Genuine question for the Bernie doomsters?

[cherryinpa]

Firstly do note that I'm no way support much of Bernie agenda. I don't like MFA or the free stuff bonanza giveaway and in reality even if he wins, most of that is just fantasy land. But my question is around one thing.

I've seen a lot here about Bernie will have a downstream impact on many House races where we will lose.

OK, accepted.

But could there also be another impact on many House races we would have lost but now win thanks to Bernie? I'm posting this to get genuine thoughts as I simply don't know, but it seems to me that usually if you take a hit in one area you will get that off-set by a pick-up in another area.

[mikeysnot]

1. free stuff bonanza?

good luck.

[cherryinpa]

2. Relax

Relax man, I'm far more positive on your candidate than many.

But he does have a lot of free stuff in his agenda.

You gotta accept that.

[mikeysnot]

3. like what?

off the top of your head....

[mopinko]

6. oh c'mon. free/zero is his favorite word. i get that isnt what he means, but

why the heck does he keep using that word? it aint true, and he is gonna spend the next 10 mos defining the word free w a fairytale.

[cherryinpa]

10. OK

I didn't mean free as in no one pays for it, I know Bernie isn't saying that.

I'm not against Bernie overall man, or even what he's trying to do, just wish there wasn't so much giveaways in his plan it just not realistic.

[unitedwethrive]

14. Absolutely...has always reminded me of the song from Gypsy

“Gotta Get a Gimmick”, or at the very least a kid running for student body president of junior high, promising everyone free candy and soda machines.

Not saying it doesn’t work to win elections, just funny how many people fall for it.

[Gothmog]

16. CNN- Sanders' agenda: Its cost -- possibly $60 trillion -- would set a peacetime US record

Link to tweet

Sanders' plan, though all of its costs cannot be precisely quantified, would increase government spending as a share of the economy far more than the New Deal under President Franklin Roosevelt, the Great Society under Lyndon Johnson or the agenda proposed by any recent Democratic presidential nominee, including liberal George McGovern in 1972, according to a historical analysis shared with CNN by Larry Summers, the former chief White House economic adviser for Barack Obama and treasury secretary for Bill Clinton.

Sanders' plan would also increase the size of government far more than any modern Republican president, including Ronald Reagan, has sought to cut it, Summers' analysis concluded.

"On the spending side, ... this is far more radical than all previous presidencies, on either the right or the left," Summers said in an interview. "The Sanders spending increase is roughly 2.5 times the size of the New Deal and the estimated fiscal impact of George McGovern's campaign proposals. This is six times as large of a growth of government than any of the Ronald Reagan dismemberments. We are in a kind of new era of radical proposal."

Exact cost projections on all of Sanders' proposals aren't available, in part because he hasn't fully fleshed out some of the ideas he's embraced (such as universal pre-K and child care). But a wide variety of estimates put the likely cost of the single-payer health care plan he has endorsed around $30 trillion or more over the next decade. Depending on the estimates used, including projections from his own campaign, the other elements of the Sanders agenda -- ranging from his "Green New Deal" to the cancellation of all student debt to a guaranteed federal jobs program that has received almost no scrutiny -- could cost about as much, or even more than, the single-payer plan. That would potentially bring his 10-year total for new spending to around $60 trillion, or more.

[RandySF]

4. I only see a net positive in blue districts

But that's useless because we would hold them regardless.

[Fresh_Start]

5. DUers like most people in the USA

have a personal knowledge of politics in general, and very little about the politics in any other specific voting district than the one they live in.

I look at the democrats who won in competitive districts because they were able to understand their voters enough to marshall enough votes to win in their district.

Essentially they are the experts in their own election district.

When they say Bernie is a problem in their district, believe them.

[cherryinpa]

9. Yes, agreed

This is the first primary I'm really following and I'm in a very blue state (ignore my profile, I'm in NJ). I think lots of times we look through the lens of our own experiance.

[Locrian]

7. why is everyone gaslighting themselves in regard to MFA?

You mean the MFA that costs 32 trillion? *vs the current 34 trillion? A 2 trillion savings - this is a **conservative** study.


As well as a general thing, so 46,000 don't die every year:

The Preamble states that an overriding purpose of the U.S. Constitution is to “promote the general welfare,” indicating that issues such as poverty, housing, food and other economic and social welfare issues facing the citizenry were of central concern to the framers.

And none of them have repealed it either.....

Map of the world of countries with universal health car


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_universal_health_care

[Hoyt]

8. What House races might flip with Sanders vs. another Dem? I doubt any House districts in my area are

going to flip Blue because Sanders is nominee (most of the Districts where I live were 70/80% for trump, with a few exceptions in big towns).

I don't see an upside in House with Sanders.

[Celerity]

11. almost none will flip Blue and a shedload of the 2018 Blue Wave in red/pink/purple districts

will be washed out to the ocean of doom.

[Sloumeau]

12. Sometimes negatives in some areas are offset by positives in another area,

and sometimes they are not. For example, look at the U.S. House of Representatives races in 1976, 1994, and 2010. In 1976, after Watergate, the Republicans overall were slaughtered in House races. In 1994 and 2010, the Democrats were slaughtered in House races. There really was not much of a positive counteracting the negative for the Republicans in 1976 and for the Democrats in 1994 and 2010.

[uponit7771]

13. No, that's not the way swing states losses work. Sanders has no historical swing state wins vs Trump

...outside the MOE

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/nbc-news-wsj-poll-sanders-opens-double-digit-national-lead-n1138191

[Gothmog]

15. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy will be the next speaker come 2021

Kevin McCarthy also wants sanders to be the nominee

Link to tweet

THE TUMULTUOUS POLITICAL CLIMATE has given fresh hope to REPUBLICANS, who were privately skeptical of TRUMP’S prediction that House Minority Leader KEVIN MCCARTHY will be the next speaker come 2021. Internal polling commissioned by the NATIONAL REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE showed that voters in districts targeted by both parties are skeptical of SANDERS -- his approval rating is 42%, and disapproval stands at 53% -- which they believe will help boost their candidates for the House. In these districts, voters prefer TRUMP, 48% to 43%. If SANDERS is atop the ticket, Republicans believe, they can credibly label every Democrat a socialist without fear of overreach.

[Gothmog]

17. Even With New Pay-Fors, Bernie's Agenda Still Has A $25 Trillion Hole

Link to tweet

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has made some extraordinary promises in his campaign for president, including free health care, a federal jobs guarantee, universal forgiveness of all student debt, and radical expansions of nearly every government program from Social Security to housing subsidies. When asked at a CNN town hall last night how he would pay for this gargantuan expansion of government, Sen. Sanders presented moderator Chris Cuomo with a new document that Sanders claimed detailed how he would pay for his proposals. But don’t be fooled: these numbers still don’t add up, and Sanders should be pressed to explain his magic math at tonight’s debate.

The first problem is that the list of Sanders’ proposed spending increases is incomplete. Sanders has proposed costly plans for K-12 education, expanding disability insurance, paid family leave, and more that were not accounted for in the new document. He also grossly understates the cost of his Medicare for All plan by citing a flawed analysis that neglected to incorporate the costs of specific benefits Sanders proposes, such as universal coverage for long-term services and supports, and failed to account for how offering universal health-care benefits more generous than those offered by any other country on earth would increase utilization of health services.

Sanders and his surrogates regularly claim that critics are wrong to focus on how much Medicare for All increases government costs because it would reduce the total cost of health care. But independent analyses from the Urban Institute and Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget have concluded that even with the aggressive price controls he has proposed, Sanders’ Medicare-for-All framework would actually increase national health expenditures by up to $7 trillion. Sanders himself also admitted in a 60 minutes interview this weekend that his Medicare-for-All plan would likely cost around $30 trillion, yet the list of “options” Sanders has offered to pay for them (options which, it should be noted, he has never explicitly endorsed enacting together) would together cover less than 60 percent of that amount by the Sanders campaign’s own accounting.

In January, the Progressive Policy Institute published comprehensive cost estimates of the proposals offered by each of the leading candidates for president before the Iowa Caucus. After incorporating new proposals that Sanders has released since the publication of our analysis and minor methodological updates, PPI concludes that Sanders has now proposed over $53 trillion of new spending over the next 10 years – an amount that would roughly double the size of the federal government. Our estimate is, if anything, overly charitable to Sanders, as it accepts most of the Sanders campaign’s cost estimates outside of Medicare for All and assumes significant overlap in the costs of his proposed federal jobs guarantee and other spending proposals. Other analysts have estimated the total costs of Sanders’ proposals could be anywhere between $60 trillion and $100 trillion over 10 years. ,,,,

Sanders’ proposed pay-fors don’t even come close to covering these costs. The document Sanders published last night, along with others released earlier in his campaign, claim to collectively raise less than $43 trillion in new revenue – meaning that he’s at least $10 trillion short. But the revenue projections Sanders uses for his tax proposals are well outside the mainstream of what independent analysts at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Congressional Budget Office, Tax Policy Center, Penn Wharton Budget Model, and others have estimated. After reconciling Sanders’ latest list of pay-fors with these independent estimates, PPI concludes that even if Congress were to adopt every single revenue option Sanders has offered for consideration, it would fall almost $25 trillion short of his proposed spending increases over the next decade – leaving a gap nearly equal to the total value of all goods and services produced by the U.S. economy in one year.

[Gothmog]

18. Why has sanders not been honest about cost of his programs?

Link to tweet

[Gothmog]

19. Warren calling Bernie Sanders a massive failure. Fails to get things passed, f

Link to tweet

[Gothmog]

20. Sanders has yet to explain how he'll pay for half of his agenda

Link to tweet