Sanders plan would save at least $5 Trillion

[Ladmo]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gerald-fr ... 43062.html

Gerald Friedman
Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

An Open Letter to the Wall Street Journal on Its Bernie Sanders Hit Piece

Gerald Friedman's research was cited in a Wall Street Journal story about Bernie Sanders's proposals for government spending. Friedman responds to that story below.

It is said of economists that they know the cost of everything but the value of nothing. In the case of the article "Price Tag of Bernie Sanders's Proposals: $18 Trillion," this accusation is a better fit for the Wall Street Journal that published it.

The Journal correctly puts the additional federal spending for health care under HR 676 (a single payer health plan) at $15 trillion over ten years. It neglects to add, however, that by spending these vast sums, we would, as a country, save nearly $5 trillion over ten years in reduced administrative waste, lower pharmaceutical and device prices, and by lowering the rate of medical inflation.

These financial savings would be felt by businesses and by state and local governments who would no longer be paying for health insurance for their employees; and by retirees and working Americans who would no longer have to pay for their health insurance or for co-payments and deductibles. Beyond these financial savings, HR 676 would also save thousands of lives a year by expanding access to health care for the uninsured and the underinsured.

The economic benefits from Senator Sander's proposal would be even greater than these static estimates suggest because a single-payer plan would create dynamic gains by freeing American businesses to compete without the burden of an inefficient and wasteful health insurance system. As with Senator Sanders' other proposals, the economic boom created by HR 676, including the productivity boost coming from a more efficient health care system and a healthier population, would raise economic output and provide billions of dollars in additional tax revenues to over-set some of the additional federal spending.

Summary of 10-year projections

Because of the nearly $10 trillion in savings, it is possible to fund over $4.5 trillion in additional services while still reducing national health care spending by over $5 trillion. With these net savings, the additional $14.7 trillion in federal spending brings savings to the private sector (and state and local governments) of over $19.7 trillion.

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[Cap]

The Sanders plan will save zero, because it's a non-starter in a Republican-controlled Congress, even with Sanders in the White House.

[OE32]

Will there even be any Republicans left in 2016?



Abraham Lincoln creates the Republican Party, and Barack Obama destroys it. Kinda poetic.

[Mori Chu]

Is there any sense yet of what is likely to happen in 2016 with House and Senate elections? Is it likely that one party will gain or lose a bunch of seats?

[Ladmo]

The Sanders plan will save zero, because it's a non-starter in a Republican-controlled Congress, even with Sanders in the White House.

I don't think so Cap. While I understand your skepticism, and I'll agree that obstructionist politics from the Right has doomed the Obama Administration, I think that Sanders will continue to rely on political activism to force the Republican party to get off their ass.

One thing that Bernie has repeated over and over again is that no President can do it alone. In order for his policies to work, it is going to take millions of protesters to force Congress to carry out the will of the people.

Bernie has the largest group of volunteers working for his candidacy, and has raised the largest amount of campaign donations of anyone in the field, all from supporters, the little people of this nation, nothing fro PAC's or special interests. If anyone has ever proven he has the support of the people, it's this guy.

I can see a future where millions of protesters get behind the Sanders bully-pulpit. You look at the GOP right now and they are rudderless. Republicans can't find leadership, they can't come to agreement on anything. 79% of Republicans polled do not have faith in their leadership, and Congress' approval rating is probably still in single digits. Meanwhile, there are groups like "Republicans for Bernie Sanders," and even portions of the Tea Party are choosing Sanders over every other candidate. That's the kind of pressure that will force Congress to act.

I think when all is said and done, the fact that every plan from the GOP is going to increase spending and add to the debt is going to eventually become a factor, too.

This surrender of our government reply due to the belief that Republicans are just going to ruin everything anyway with obstruction is really a nonsensical statement. What is your alternative, do nothing? Good thing there are millions of us willing to fight for what we believe in...

If you didn't catch Bernie on Meet The Press today, I thought Bernie did a great job trying to explain how we all need to come together in order to accomplish the goals he has set out, and why it hasn't worked for Obama.


http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/v ... 1428931566

[Ladmo]

I don't think that's the right link. It's on the front page of the Meet The Press website.

http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press

[Ladmo]

I don't think that's the entire interview either. DAMN YOU MEET THE PRESS!
http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/b ... on-n442411

[Ladmo]

Christ almighty... Meet The Press, your website SUCKS! Here's the interview on youtube... sheesh...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oskp9JBIH9E

[Ladmo]

Here's another article you might want to read. If you don't learn from history you are doomed to repeat it, and something similar would occur under a Sanders Administration.

Apathy is the friend of the Republican party, and I think most of us are sick and tired of getting fucked repeatedly by extremists in the House. We're going to rise up against them and everyone who is benefiting by fucking over the majority, one way or another.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... ss/384688/

50 Years Ago, Americans Fired Their Dysfunctional Congress

Like Obama, JFK and LBJ found their agendas stymied by a hostile Congress, until American voters stepped in to demand change.

It’s almost impossible to find anyone who is optimistic about Congress. The good news is that this is not the first time we've despaired over Congressional dysfunction. In fact, in the years leading up to one of the biggest outbursts of legislative productivity—the passage of the Great Society in 1965 and 1966—there was a huge chorus of critics who decried the inaction of Congress. Revisiting that history can teach us about how to navigate the present political morass.

We just finished one of the least productive sessions in American history. Partisan gridlock, incivility, and extremism have paralyzed Capitol Hill. There are not many observers who believe that President Obama’s current policy agenda stands much of a chance of passing through a broken Congress.

Whereas Obama has been stymied by congressional Republicans who controlled the House and capitalized on minority power in the Senate, Kennedy squared off against a coalition of southern Democratic committee chairmen and Republicans. Since the 1937 backlash against Franklin Roosevelt, this conservative coalition had been the principle roadblock to liberal reform. Southerners, elected to safe districts, thrived in a committee system based on seniority.

The longer a person stayed in office, the more power they obtained. Mississippi Senator James Eastland, an ardent racist, chaired a subcommittee responsible for civil rights. He liked to joke that he had special pockets made in his pants just to carry around all the bills he wouldn’t let come up for a vote. In the Senate, southerners killed bills through the filibuster, which, according to journalist William White, made the upper chamber “the South’s unending revenge upon the North for Gettysburg.”

By the time that Kennedy was elected president in 1960, liberals had lost faith in the existing Congress. Democrat Senator Joseph Clark called his colleagues the “Sapless Branch” of government and wrote that the conservative coalition was the “antithesis of democracy….” Soon after Kennedy’s election, House Rules Committee Chairman Howard Smith, who had once pretended there was a fire on his barn in Virginia just to prevent a vote on a civil rights bill, told reporters that he would “exercise whatever weapons I can lay my hands on” to stop the new president.

Though Kennedy’s critics complained that he was too disengaged on domestic policy, even when he did move forward with legislation the coalition remained powerful enough to block much of his progress.

On every major domestic issue, Kennedy failed to gain any traction. “I think the Congress looks more powerful sitting here than it did when I was there in Congress,” the president admitted.

Despite Kennedy’s reputation for coolness, he undertook an aggressive campaign to push his proposal for Medicare, a bill that would provide hospital insurance to the elderly, paid for by Social Security taxes. The administration worked with organized labor to build pressure on members of Congress. In December 1962, the president spoke at a massive televised rally in Madison Square Garden to urge citizens to demand that their representatives support him. At the same time, top officials in the Social Security Administration worked behind the scenes to conduct negotiations with the main committee chairs over the details of the legislation. The campaign did significantly broaden public support for Medicare.

But the opposition to Medicare within Congress was stronger. Members of the conservative coalition were firmly opposed to Medicare, which the American Medical Association branded as “socialized medicine.” The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Arkansan Wilbur Mills, refused to let the bill come up for a vote. The AMA conducted the most expensive lobbying campaign in history to oppose Medicare. It sent pamphlets to the offices of physicians so that patients leaving their appointments would read warnings about how government bureaucrats would make the decisions at their next visit.

Then there was the civil-rights legislation, aimed at ending racial segregation in public accommodations. The civil-rights Movement, led by figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., had been steadily mounting grassroots pressure for President Kennedy to send a bill to Congress. At first, Kennedy hesitated. Top advisors, including the ardent civil rights supporter Harris Wofford, convinced the president that a bill would tie up the rest of his agenda, but couldn’t even make it out of committee. James Foreman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee complained that Kennedy was a “quick-talking [and] double dealing” politician.”

The movement didn’t take no for an answer. As the protests in Birmingham, Alabama in April 1963 brought international attention to the white violence that African Americans faced in Dixie, Kennedy was finally convinced to move forward with a proposal. The protests had created enough support among Republicans to get the legislation through the House Judiciary Committee. But the administration was still uncertain if the legislation could make it through the House floor or survive a filibuster.

When Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy in November 1963, most of the president’s domestic agenda was stalled. In Life magazine’s memorial issue for JFK in December, the lead article by the editors warned: “The 88th Congress, before the assassination, had sat longer than any peacetime Congress in memory while accomplishing practically nothing. It was feebly led, wedded to its own lethargy and impervious to criticism. It could not even pass routine appropriations bills. It was a scandal of drift and inefficiency.”

The first year of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency saw some more progress. Most importantly, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The success of this bill, however, stemmed from the overwhelming pressure placed upon Congress by the Civil Rights movement. It also relied on the impressive organization and tactical fights that liberals mounted against the southern civil rights filibuster in the spring of 1964.

Outside of civil rights, Johnson’s gains remained limited. The situation was better than one year earlier, but Congress was not yet ready to endorse a Great Society. Congress did pass the War on Poverty, but the program obtained a very meager budget that paled in comparison to most other major domestic programs. To secure support for an across-the-board tax cut, LBJ agreed to hold the federal budget under $100 billion, so that he could obtain the support of Virginia Senator Harry Byrd, the conservative chairman of the Finance Committee. Most of his advisors agreed this was insufficient to fund any new programs of major significance,

Grassroots pressure was not always enough to move a bill as it was on civil rights. While Johnson kept pushing for Medicare, conservatives in Congress didn’t seem moved by the sentiment surrounding Kennedy’s death to pass a bill. When liberals in the Senate tried to circumvent Wilbur Mills by adding Medicare as an amendment to Social Security legislation, Mills killed the proposal in conference committee.

Then everything changed. In the 1964 elections, Johnson defeated right-wing Republican Barry Goldwater in the biggest landslide since 1936. Voters elected huge liberal majorities in Congress, rejecting Goldwater’s brand of right-wing conservatism. Democrats reminded voters that Goldwater had voted against civil rights, and stood opposed to programs like Medicare. While Johnson touted his liberal agenda, his main goal was to depict Goldwater, and the kind of extremism that was common on the Hill, as far from the political mainstream.

Democrats came out of the election with 295 seats in the House and 68 in the Senate. The balance within the Democratic Party shifted decisively to the liberals. Most Republicans were terrified of being associated with the conservatism of Goldwater, lest they suffer the same fate.

As a result of the election, Johnson had all the votes that he needed to move forward with his bills. “There were so many Democrats,” Illinois Republican Donald Rumsfeld said, “that they had to sit on the Republican side of the aisle.”

Congress passed Medicare and Medicaid, federal aid to elementary and higher education, Voting Rights, environmental regulation, and much more. Opponents of liberal reform realized that they would be beat. “Suddenly, after years of deadlock,” Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale recalled, “the floodgates burst open.” After Congress passed immigration reform, Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts noted: “It’s really amazing, a year ago I doubt the bill would have had a chance. This time it was easy.”

The window for legislating was short. In the 1966 midterms, a backlash against civil rights and political unrest over Vietnam allowed the conservative coalition to regain its strength in Congress. Republicans gained 47 seats in the House. The Democratic majority shrunk to 248 in the House and 64 in the Senate. “We’ve beaten the hell out of them,” Richard Nixon boasted to his advisors upon hearing the results.

Today, President Obama faces a Congress that will be just as obstructionist as the one that Kennedy faced, but he lacks the same kind of vibrant grass roots liberal movement that existed at the time. Regardless of how much Obama twists arms or how aggressive he is toward the GOP, he will not be able to make much progress with his legislation.

That doesn’t mean the future will always be bleak. The 89th Congress is proof that average Americans have the capacity to dramatically alter the status quo. In 1964, the civil rights movement was able to create the pressure on Congress necessary to end segregation. That fall, voters elected huge liberal majorities that were ready and eager to pass many bills. An overwhelming majority of voters also rejected the kind of conservatism that Goldwater was peddling.

If Democrats are going to fundamentally change the dynamics in Washington, they will need to focus on the next series of elections in 2016 and 2018. They must also pay more attention to government reforms on matters like partisan gerrymandering that make it hard to swing the composition of the House, so that future presidents have a better playing field.

If voters don’t change Washington, nobody else is going to do it for them.

[Ladmo]

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/12/the_med ... socialflow

The media’s lying to you about Bernie Sanders: This is why a socialist can win the Fox-loving red states
I spent days with Sanders fans across red states. They watch Fox, live in the heartland, and are voting for Bernie
Rick Perlstein, Washington Spectator

Nate Silver has the Bernie Sanders campaign figured out. Ignore what happens in Iowa and New Hampshire, the “data-driven” prognostication wizard wrote back in July, when Sanders was polling a healthy 30 percent to Clinton’s 46 percent in both contests. That’s only, Silver says, because “Democratic caucus-goers in Iowa and Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire are liberal and white, and that’s the core of Sanders’ support.”

Silver has a chart. It shows that when you multiply the number of liberals and whites among state electorates, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Iowa rank first, second, and third. Texas is near the bottom—a place where Bernie Sanders should feel about as welcome as a La Raza convention at the Alamo, right?

I have a new friend who begs to differ.

It’s July 20, and my airplane seat mate asks what brought me to Texas. He is a construction company sales executive from Houston. He’s watching Fox News on his cell phone. He tells me he considers himself a conservative. I tell him I’m a political reporter covering the Bernie Sanders campaign. He perks up: “I like what I’ve heard from him. Kind of middle of the road.”

Eleven days later, I’m at a Bernie Sanders house party in the depressed steel town of Griffith, Indiana, in a state that places in the bottom quartile on Silver’s chart. I approach a young man in his twenties wearing a thrift store T-shirt. I ask him what brings him here tonight.

“I’m just helping out my friends because they asked me to help out,” he tells me. He adds that he’s a conservative: “But I approve of some of the stuff that Bernie stands for. Like appealing to more than just the one percent and just trying to give everybody a leg up who’s needing it these days.” Data-driven analysis is only as good as the categories by which you sift the information. If you’ve already decided that “liberals” are the people who prefer locally sourced arugula to eating at McDonald’s, or are the people who don’t watch Fox News, it is a reasonable conclusion that there aren’t enough “liberals” out there to elect Bernie Sanders. Yet political categories shift. One of the things the best politicians do is work to shift them.

Sanders has been extraordinarily clear about the kind of shift he’d like to effect: Republicans “divide people on gay marriage. They divide people on abortion. They divide people on immigration. And what my job is, and it’s not just in blue states. . . [is] to bring working people together around an economic agenda that works. People are sick and tired of establishment politics; they are sick and tired of a politics in which candidates continue to represent the rich and the powerful.”

The theory that economic populism unites voters is hardly new. Lyndon Johnson, in New Orleans and about to lose the South to Barry Goldwater in 1964, expressed it in one of the most remarkable campaign speeches in history. A Southern Democratic politician was on his deathbed, Johnson said. “He was talking about the economy and what a great future we could have in the South, if we could just meet our economic problems. . . ‘I would like to go back down there and make them one more Democratic speech. I just feel like I have one in me. The poor old state, they haven’t heard a Democratic speech in 30 years. All they ever hear at election time is n****r! n****r! n****r!’”

The theory suggests that when upwards of 60 percent of voters consistently agree that rich people should have their taxes raised, a candidate who promises to do so might be identified as what he actually is: middle of the road. That if Democrats give Democratic speeches on economic issues, voters suckered into Republicanism by refrains like Jihad! Jihad! Jihad! just might try something else. And that new voters might be attracted into politics if they could just hear a candidate cut to the radical quick of the actual problems that are ruining their lives. My new Republican friends didn’t know they were not “supposed” to like a “liberal” like Bernie Sanders. Then they heard what he was saying, and liked what they heard. How many are there like them? That’s what I’ve been trying to begin to find out.

A populist moment in Dallas

Dallas is Dallas. At Love Field, a middle-aged woman sports a “Mrs.” T-shirt—1970s-style antifeminist trolling. I pass the Dallas Country Club, which made news last year for admitting its first black member after he spent 13 years on a waiting list. The Holocaust Museum features a “Ground Zero 360: Never Forget” exhibit on 9/11. (Jihad! Jihad! Jihad!)

Hillary Clinton had recently been to Texas. She did a fundraiser here in a gated community where guests were told the address only after delivering their $2,700 checks. For nationally prominent Democrats, one of the donors complained, “All Texas is to anyone is a stop to pick up money.”

Not all nationally prominent Democrats. When I talk with a bunch of old hippies after an afternoon Sanders rally at a downtown convention center in Dallas, their minds are blown. Long-haired Zen Biasco is a professional “creativity teacher”; Morris Fried first picketed against apartheid in 1965. The only non-Jew in the group, and the only native Southerner, explains Texas politics: “The states that came up throughout the plantation economy did not really believe” in democracy. “It was the elites running things, and basically the GOP here in the South, especially in Texas, has inherited that basis of understanding. In Texas we are not
necessarily a red state. We are a non-voting state.”

These are the people you’d see at any lefty rally anywhere. But this lefty rally was unlike any they’ve seen in their adopted hometown. “I’m shocked at such a draw on a Sunday afternoon!” one offers. “I’m shocked at all the young people in this crowd!”

Before Sanders began speaking, I had spoken to two of those young people, a married couple, who represent a liberal holy grail: kids who had grown up conservative—Mormons!—and reasoned their way to the left. “Thanks to people like Bernie,” as one put it. They try to spread the gospel to professional circles saturated with Republicans and to their families back home.

The husband unspools a splendid version of the Sanders argument:

“I don’t think the values of those communities are really represented in their politics, family values, the ideology they profess to have. . . doesn’t match up with the words or things [the politicians they align themselves with] actually represent. I don’t think people realize that if they actually were for family values, and were for the working family, that Republican policies are not going to move you closer.”

Sanders on the stump

The speech begins. I’ve rarely heard one more electric. Bernie gets to the part about how America could increase its competitiveness and move toward full employment by spending a trillion dollars rebuilding bridges and roads, and a fashionably dressed young woman next to me with a swallow tattoo on her wrist cries out like a cheerleader.

“INNNNNNNFRASTRUCTURE!!!!”

The senator follows with a disquisition about the Sherman Act.

“ANTI-TRUSSSSTTT!” she shouts.

When he gets to reinstating the Glass-Steagell act, she lets out a “WHOOOOOOOO!”

At the 21-minute mark comes something extraordinary. After a reverberating ovation for a call for pay equity for women, a promise to fight for 12 weeks of paid family leave, and an excoriation of the fact that “the American people work more hours than any other major country on Earth.” Then the senator announces his marquee platform plank.

“To make every public college and university tuition-free.”

The crowd’s response is so ecstatic it overdrives my tape recorder. It continues into a chant: “BERNIE! BERNIE! BERNIE! BERNIE!”

And when the show ends, a crowd in a nearly post-coital mood of sated exhilaration doesn’t want to leave, doesn’t leave, until Bernie returns to to the podium for something I’ve never witnessed at a political event, an encore, and announces that the crowd numbered 6,000.

I followed the campaign that evening to the University of Houston, where he got the same thunderous reception before 5,200 college students. Both events got prominent play in the local media, where hundreds of thousands of Texans heard heretical ideas that they might not have read in their newspapers before: like raising taxes on the rich isn’t crazy, even if 62 percent of Americans agree.

Some things polls have a hard time recording. They may miss kids like these, who only carry cell phones, as pollsters rely mostly on landlines. Or the intensity of support, how many people are willing to knock on doors for a candidate. And, last but very much not least, novel issues and how constituencies respond to them.

In 1965, for instance, when he began running for governor, Ronald Reagan made the focal point of his speeches the student uprising at Berkeley. His consultants told him to knock it off because it wasn’t showing up in their polls as a public concern. Reagan ignored them, reading the response of crowds that didn’t yet think that students tearing up their college campuses was a “political issue” to bring up when pollsters called.

Similarly, in the late 1970s, when the Equal Rights Amendment began failing in state after state though polls showed it had majority support, a sociologist named Ruth Murray Brown polled anti-ERA women activists in North Carolina and found that more than half of them had never participated in politics before. The pundits didn’t know how to count what they didn’t know was out there.

Rust belt populism

That’s what I thought of when I met Gypsy and David Milenic, whose front lawn had hosted that house party on July 30. I had read an interview with Sanders in which he said the campaign was hosting these parties around the country, which he would address via a live video feed. I chose one as far afield as possible from the places where “liberals” are supposed to congregate. Ten miles past a creationist museum billboard on I-90, there was no arugula, but there were crackers, pretzels, and store-bought gingersnaps. Griffith, Indiana, population 16,619, has a per capita income of $21,866.

“My history of political volunteering is that this is the first political volunteering I have done,” Gypsy tells me, taking a break from directing traffic and packing her two small children off to grandma’s. “But, to be honest, Bernie is the first person who’s gotten me out of my chair and out doing things.”

From her front porch, she casts her nervous eye over a lawn that keeps filling, and filling, and filling. (In the interview Sanders said the campaign was planning for 30,000 participants across the nation; the final number turned out to be 100,000.)

“This home was paid for by union dues,” Gypsy says. “That matters. Keeping it in the family: that matters. Being able to have a small town like this that was a mix of blue-collar and white-collar matters.”

At 6:30 a political meeting unfolds unlike any I have ever seen. Bernie is to speak on a live feed at 8:00. David, an accountant, welcomes us, and invites people to stand up and introduce themselves.

A young man who has been busily setting up the AV system volunteers to go first.

“Both my parents together made barely over the poverty line, and I can tell you that life sucks,” he begins.

“I have no financial support from my family. I get very little from the government. I am on my own, trying to make it, trying to thrive, just like everybody behind me. And it’s hard. And I am currently about 50 grand in debt between student loans, car loans. . . and I am trying so damned hard. And working so damned hard.”

[Ladmo]

[Ghost]

IF (and that's a big one) Sanders got elected, it's true that he couldn't do a whole lot under the current Congress. Nor will any Democrat, for that matter. The current Congress is poisoned by their own dogma.

But the Republican party is dying. Literally, in that their old guard is old, and dying (I'm not necessarily talking leaders, but voters), and figuratively, in that everything they say makes them more irrelevant to today's society. And Congress has elections what, every two years? Two years for the House, and the Senate splits their elections over their six year terms. So, if Sanders could win, and the Republicans (who do not have a veto-proof majority) insist on strangling him and shutting the government down every chance they get, they will be the first to pay the price.

I don't think Sanders is nearly as ill-equipped to deal with this bunch of playground bullies as a lot of you think. His main issue will be getting mainstream media coverage, but the fact that he was in this debate (and won, in my opinion) is huge. The win doesn't matter, but the fact that an Independent is currently the main competition for Clinton AND is getting covered more or less evenly is really, really great.

But he'll lose, because a lot of well-meaning people like the ones we have here think that their individual votes matter, so they want to throw in with the person who they decide has a better chance, even though they know she'd be worse at the job.

But individual votes do NOT make a difference*, so why not vote for Bernie? I follow third party candidates rather obsessively, and they are usually not worth talking about. Bernie is the first in a VERY long time who could actually make serious waves. Nader never made real waves. Perot did, but they were comic relief waves. The two-party system (three if you count the media, which I do) is a major part of why our political system is a disaster, and is getting worse. And yet, in 2016 we may well have a candidate who is not a part of that system and yet garners legitimate attention, a guy with actual ideas and visions and a plan. Nobody else running has any of that.

But anyway, I'm wasting my time already. I know what most of you will do when it comes time to vote, and it's not even your fault (seriously, there are entire studies about why we cannot collectively rally around third party/independent candidates -- it's not your fault you're human).

* I know, Florida 2000. Look, I hate Florida and wish it would sink into the gulf, so let's never speak of it again. Particularly Orlando.

[Indy]

* I know, Florida 2000. Look, I hate Florida and wish it would sink into the gulf, so let's never speak of it again. Particularly Orlando.

We should start a party around this as our central theme.

[Mori Chu]

Ghost: Wanting to vote for the winner is more of a general election thing, not the primary.

[Ghost]

Ghost: Wanting to vote for the winner is more of a general election thing, not the primary.

You'd think so, but Hilary is getting votes in the primary because people don't thin Bernie can win in the general election.

Sent from my Nexus 6 to annoy Superbone using Tapatalk

[Mori Chu]

True, but I think that's a different thing. There's a big difference between:

"I will vote for Candidate X in the primary because i think X has a better chance to win the general election", and:

"I will vote for Candidate X in the general election even though I don't agree with their politics, because I think X is likely to win, and I want to be able to say that I voted for the person who won and that I was 'right' about picking who would become President."

[Nodack]

I pick the candidate that I think will do the most good. I think all Republicans will do harm and Democrats less harm, so they get my vote. Between Hillary and Bernie, I like Bernie's views and ideas best. I will pull for him but, if I vote for Hillary it will be to ensure Republicans don't win, not because I like voting for a winner.

[Ghost]

True, but I think that's a different thing. There's a big difference between:

"I will vote for Candidate X in the primary because i think X has a better chance to win the general election", and:

"I will vote for Candidate X in the general election even though I don't agree with their politics, because I think X is likely to win, and I want to be able to say that I voted for the person who won and that I was 'right' about picking who would become President."

In terms of motive, sure. In terms of effect, both approaches are equally bad for the country. I don't really care about motive. The effect is that our voting system is fucked up, and it's because of this (and many other contributing factors, but in the end, the vote comes down to the voters).

And for the record, I don't think many people walk around boasting that they voted for the winner. But I absolutely believe that people buy into the horse race that the media turns every election into, and they absolutely want to vote for the winner. Look at how early primaries in states that we only care about every four years alter the course of elections; a big win or loss in a flyover state is enough to make or break any candidate. Why is that? Because people see that one guy is doing better than the other, and so they bandwagon on him. And that is exactly what I was saying before...people want to be on the winning team.

[Ladmo]

I pick the candidate that I think will do the most good. I think all Republicans will do harm and Democrats less harm, so they get my vote. Between Hillary and Bernie, I like Bernie's views and ideas best. I will pull for him but, if I vote for Hillary it will be to ensure Republicans don't win, not because I like voting for a winner.

[Ladmo]