I don't understand why Bernie is going to make women and minorities wait?
I am not interested in debating whether he would make women and minorities "wait" as it were.
But I personally prefer Hillary's priorities and think she will put women's rights as a higher priority than Bernie will. For example, she frequently talks about the ways that women are disadvantaged in our Social Security system. Another example is his college plan. I'm not opposed to free college tuition on principle. But it would require enormous resources, and I think we'd be better off using fewer resources to make college more affordable and then also putting resources toward making childcare more affordable. It really burns my cookies that Bernie puts early childhood education under the "women's issues" section of his website but then devotes far more time in his stump speech talking about free college.
Although I don't want a politician classifying ECE as a "women's issue" because I want the tone set that this is a societal issue, we all know that the cost of childcare is a bigger issue for women, especially with the large number of single mothers out there.
So I prefer a candidate who's not so singularly focused on Wall Street and has an interest in other issues that I think particularly affect women.
Also, he can SHUT THE FUCK UP with calling Planned Parenthood the establishment with disdain in his voice. Yes, PP is full of medical and public health experts. PP is a vitally important organization for women, and demonizing it as the establishment with the same tone he uses for Goldman Sachs pisses me right off.
I won't dare to speak for people of color, but I think Bernie would be faaaaaaaar better for women than Trump will. Obviously. But I think Hillary will prioritize women's rights more than Bernie will. YMMV.
Several people in this thread have implied that I simply haven't looked at Hillary's website or I'd know what her detailed plans are for fracking, climate change, affordable college education, universal health care, and wall street reforms. I'll rise above the continued "if you only educated yourself" insinuations and just say, I HAVE looked at her web page and I don't find it to be any more specific that Sanders. Sanders has some very specific climate change reforms. Hillary has some very specific college-education reforms (that I don't fully agree with). Sanders is vague on rural communities; Hillary is pretty fucking vague on Citizens United, and climate change.
The point is, Sanders page gets pretty specific. I think there is a double standard at work here. Maybe some people need to take a look at Sanders's page? It's one thing to say, "Yeah, I looked and don't agree" but this constant chant of "HE HAS NOT PLAN" is not true.
There's a few problems with this chart, and why I would like more details.
First, there are questions about how he got to the estimates of what his plans will cost. For example, there's a lot of unanswered questions about his health care plan. He doesn't say what kinds of things will be covered. Aside from a general statement about how his plan will cover the entire spectrum of health care, we don't really know what that means. It's troubling because he talks about how there won't be copays or deductibles and says it will be "comprehensive coverage." Is anything you could possibly ever want going to be covered? Will designer eyeglasses be covered? Name brand pharmaceuticals when generics are out there? There's nothing in the way of any specifics about the kinds of things that are usually offered as riders or excluded all together, like reproductive health, maternity coverage, infertility, vision, dental, mental health, nursing homes, and rehab and drug treatment. Are we going to be paying for infertility? How many rounds? Is there an age limit on who can get it?
There are no details anywhere about any of this stuff. Perhaps the details exist, but if they do, why aren't they public? In the absence of them, I have to either assume (1) they don't exist, in which case, how does he come up with a reliable cost estimate? or (2) they do exist, but they aren't going to be politically acceptable.
I've discussed this with a few friends, who always say that these are the details that get worked out in the legislative process. I don't necessarily disagree with that, but I think it's disingenuous for him, because I don't think people will be too thrilled to learn that their taxes are going way up and they still have some OOP health care expenses or that, like people in countries with universal health care, they need supplemental private insurance riders to get the care they need. A lot of people are going to be very, very disappointed when they find out that it's not all you can eat health care.
Second, it's not clear whether his estimated revenue is based on assumptions about the market and revenue currently, or based on assumptions as to what will happen after his reforms are made. If he breaks up banks and reforms Wall Street, will his tax on Wall Street be enough to finance the higher ed plans? If he's assuming that tax based on current trading, that's fine, but how does the education plan continue to get funded if his Wall Street reforms get enacted? If he's based in on assumptions about what happens to Wall Street after reforms. And what if health care reform goes first? What will happen to the billions invested by health insurance and reinsurance companies if they are run out of business or drastically cut down to size? Do his revenue estimates take that into account? Likewise, right now there are not enough doctors to take Medicare. If everyone in the country needs one, is he going to raise rates to increase supply? Does his health care plan take that into account?
Third, there's some very funny math. For example, on his health care page, he talks about how he's going to pay for it. One glaring problem that stands out to me is his claim that he will pay for his plan in part by ending the tax exclusion for employer based care. This doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, right now, let's say an employer pays someone $50,000 in wages and $10,000 in health care premiums. The employer and employee pay payroll taxes on the $50,000 in wages, and the employee pays income taxes on those wages, but not on the health care costs. If he ends the tax subsidy and expects revenue from it, he's assuming either: 1. The $10,000 in health care premiums will be paid out entirely in the form of wages that can be taxed on both sides of the equation OR 2. The $10,000 the company saves in health care premiums will not be spent by the company on any other tax deductible line item but instead will be subject to income tax used to pay for the plan. That seems like a severely flawed assumption.
If non-economist me can find a problem that simple with his math, it concerns me what people who actually know what they are doing would find. That's what again makes me very concerned about the lack of details. Without them, it seems that people can read into the plans what they want to read. For example, I've had friends direct me to non-campaign sites that claim to describe his plans, but they are just guesses cobbled together by Reddit users, not actual Bernie-endorsed plans. They insist that the plans won't be all that different, but I don't know how they come to that conclusion.
Bernie is proposing massive, expensive changes to a number of institutions. The appeal of incremental change is that typically effects are contained and easier to predict. That's not the case here. Industries will be transformed and the economy will shift dramatically as a result. So I don't think it's unreasonable or imposing a double standard to ask to see receipts.
THIS is why Bernie's lack of party building activities is problematic. We are looking at 1992's Year of the Woman on motherfucking steroids. Potentially TWENTY Democratic women in the Senate. And this is possible because Elizabeth Warren (and others) used their platforms to raise money for other Democrats. This is what a political revolution will actually look like, and it won't be due to Bernie's down ballot efforts.