How We Can We Trust Bernie If He Does Not Know or Won't Tell? [View all]

[TomCADem]

This is why I don't trust Bernie. He offers a lot of big proposals, but there is no coherent overall platform that shows how it fits together. It is aspirational at best.

To put it into perspective, we all doubted Trump's promises that tax cuts would pay for themselves or that Mexico would pay for the wall. However, Bernie's healtcare plan is magnitudes greater than these proposals, yet Bernie repeatedly refuses or can't explain how much this plan will cost and how he will pay for it. I know he plans to tax the rich. So does Warren. The question is whether it comes anywhere near penciling out at all.

This is why I think Bernie is being fundamentally dishonest with progressives. When it comes to try to pass a bill, we are going to have to deal with costs and how to pay for it. At the time, because Bernie has not been honest about costs and funding, the plan will go nowhere and we will have wasted an opportunity to pass healthcare reform if Bernie crashes and burns on his signature proposal.

Well, Bernie supporters might say that he could always scale back, but doesn't that just acknowledge that he is not being honest with voters? Worse, if scales back too much, he loses support.

Finally, Bernie himself has set unrealistic expectations by criticizing the passage of the ACA, which took place in two years in the midst of the Great Recession. After criticizing the ACA, if Bernie does not get a bill passed through Congress in his first two years, the he is a failure under his own terms.

So, while Bernie is still better than Trump, in the long run, he will hurt progressives because he has been overselling his platform, and not being honest about how it all fits together and whether it fits together.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/24/politics/bernie-sanders-donald-trump-2020/index.html

Cooper: Do you know how all -- how much though? I mean, do you have a price tag for -- for all of this?
Sanders: We do. I mean, you know, and -- and-- the price tag is -- it will be substantially less than letting the current system go. I think it's about $30 trillion.
Cooper: That's just for "Medicare for All," you're talking about?
Sanders: That's just "Medicare for All," yes.
Cooper: Do you have -- a price tag for all of these things?
Sanders: No, I don't. We try to -- no, you mentioned making public colleges and universities tuition free and canceling all student debt, that's correct. That's what I want to do. We pay for that through a modest tax on Wall Street speculation.
Cooper: But you say you don't know what the total price is, but you know how it's gonna be paid for. How do you know it's gonna be paid for if you don't know how much the price is?