2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Avg health care spend is $6,125 (working age) and $3,628 (child) but Bernie claims you only pay $466 [View all]Sancho
(9,070 posts)and MONEY is pretty far down on my list of things that are the key to social justice. There is no purely economic policy, law, or plan that will ever be enough to satisfy my Democratic heart because I know for a fact that it's a dead end to chase dollars without real equality and respect.
I was against the Korean War (40,000 Americans died), the Vietnam War (68,000 Americans died), and the Cold War. I actually protested and didn't just stand around complaining about how people voted. The Iraq War was just one drop in the bucket of recent American Wars - so don't complain about Iraq unless you are in the streets today. Some of us remember the lessons of the Democratic Convention of 1968 (look it up if you don't know what I'm talking about).
I worked for change (18 year old vote and ERA), likely before many DUers were born. I introduced Jimmy Carter when he was campaigning once, and I have actively worked for all sorts of Democratic politicians over the last 50 years.
Even today on DU I see and hear lots of "loud claims", but see little action. I was recently at a college campus where there was an effort to get students to register to vote - the majority were not registered, and a small subset actually vote.
That's a lot different than when I was A1 in the draft and people were scrambling for deferments. We were seriously interested in politics. I've been a union member for about 50 years too.
So I posted some factual information that is only ONE small reason that Bernie's single payer plan is simplistic and doomed. That's the fact that the US pays higher salaries to doctors and nurses than other countries (while we sometimes pay teachers less!). In spite of his years in Congress, Bernie is selling something that won't happen and also is misguided.
Bernie can't say with one breath that everyone will get a raise to $15 an hour and with the next breath say that doctors and nurses salaries will go down a third. Think about it.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/01/what-sanders-doesnt-understand-about-politics.html