic ideals seem to slip away.
I dunno. Ekins continues:
So what does socialism actually mean to millennials? Scandinavia. Even though countries such as Denmark aren’t socialist states (as the Danish prime minster has taken great pains to emphasize) and Denmark itself outranks the United States on a number of economic freedom measures such as less business regulation and lower corporate tax rates, young people like that country’s expanded social welfare programs.
Coming of age during the Great Recession, millennials aren’t sure if free markets are sufficient to drive income mobility and thus many are comfortable with government helping to provide for people’s needs. Indeed, a Reason-Rupe study found that 69 percent of millennials favor a government guarantee for health insurance and 54 percent support a guarantee for a college education. Perhaps most striking is that millennials favor a bigger government that provides more services — 52 percent of them do, compared with 38 percent of the nation overall.
Then she asks whether this will last. “Are millennials ushering in a sea change of public opinion?,” she wonders. “Do they signal the transformation of the United States into a Scandinavian social democracy?”
Her conclusion? That it depends.
Which indeed it does—on what the pollster tells the respondent and doesn’t tell the respondent about what the hell the question is getting at. And what the question wants the respondent to think the underlying alternatives actually are. Ekin reveals the answer to the latter:
There is some evidence that this generation’s views on activist government will stick. However, there is more reason to expect that support for their Scandinavian version of socialism may wither as they age, make more money and pay more in taxes.
The expanded social welfare state Sanders thinks the United States should adopt requires everyday people to pay considerably more in taxes. Yet millennials become averse to social welfare spending if they foot the bill. As they reach the threshold of earning $40,000 to $60,000 a year, the majority of millennials come to oppose income redistribution, including raising taxes to increase financial assistance to the poor.
Similarly, a Reason-Rupe poll found that while millennials still on their parents’ health-insurance policies supported the idea of paying higher premiums to help cover the uninsured (57 percent), support flipped among millennials paying for their own health insurance with 59 percent opposed to higher premiums.
When tax rates are not explicit, millennials say they’d prefer larger government offering more services (54 percent) to smaller government offering fewer services (43 percent). However when larger government offering more services is described as requiring high taxes, support flips and 57 percent of millennials opt for smaller government with fewer services and low taxes, while 41 percent prefer large government.
It’s downright shocking to me, a Sanders supporter, that millennials don’t want to pay higher insurance premiums, although since Sanders’s proposal would actually lower premiums and overall healthcare expenditures by individuals and employers I’m not sure what this actually says about millennials . Or about the lasting appeal to them of Sanders’s healthcare proposal.
And at least to my knowledge (and I’m pretty sure I’m right), Sanders’s tax increases for middle-income people are mostly to pay the healthcare premium, although there is a payroll tax of $1.64 (or something) a week on everyone to pay for guaranteed paid family and medical leave. I’m just not sure that false factual premises indicate much about how likely millennials are to change their political ideology.
But it does say something pretty clear about Ekins and the Cato Institute. It says that they either can’t distinguish between apples and elephants, or that they pretend not to. It also says something—a lot, actually, I think—about the Washington Post’s op-ed editors. The representation that the expanded social welfare state Sanders thinks the United States should adopt, including additional financial assistance to the poor, requires everyday people to pay considerably more in taxes is partly false and partly deeply misleading. It is a line, however, that the Post’s editorial board and centrist opinion writers have been pushing since last summer, though, so it’s no surprise that that they published Ekins’s piece.
It also, though, says lot about most of the rest of the mainstream press, both in its inattention to Sanders’s campaign—NYT columnist Charles Blow documented this last week—and in its often misleading accounts of Sanders’s proposals, which to a surprisingly large extent relies on gross misrepresentations of the Scandinavian countries’ systems from which Sanders draws some of his proposals. Including the falsehood discussed in this recent article by Finnish-bron writer Anu Partanen in The Atlantic Monthly titled “What Americans Don’t Get About Nordic Countries” and subtitled “When U.S. politicians talk about Scandinavian-style social welfare, they fail to explain the most important aspect of such policies: selfishness.”
But back to Ekins. Her conclusion! Which is that millennials will flip-flop on the big-government-big-taxes-vs.-small-government-vs.-low-taxes-especially-on-the-wealthy thing! Well, I don’t want to misrepresent her, even slightly. So here’s what she writes:
Millennials wouldn’t be the first generation to flip-flop. In the 1980s, the same share (52 percent) of baby boomers also supported bigger government, and so did Generation Xers (53 percent) in the 1990s. Yet, both baby boomers and Gen Xers grew more skeptical of government over time and by about the same magnitude. Today, only 25 percent of boomers and 37 percent of Gen Xers continue to favor larger government.
Many conservatives bemoan millennials’ increased comfort with the idea of “socialism.” But conservatives aren’t recognizing that in the 20th-century battle between free enterprise and socialism, free enterprise already won. In contrast with the 1960s and ’70s, college students today are not debating whether we should adopt the Soviet or Maoist command-and-control regimes that devastated economies and killed millions. Instead, the debate today is about whether the social welfare model in Scandinavia (which is essentially a “beta-test,” because it hasn’t been around long) is sustainable and transferable.
Hillary Clinton couldn’t have said it better—although she certainly has tried, repeatedly, in nearly every one of the debates and on the trail, usually in her favored sing-song soundbite style, often with a cutesy play on words or rhyming or alliteration, since she is clueless that this is extremely annoying and off-putting to many, many people. (Well, to me, but I think probably to many, many others.)
Clinton repeatedly misrepresented the nature of Sanders’s single-payer healthcare plan. Both she and her daughter told the public that Sanders’s proposal made state participation optional, like the ACA’s Medicaid provision. Sanders’s proposal instead involves states in exactly the same way that the state-by-state insurance marketplaces that form the backbone of the ACA—the law that Clinton has campaigned on keeping—does: if a state government declines to establish its own setup within the narrow guidelines of the law, the federal government will do that for the state.
And, most important, Clinton intimated for months that the increased taxes that would pay for Sanders’s system would not replace the insurance premiums that employers, employees and those using the ACA’s marketplaces pay, as well as out-of-pocket expenses. Clinton and her daughter both are very wealthy women, so they don’t sweat the cost of premiums and out-of-pocket expenses. So it was fine for her to obfuscate on this to prospective Democratic primary voters, on the theory that they too find it easy to pay private healthcare premiums and sometimes large deductibles and co-payments.
In the last debate, Clinton used a favorite line of her father’s: that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. The problem, though, is that it hasn’t been too god to be true in northern, central and most of southern Europe, in Australia, in Canada, in England, in Scotland, in Israel, in Taiwan, or in Japan. All of them which have market economies. None of them which fund their political campaigns through legalized bribery. Clinton failed to mention that the reason why it nonetheless has been too good to be true in this country is the political power—i.e., the campaign funding—of private insurers and the pharmaceutical industry.
Ekins, for her part, closed her op-ed piece with this:
Millennials like free markets, and most already accept that free markets have done more to lift the world out of poverty than any other system. Instead, what this generation has to decide is whether higher education and health-care innovation, access, and high quality can be best achieved through opening these sectors to more free-market reforms or through increased government control. This is a debate we should be glad to have.
Actually it’s not their decision, any more than the scientific existence of man-made climate change is their decision. Facts are facts, and in fact that fact itself is what they have decided.
A critical reason why social mobility has stalled almost completely in this country is that higher education is financially outright foreclosed to so many or requires the incurring of huge debt. And, as the many Americans who died in, say, the last 20 years because of lack of access to healthcare can attest from the grave—and as the many millions who have struggled mightily (or are doing so now) to pay medical bills although they had insurance when they had the care, or who find it very difficult to pay the premiums even under the ACA, and the many millions who have found themselves paying large bills for out-of-network this or that, can discuss in live voices—health-care innovation, access, and high quality cannot be best achieved through opening these sectors to more free-market reforms.
Germany, Switzerland, France, Holland and the UK, among others, innovate. Just as public grants in this country produce much of the medical innovation here. And it’s not like the pharmaceutical industry would go broke if their profit margins were cut a bit. They all also have high quality. The difference is that everyone has access to it.
Ekins says she wants a debate on this, but what she really wants are poll results obtained through poll questions that offer fake alternatives and that impart false information.
We already have the answers to the questions she says she now wants to debate. And maybe Reason’s next poll should mention that Medicare is a government service that people back in 1967 had to begin paying for through a tax. And that unleaded drinking water and safe bridges are two other government services. Sometimes.
____
UPDATE: Reader Jason and I just exchanged the following comments in the Comments thread:
Jason/ March 25, 2016 6:24 pm
“Raising taxes to increase financial assistance to the poor”? What program is Ekin referring to? Pretty much everything Sanders has proposed is universal, and the $15 minimum wage does not involve a tax increase. Sanders has gone after Clinton on welfare reform, but AFAIK, he hasn’t said anything about undoing it.
Me/ March 25, 2016 7:33 pm
Exactly, Jason. One of my pet peeves is major old-media, and therefore highly respected, publications that allow their op-ed columnists to make false statements of fact in their opinion pieces. They just slip in some false statement. The Washington Post is a routine offender on this, the NYT less so these days, but it still occurs. David Brooks used to do this often, but I think the Times put a stop to it when it became commonplace with him. Thomas Friedman did it about a month ago.
But what’s different here is that this writer is not a Post staffer. Didn’t an editor read the piece before accepting it for publication? Or was it just automatically accepted as submitted, regardless of blatant errors of fact, because she’s, well, a bigwig at a high-profile think tank?
Or maybe it’s just that, as I said in my post, they liked the idea of getting an additional voice onto their opinion pages that will make misrepresentations about Sanders’s policy proposals. Apparently no one on their staff had thought of this particular falsehood, or maybe it’s just easier to get away with it when the writer is a guest rather than a staffer.
Thanks for commenting.
Appalling.
Added 3/25 at 7:41 p.m.
“Raising taxes to increase financial assistance to the poor”? What program is Ekin referring to? Pretty much everything Sanders has proposed is universal, and the $15 minimum wage does not involve a tax increase. Sanders has gone after Clinton on welfare reform, but AFAIK, he hasn’t said anything about undoing it.
Exactly, Jason. One of my pet peeves is major old-media, and therefore highly respected, publications that allow their op-ed columnists to make false statements of fact in their opinion pieces. They just slip in some false statement. The Washington Post is a routine offender on this, the NYT less so these days, but it still occurs. David Brooks used to do this often, but I think the Times put a stop to it when it became commonplace with him. Thomas Friedman did it about a month ago.
But what’s different here is that this writer is not a Post staffer. Didn’t an editor read the piece before accepting it for publication? Or was it just automatically accepted as submitted, regardless of blatant errors of fact, because she’s, well, a bigwig at a high-profile think tank?
Or maybe it’s just that, as I said in my post, they liked the idea of getting an additional voice onto their opinion pages that will make misrepresentations about Sanders’s policy proposals. Apparently no one on their staff had thought of this particular falsehood, or maybe it’s just easier to get away with it when the writer is a guest rather than a staffer.
Thanks for commenting.
There is no mystery here. People are always in favor of free services. Young people tend to marry, have kids, move to the suburbs for the schools and become more conservative as they age. It’s pretty difficult to believe that the expansion of governmental services Bernie advocates would not involve an increase in costs through taxation even after factoring out insurance premiums. Pretending otherwise only erases the advocate’s credibility. It may well be that the benefit to our society as a whole is worth the costs involved. I, personally, believe that it is. However, pretending there are no substantial costs really won’t sell and it shouldn’t.
Jack, I think that your premise, which proved true for about three decades, is very much out-of-date now, for at least three reasons. One is that, as the author of the Atlantic article illustrates really clearly, the Nordic (and German and Dutch) systems has nothing to do with helping others or making society as a whole better. It has to do with people wanting things for themselves: access to quality healthcare, and to such things as ambulance services, without it having a big, sudden, and maybe unmanageable financial impact on them; people wanting quality, affordable daycare; people wanting paid sick leave, maternity leave, family leave, and paid vacation time; people wanting their kids to have access to college or trade schools without taking on large debt; workers wanting enough say in the governance of their place of employment that they can actually participate in critical decisions such as those that result in keeping manufacturing at quality levels and physically within the country.
Sanders has been able to communicate this very effectively to millennials and others who get most of their information through social media and websites. And so, so many more families are really struggling financially now than was the case, in the ‘80s and ‘90s and early ‘00s (or so it seemed in the early ‘00s because of access to easy credit).
Two articles published yesterday, one in the NYT, the other in the Washington Post, illustrate extremely clearly what free public-college tuition would mean: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/free-tuition-has-made-a-remarkable-impact-on-the-community-college-i-lead/2016/03/25/1342bcb6-ec45-11e5-a6f3-21ccdbc5f74e_story.html and http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/26/your-money/medical-dental-401-k-now-add-school-loan-aid-to-job-benefits.html?_r=0. I was especially struck by the second one, the NYT one, which discusses a 26-year-old woman who works as a financial advisor at Fidelity and whose benefits include repayment of her $85,000 student-loan debt, which she incurred as an undergraduate at Montclair State University in NJ. The other article, in the WP, is by the head of a two-year community college in North Dakota which now is tuition-free—and what this means to the students there.
I remember back last fall, when it started to become clear that Sanders’s campaign had really caught on, Paul Krugman, as part of his anti-Sanders Hillary Shillary, wrote that Sanders could never win the general election, because most people don’t want to be that generous toward the poor. I couldn’t believe it; Krugman either had no clue about what Sanders’ proposals actually are or he had no clue about the financial struggles of huge swaths of Americans. And since Krugman clearly well knows the latter, it was the former that he didn’t know. Which itself was pretty odd. But since most millennials do know, and know how, say, huge college debt or the outright inability to afford college or trade school at all, effects their lives and may well effect their kids’ lives if things don’t change.
Another, related reason, and one that I think is very underrated by political commentators, is the near-complete halt to upward mobility—a process that began in the ‘80s.
A third reason is exactly what Bill and other commenters said: It is a return to the human side of politics where people matter and business again takes a back seat. And people now know that the sales pitch for trickle-down, small-government policies was a con.
Reality has changed hugely, and now, suddenly, finally, the political climate has caught up with that.
Millenials look more favorably on socialism?
Perhaps it has something to do with decades of right-wing trash media screaming “soshulizm!!!” over everything from regulating Wall Street to car emission controls, bicycle lanes and recycling.
Or maybe they feel their economic prospects are so dim that they aren’t bilking themselves with the baby boomer delusion of wanting taxes low so they won’t have to pay so much when they inevitably become a millionaire or win the lottery.
I do not speak for Millennials, but their embrace of Democratic Socialism is, in fact, a full-throated denunciation of the capitalist order they see around them, specifically — and I pray they see this as well — the supply-side theory underlining the capitalist order.
The denial of global climate change with its denial of science, its anti-intellectualism and its embrace of an irrational, unhinged ideology; the social attacks on gays; the attacks on the constitutionally-protected right to abortion; the racist war on drugs; the denial of institutional racism, specifically related to policing and prison policies; the grotesque wealth inequalities that show no signs whatsoever of abating; the political system that is not just for sale in every political race but that has been purchased, on the cheap, by the wealthiest sectors of society at the expense of every other sector; the assault on unions; the life-crushing debts incurred by going to college — all of this, and more, is what any decent person rejects, and any intelligent person perceives to be the intolerable prevailing reality.
Democratic Socialism in the US, as advocated by Sanders in the tradition of FDR and LBJ, is not a rejection of capitalism, per se, but an insistence that its savagery be tamed, that it work for everyone, that it shows a human face.
No political or economic system anywhere that does not serve the interests of its citizens is worthless and deserves to be overthrown — altered or abolished.
57:
It is a return to the human side of politics where people matter and business again takes a back seat.
Spot-on, Bill, and perfectly phrased.
JackD is wrong about successful young people moving to the suburbs and becoming more conservative. It was true 30 and even 20 years ago but is no longer true today.
Millennials have been expressing a strong preference for living in cities for about a decade now and that trend has only increased. It reverses about 4 decades of demographics and eventually political ideologies.
As another wag observed somewhere, “It’s really difficult to sell people who want to live in cities on the idea of limited government.” They realize that a functional city requires services sometimes expensive ones. As long as the GOP/RW noise machine continues to try sell people on the idea that government is useless, dysfunctional, inefficient etc. their coalition will continue to become older, whiter, more rural (and perhaps most significantly) less affluent.
And for the wonks who actually pay attention to cost to provide municipal services it makes sense. It’s significantly cheaper to provide water/sewer/power/fire/police to denser cities. After 3 decades of subsidizing sprawl on this continent planners are waking up to the economic realities. High population and transportation density are key to functional cities.
And if you think about Bernie’s candidacy in that context it makes even more sense. My impression from talking to many of them is that they are more likely to want to escape the suburbs (where a lot of them grew up) than into them.
Bev and AmateurSocialist: My main point was that the cost of Bernie’s proposals is severely minimized by him and his supporters. As to the young marrieds heading for the suburbs from the city, I have watched it in suburban Chicago for many years and it continues easily as intensely, if not more so, today. Schools seem to be the primary attraction.
They do, indeed, become more conservative than they were, but not Republicans. It’s partly because they are now among those significantly taxed and partly through simple maturation. Getting bond issues passed in the suburbs is a tricky business. It can get done, but the voters, young and old, are very demanding on the financial issues involved.
Jack, you’re right that millennials move to the suburbs because of poor school systems in most of the large cities. Another reason is that homes now in city neighborhoods they’d like to live in are out of their price range—far more expensive than in many of the post-WWII suburbs. But I think there’s not much question that many, many millennials are looking for a different lifestyle than the cul-de-sac one that so many of them had growing up. They really would like walkable, mixed-use communities and good public metropolitan transportation systems, more public green spaces and the like. And they certainly want safe water and clean air.
But my main point is a different one. I was trying to make the point that millennials recognize that it would benefit them financially, directly, to not have to pay exorbitant healthcare premiums and out-of-pocket medical costs, and to instead pay a fixed lower amount in taxes and have it all covered, and also not have to constantly navigate the provider-network labyrinth. And they know that one reason many of them are struggling financially is that they’re paying off large student loans—amounts like the $89,000 that the 26-year-old Montclair State grad in the NYT article I linked to accrued for an undergrad degree. And they know that if the system isn’t changed, they or their kids, or some combination of the two, will have to pay huge amounts for the kids’ college tuition.
And they know that preschool is now a very large expense, and that there may well come a time when they will badly need paid sick leave or family leave.
So, no, Sanders and his supporters aren’t minimizing the costs. We’re just doing some math and calculating the amount paid in taxes versus the amount paid for these things through the private sector, and the loss of income if unpaid sick leave becomes necessary.
Jack:
Eric is looking in Caldwell Woods area and Park Ridge around Chicago moving out of the Andersonville area of Chicago in the hope of better schools. I would not call him conservative; but, we have discussed getting a good paying job by those in the lower income brackets is not as easy as he thinks. He just want to see an effort. His $100,000 degree out of Lake Forest in Economics and Math in 2002 was not cheap; but, it has served him well. He paid what was left of it off. He got a 50% ride there thanks to a good financial aid officer.
At Ohio Wesleyan Craig was at 30,000 per year and he had good scholarships and financial aid. Almost done with paying it off.
I kind of agree with you on the younger ones being more cautious; but then, good schools, areas, services, and infrastructure cost money. Taxes in the city of Chicago are not cheap and neither are they in outlaying counties either.
Bev, I’m saying that the math has been speculative at best. And that’s just on the medical coverage. Throw in free public education through college and you’re deeply in the red. As it stands, state funded universities and colleges already charge significant amounts before you get to living expenses. To put it clearly, I think that claiming all that is proposed can be done without increasing out of pocket costs under the present system requires more than mere assertion and a clear need for showing your work. Then those being asked to approve can decide for themselves how believable are the underlying assumptions and the tax burdens required to make them happen. There are lots of underlying questions left unanswered with respect to the medical coverage for example. Are the doctors, nurses, technicians, and hospitals going to become operated by the state or federal government with compensation determined by the respective governments; will there be parallel track private practices and institutions for those who can afford them; who will get to decide “best medical practices”; and the like? As always the devil is in the details and the grand scheme is meaningless without them.
Jack:
Correctly stated as states have backed away from funding state universities. Michigan being one example. State funding has dropped from 60% to ~20%.
Yeah. Exactly, Bill.
Jack, the questions on medical coverage that you say are unanswered are not unanswered. Sanders is proposing a Medicare-for-all plan. The doctors, nurses, technicians, and hospitals are not taken over by and operated by any government. There will not be parallel track private practices and institutions for those who can afford them, because there will not be public institutions. The same folks who now decide “best medical practices” for Medicare will decide “best medical practices” for Medicare-for-all. His plan is quite specific on these things. His plan’s coverage would be very comprehensive as he’s proposing it, but if that proved too costly and benefits were instead at roughly what they are now for Medicare, then private supplemental insurance would be available just as it is now for Medicare.
Sanders proposes to pay for tuition-free public college by a securities-transaction tax, which others have recommended as a way to limit the nanosecond and short-selling trading that causes volatility and that puts ordinary investors at a big disadvantage. Sanders does actually include in his plans the funding mechanisms for his proposals.
I do understand that the costs of programs, especially large, complicated ones, are speculative. There’s no way to avoid that; no one has a crystal ball. But the healthcare system now is extremely expensive for employers and most individuals who are not on Medicare. I don’t see why paying a set cost through the tax system for comprehensive coverage is something to be upset at the prospect of, but paying large and spiraling premiums, co-payments and deductibles is not.
Bev, I don’t believe the proposals include actual numbers (at least the ones I looked at on Bernie’s website). I do believe, as I stated, that in order to get approval from the majority of voters, not just the younger ones, real numbers will be necessary bearing in mind that the majority of voters who are working don’t want to lose their employer provided coverage. Recall the trouble Obama got into when he said they could keep their coverage and it turned out they couldn’t. I know that there was a lot of manipulation of the facts by both sides about that but the fact is it caused a major blowback.
On the education issue, the complications are severe. He’s proposing a federal tax on financial transactions to fund what are state, not federal, educational institutions. Are the feds going to control tuition and other costs of the state institutions and subsidize the students or are they going to subsidize inflated costs by the state institutions much as student loans do now?
Equally problematic, Bernie says nothing that I have seen about what, if anything, he will propose or do if his basic proposals are rejected, as they are likely to be, by the Congress. In short there is no plan B, much less C or D, nor any indication of how he would propose to attempt to work with a hostile House. Another 8 years of congressional no is not appealing.
Jack, your point about Sanders sounding uncompromising—my way or the highway—raises the question of whether that really is what he’s saying. Krugman and others I’ve read have made that claim, based on the presumption that because he takes the positions it means his position would remain all or nothing. But that’s pretty unlikely.
Paul Waldman, one of the two contributors to the Washington Post’s Plum Line blog, posted a comment a couple of weeks ago that I think was spot-on on the issue of Sanders’ willingness to compromise. He said that as a practical matter there isn’t much difference between Clinton and Sanders on policies such as healthcare insurance; Sanders would propose single-payer Medicare-for-all, Congress would refuse to pass it, and then Sanders would propose important changes to the ACA or would sign any bill Congress itself came up with and passed that made improvements to it.
It’s now looking quite possible in light of what’s happening with the Republican Party that both houses of Congress could become Dem majority, ushering in the possibility of genuine progressive change. And it’s not just because Trump, if nominated, will be a down-ballot disaster for Repubs because many Repubs won’t vote. Or that if he loses the nomination at a contested convention, that too will be a down-ballot disaster for the Repubs. It’s also that the Repub formula—Ayn Rand, in essence—has crashed dramatically among the white blue-collar base. There’s a terrific in-depth article in the NYT today titled “How the G.O.P. Elite Lost Its Voters to Donald Trump” by Nicholas Confessore (one of my favorites) that does some excellent reporting on this. It’s at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/28/us/politics/donald-trump-republican-voters.html?ref=politics&_r=0
I think it’s a mistake to assume that the Ayn Rand antigovernment position of the Repub donors and their elite puppets will remain tenable much longer.
Bev,
I think the chances of a change in the majority in the House are between slim and none.
I would like to hear something from Bernie about possible actions short of “revolution” he would be willing to consider, or better yet, propose.
Here’s the thing, Jack. Sanders is the un-Obama in how he thinks a progressive president should negotiate. Obama starts off offering what he thinks is the best he can get, then ends up with less than even that. Sanders knows the, um, art of the deal. He’s not going to start off saying, “Oh, yeah, I’d really like universal healthcare/Medicare-for-all, but I’ll settle for … whatever.” He thinks we not only SHOULD have universal healthcare coverage like every other modern country; he also thinks we CAN have it. So why would he campaign on universal healthcare coverage but also say, “Well, I’d settle for some improvements to the ACA”? He’d settle if that’s really the best he can do. But if he says so, that makes it more likely that he’d have to settle—that that is the best he will be able to do.
Bev:
He did make a good run and his efforts “should” bear fruit in the HRC candidacy. http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/2016/primaries I think the next step is to have him as a VP.
No, he’d never accept the nomination. His role will be the one that I described in response to your other new comment, to Jack’s comment.
Ditto on the winning of a House majority. Too many states (including Michigan) gerrymandered and the efforts do not favor Dems. Too lackadaisical. Here this will give you a read: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2671607
You know what, Jack and Bill? As an article in today’s NYT makes pretty darn clear, a Sanders nomination would seem to make Dem control of both houses of Congress actually likely. The article, by Alexander Burns, is titled “Donald Trump’s Success Upends Battle for Control of Congress By ALEXANDER BURNS MARCH 28, 2016,” and says that Trump’s candidacy may make it harder for Dems to win House seats in blue-collar areas but puts some congressional districts in some Southern States—specifically, in Virginia, Georgia and North Carolina—in play because those districts now have more educated and white-collar populations.
But Sanders would put blue-collar white congressional districts in play in Michigan, Ohio and Illinois, and even in Indiana and Missouri and Wisconsin. If I recall correctly, Sanders won more votes in MI than Trump did. He also proved popular in WESTERN and NORTHERN Michigan! And blue-collar whites in Ohio who voted for Kasich against Trump, some of them who might have voted for Sanders were Kasich not running and were it not so publicized that Clinton already held a nearly insurmountable delegate lead, may also well be willing to vote Dem for Congress, largely because of the Repub Party’s actual policies, including virulent anti-unionism. As well as, of course, the ever-greater-tax-cuts-for-the-wealthy-and-corporations thing that, clearly, is now a collapsed helium balloon.
Another NYT article today talks about Kelly Ayotte’s already-uphill battle to maintain has, thanks to Trump, become even steeper.
Sanders’ role in the general election if Clinton is the nominee will be to remind people that he’s still a senator, as is Elizabeth Warren, and that legislative proposals that will gain no traction in a Congress in which at least one house remains under Repub control will instead be enacted if the Dems control both houses of Congress.
A mistake that the Repubs and so many pundits make, and which Trump now has exposed so rawly, is that while Hillary Clinton herself is not particularly popular, the progressive policies of the Dem Party that she now has adopted, thanks to Bernie, are.
The Burns NYT article is at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/29/us/politics/donald-trumps-success-upends-battle-for-control-of-congress.html?ref=politics&_r=0.
A little off point but of general interest in the nomination contest, Washington Monthly reports a Gallup poll finding that Clinton supporters are more enthusiastic than Sanders supporters. Who’d a thunk?
Jack D, On the 24th Bloomberg reported that Bernie and Hillary were neck and neck among Democrats: Sanders 49% — Hillary 48%. Reading the article (a bit quoted below) it seems either Gallup or Bloomberg is missing the mark.
“The collection of enthusiastic first-time voters, those under 35, men, and self-described independents that he’s leaned on to win in states like New Hampshire and Colorado are keeping Sanders in the race, as is his message singularly focused on addressing income inequality.
By a more than 2-to-1 ratio, Democratic primary voters say Sanders would fight harder than Clinton for the middle class and do the most to rein in the power of Wall Street. Nearly six in 10 say the Vermont senator cares the most about people like them, and 64 percent see him as the most honest and trustworthy candidate. Just a quarter of voters said that of Clinton.
“It comes down to this: Bernie Sanders is the one Democrats see as looking out for them — meaning he will build a stronger middle class at the expense of Wall Street,” said J. Ann Selzer, whose firm conducted the poll. “They trust him to do it. In the end, Hillary Clinton has a trust problem.”
I think Gallup limited its respondent pool to women over the age of 50.
The demands that Bernie should, in effect, lay on the table now the specifics of the first budget he would submit to Congress is not just unfair, in that no other candidate is being asked to do so, but unwise — he is in the middle of a campaign for the nomination of the party, hasn’t begun the campaign to win the presidential election, and has no idea what the results will be in the congressional elections. Instead of the specific numbers, what we have is a forthright and consistent argument outlining what he thinks. In essence, that argument of his has never changed:
“The American people must make a fundamental decision. Do we continue the 40-year decline of our middle class and the growing gap between the very rich and everyone else, or do we fight for a progressive economic agenda that creates jobs, raises wages, protects the environment and provides health care for all? Are we prepared to take on the enormous economic and political power of the billionaire class, or do we continue to slide into economic and political oligarchy? These are the most important questions of our time, and how we answer them will determine the future of our country.”
That is not a slogan but a straightforward declaration of meaning and purpose. In and of itself, in terms of “politics as usual,” that is a startling statement: It is, in fact, revolutionary.
For anyone who wants a fuller description of what he would do, visit berniesanders.com, his home page.
And for yet an even fuller discussion of what he intends to do, go to the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s home page to examine what they call the People’s Budget: http://cpcbudget.org/here
And if you can find any candidate among any of those still running who provides more specificity than that, please let me know. I’ll bet you can’t.
Brilliant negotiating strategy: I demand single payer! No! Crickets.
It’s worth remembering that Sanders, while he is deeply moral, deeply principled and thus deeply pissed off, has been a professional politician for 35 years, including a stint as Mayor of Burlington VT. It’s fair to say that, at least once or twice, he has engaged in the process of negotiation and compromise.
Um. Yeah.
Is no your final offer?. . . . . . . yes.. . . . . . .
BERNIE. BERNIE. BERNIE. BERNIE. BERNIE.
I’m sticking my tongue out at you.
“[Nanosecond] and short-selling trading… causes volatility and that puts ordinary investors at a big disadvantage.”
As an ordinary investor, I _love_ those guys! Their nanosecond trading cuts transaction costs, and short-sellers lose their shirts more often than not (finite profit potential and infinite loss potential, unless they have put in a buy order at a higher price).
Hey, Warren, can you send me a business card?!
Part of Sanders’ rationale from the very beginning has been the well-founded belief that everything he says about income inequality and the wholesale purchase of the political class by Plutocrats would resonate with the middle- and working-classes right across the political spectrum. One fundamental lesson of this entire campaign season is that party identity by the citizenry is kaput and has been replaced with class-interests, whether the citizenry recognizes it or not. Even Cruz, of all people, has mentioned wealth inequality. Trump’s rise has been due entirely to an inchoate expression of rage against the establishment and the prevailing political and economic order. Bernie knows in his bones that if he could ever get the attention of those supporters – those who are not inherently racist or reactionary; those who are not susceptible to demagoguery – they are a natural constituency. He represents them every bit as much as he does any progressive. The House is entirely in play – unless you nominate Hillary.
The only way to guarantee that nothing ever changes is not to try.