Choosing HRC ~HRC GROUP
Reasons for not getting on the BS bandwagon:
https://medium.com/robinalperstein/on-becoming-anti-bernie-ee87943ae699#.u3ykfl9te
This article is a great find, quite long and exhaustive!
So much there. I don't know what to excerpt! Maybe you can choose?
Some from the beginning:
First, I researched. I went to his website, I went to yougov, I went to other sites examining his record to see how it squared up with his rhetoric. I tried to find unbiased articles assessing his tax policy, looking at how he would fund single payer (and what he meant by that) as well as “free college” and other promises he made. I looked at analyses on left-leaning blogs that have long advocated for universal health care to see what they thought, sites I respect and whose authors I have relied on for years for their basic objectivity within their admitted points of view. And I could find none who believed Sanders’ numbers added up.
When I saw that the estimates were based on the assumption that the U.S. economy would have an average growth at a 5% rate over his term, that was it for me. And the reason is this: when Jeb! announced he was running for President, he declared that his plan would result in a 4% economic growth rate — and the other GOP presidential contenders quickly followed suit. The Republican candidates’ claims that they “would” do this had been derided on all the same left-leaning blog sites I was now looking at to help assess Sanders. The 4% assertion had been dismissed as “magical thinking” — or in more straightforward terms, “pulled out of Bush’s ass.” There was no precedent for a sustained growth rate that high; commentators pointed out that Reagan had achieved 4% twice in eight years, and Bill Clinton, five times, but 4% growth four years running? Never happened — and that was in better economic environments. Sanders’ 5% number was even more magical than Jeb!’s. And so the entire basis of Sanders’ promises for (promises I wanted to believe) was a historically unprecedented assumption. You can’t base a radical re-imagination of the U.S. economy and the imposition of the largest tax increases in U.S. history on made-up numbers. Sanders was able to find a single economist to weigh in positively on his plan, but that analysis was ripped to shreds by most others, who showed that Sanders’ plan doesn’t add up on its own terms (estimates are something like a $1–2 trillion shortfall even at the 5% growth assumption). So I concluded that the backbone of Sanders’ plan is founded on, functionally, a lie.
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