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Bernie: No, I won’t explain how I’ll pay for everything for everyone

Bernie: No, I won’t explain how I’ll pay for everything for everyone

They’ll be paid for, you know, “progressively”

Bernie Sanders’ “Democrat socialist” policies sound good and have a lot of popular support among certain demographics, but when pressed on how he would pay for all the free stuff he’s promising, he’s a bit nonplussed.  Pesky details like that just don’t interest him; it’s all about the utopian ideal in his dreamy little head, not about reality.

For example, although he pledged to release his plan for paying for his health care plan before the Iowa caucuses, he’s now decided that might be a mistake and is considering breaking that particular pledge.

CNN reports:

Bernie Sanders could break his pledge to release details on how he would pay for his health care plan before the Iowa caucuses, according to a top aide.

His campaign released details Wednesday of how Sanders will pay his $1 trillion dollar infrastructure plan and his $75-billion-a-year plan to make public college and universities tuition-free. But noticeably absent was his plan to pay for Medicare for all, a price tag that some estimates put at $15 trillion.

Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager, isn’t saying when those numbers will be released.

“I don’t have a date for that,” he said earlier this week. “Not necessarily before the caucuses.”

Weaver stood by his comments on Wednesday, stating that the campaign does not yet have a date for when to release the Medicare-for-all plan. He added that Sanders’ health care plan would be paid for “progressively,” similar to the way his previous Medicare-for-all proposals have been paid for.

Paid for “progressively”?  The track record on that is typically “not at all” and/or at huge cost to the already struggling middle classes.  If “progressively” is the “plan” to pay for his agenda, it’s no wonder Sanders may not release it ahead of the Iowa caucuses . . . even though he had stated earlier that he would do so.

CNN continues:

. . . . That’s a change from what Sanders first told Dana Bash on CNN’s “State of the Union” earlier this month that he would release his details for paying for his health care plan before the caucuses on February 1. Bash pressed the Vermont senator again on Tuesday after President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union when she asked if Sanders would make good on his pledge to release his single payer plan.

Watch:

Sanders understands that his lofty promises will come at a huge cost to the very voters he is courting, so pushing off the release makes sense.  On the other hand, though, the people who are enamored of Sanders’ proposed policies are not likely to think about—or care—how, or even if, such things are paid for.

CNN also notes that raising taxes on the middle classes to pay for his sweeping socialist plans would violate yet another of his pledges.

If Sanders’ health care plan did raise middle class taxes, the senator would violate another pledge he made in December when he told NBC that his paid family leave would be the only measure he would raise taxes on the middle class to fund.

It seems this primary season is like every other in the sense that it’s full of big promises, lofty and unrealistic proposals, and broken pledges aplenty.

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Comments

The moon ponies will bring down bags of money from Money Mountain.

Why are you people asking, when the answers are so simple?

Tax the rich
Feed the poor
Till there are no
Rich no more.

Sanders should propose a tax on Europe through climatized socialism.

Europe has money to waste. Just ask Money Bags Merkel.

Math is, like, super hard. Let’s skip that part.

    Eastwood Ravine in reply to Anonamom. | January 14, 2016 at 11:38 pm

    Once again, Sanders’ proposals showcase how much the Progressive utopian vision is divorced from economic reality.

Look at the budget for the US military. Thats how all his magical policies get paid for. You get a lot of free stuff for $700 billion a year.

On the other hand, I can see Sanders ending the Fed and leaving the government to print as much cash as it needs for all his policies. The current system has done nothing to place restrictions on spending, so why not be honest about it. Either way, buy gold.

He was going to pay for it with the Powerball winnings.

The Friendly Grizzly | January 14, 2016 at 11:40 am

I seem to recall another candidate with a secret plan. In his case it was to end the war in Vietnam. Smoke and mirrors.

    Nixon never claimed to have a secret plan. That was an invention of the Humphrey campaign.

    His plan was open, and was the one he implemented, and which worked. Never forget that Nixon won the war, and concluded it with a treaty promising South Vietnam that if the north invaded we’d give air support and resupplies but no ground troops. We’d trained their army to where it was perfectly capable of resisting an invasion, and so it did.

    But the Democratic Party refused to appropriate the money for the promised resupplies, or for the air support. The USA was forsworn, and the whole world learned once again that its word means nothing, and a trusting ally fell, its people enslaved and murdered. That crime should never be forgotten, and the Democratic Party should be made to wear that shame forever.

      Barry in reply to Milhouse. | January 14, 2016 at 5:30 pm

      MH is absolutely correct and the traitorous democratic party is responsible for the slavery of South Vietnam.

        Diggs in reply to Barry. | January 15, 2016 at 9:52 pm

        The Democratic bylines in the media successfully kept that one from coming true, just as they are busy rewriting history about ISIS coming out of the power vacuum left in Iraq when Barry pulled all the US troops out.

The Sad thing is…. continuing to press Bernie Sanders on where the money is going to come from will convince zero of his supporters to change their votes.

    rokiloki in reply to rotten. | January 14, 2016 at 2:09 pm

    It reminds me of an audio clip at Youtube. Michael Savage interview a liberal who wanted more immigration. It came out during the interview that she was on public assistance. When Savage mentioned that his tax money paid her welfare, which she immediately disputed and said Obama paid her welfare, not taxpayers.

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

Socialists policies never make good common sense and always ruin nations.

Here is a synopsis of Trump’s proposed policies. The health care plank of his platform is coming out this week, I believe.

Yes to Trump – no way Jose’ to Eduardo, Juan or Marco.

Enact big plans with no way to pay for them.
Conceal the truth of the same.
Break promises.
Violate pledges.

How very … “progressive”.

It’s the “Underpants Gnomes” economic policy:
1. Enact sweeping, massively-expensive reforms.
2. ??????
3. Balanced budget!

Sammy Finkelman | January 14, 2016 at 12:10 pm

According to the cover story in the January 11-17 2016, Bloomberg Business Week, Bernie Sanders would pay for his $18 trillion “Great New Deal” most of which ($15 trillion) is for Medicare for All (he also wants free two years wirth of college, increases in Social Security and pensions, and infrastructure jobs) with

1) A tax on Wall Street speculation (stock transfer tax)

2) Higher tax rates on the rich and a

3) Higher business taxes.

That math probably doesn’t add up. Bernie Sanders would have to pay for it with some kind of a consumption tax – maybe a carbon tax or VAT – which would be in addition to other taxes, at least using the traditional static economic analysis.

Hillary Clinton, by the way, decided to show was more for taxing the rich than he was by proposing a new income tax bracket, starting at $5 million. She also said his Medicare for all is not a good idea, but didn’t bother to explain, but contented herself with speaking in a mocking tone of the idea of supporting it.

Now, Sanders could argue that, under Medicare for All, people, or their employers, would be relieved of paying medical insurance premiums (although that’s not even true right now for people on Medicare) and that the total amount of money spent on medical care would be about the same, or whatever extra could be raised from other sources (Bernie Sanders in fact argues that Medicare for All would save money because now the more efficient Medicare bureaucracy, which has low administrative costs and no profits, would be in charge of spending the money)

But that would not be more or less a wash. It would have the not so subtle effect of lowering the compensation of union workers while raising the compensation of non-union workers.

Sanders also wants the $15 minimum wage, paid family leave, the ability to do banking at every Post Office, a 15% maximum on credit card interest, and a $2 limit on ATM fees, but those last probably don’t involved the federal government spending too much more money.

Bernie Sanders probably really believes, to the extent that he has thought this thing out, that he would get the money from greater economic growth, which in turn would be caused by a more expansive monetary policy. He seems to think the Fed favors bank profits over growing the economy, although it sounds more like hethinks they can slow down the economy more than they can help it.

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/24/heres-what-bernie-sanders-would-do-to-the-fed.html

“Big bankers and their supporters in Congress have been telling us for years that runaway inflation is just around the corner” and must be prevented through a rise in interest rates, Sanders said. “They have been dead wrong each time.”

He insisted that raising interest rates now will be a serious blow to small businesses that need loans to expand their operations, which would also help average Americans who need more jobs and higher wages. As a rule, he added, the Fed should not raise interest rates until unemployment is lower than 4 percent.

This is actually a very important issue.

Of course he can’t explain it. There is never enough money for everything a socialist wants to do, so there is no way to pay for it.

    showtime8 | January 14, 2016 at 12:38 pm

    Of course he can’t explain it. There is never enough (of other people’s) money for everything a socialist wants to do, so there is no way to pay for it.

    I added a bit to your answer showtime8.

    Buddy replied to an electrical problem I was having when I asked what caused it.
    His reply was “It’s effin’ magic”.
    Ended up tossing the item as it was cheaper to replace.
    Pretty much what Berno will tell you about how he’s financing his programs if he’d come clean.

The biggest problem is that these numbers are too high for liberals to comprehend. You can’t toss around numbers like $1 trillion or $75 billion and expect them to understand how great those amounts are. They think taxes cover all those costs and then some.

In a video, Jesse Watters asked a Cornell student how much the National Debt was. She thought it was $200 million. That might be a big number in her mind, but its a drop in the bucket on government scale. That’s not even 1% of Bernie’s free college plan. But in her clueless, liberal mind, it is large enough of an amount to pay for everything.

Here’s the video. The student is at the 2 minute and 10 second mark:

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

TANSTAAFL – There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Santa Bernie seems to have great plans on how to spend all the money he doesn’t have.

There’s no reason he needs to reveal his funding plans before the primaries and caucuses begin. If he actually has a plan, and he gets the nomination, then he needs to reveal it before the general election campaign, because voters at the general election will want to know. But his supporters for the nomination are not interested in that; anyone who is interested in that sort of thing is unlikely to vote for him anyway (and is probably not voting in a Democratic primary or caucus in the first place).

    Absolutely right, Millhouse, and if he hadn’t pledged to reveal it by Feb. 1, no one would be talking about it. I’ll never understand why politicians paint themselves into corners like this.

Can I pay my taxes “progressively”, say, over the next fifty years? I promise I’ll pay it all off some day.

American Human | January 14, 2016 at 4:42 pm

Is there any amount that can be considered “enough”?

Henry Hawkins | January 14, 2016 at 5:18 pm

The socialist plan never changes. The plan is to get the freebies into place and THEN reveal the fact they cannot pay for them. By that time those receiving the freebies are easy prey to support higher taxes – on others, of course. As is said, ‘those proposing to rob Peter to pay Paul can always count of the support of Paul.’ This is how Obamacare was done – lie it into law, then either raise taxes to pay for it or replace it with something worse, single-payer, again, sold by the same process.

Henry Hawkins | January 14, 2016 at 5:26 pm

At the top of this thread I quoted lyrics from a 1971 song, lyrics which still illustrate the liberal mindset of today:

Tax the rich
Feed the poor
Till there are no
Rich no more.

Notice that it doesn’t say “till there are no POOR no more.” It ain’t about feeding the poor. It’s about confiscating the assets of the rich. The ‘poor’ are just a convenient and sympathetic pony to ride.

Now, few adults were as ignorant of how shit works than the hippies of the 1960s and 70s, and this band likely wasn’t aware that this is basically communism. But those 60s/70s hippies are now the movers and shakers of the current radical/liberal movement and they know it full damn well.

Still, I loves me some Ten Years After.

I’m Goin’ Home:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXjwAVk2Ki0

Blues guitar rock ‘n roll, baby.

Sanders is proof of how much Democrats do NOT want Mrs Bill Clinton. I don’t take him seriously; he cemented that viewpoint when he refused to talk about classified emails – a national security issue in the first debate.

Mrs Bill Clinton expected an easy stroll to the Democrat nomination – like in 2008 – but finds herself having to get up and actually campaign against another “upstart”. She complained about it being exhausting. How is that possible with a daughter, husband and other lackeys doing most of the work? If things were going so swell, she shouldn’t be neck-and-neck with a guy who is not even a “real” Democrat politician, since he’s officially an “Independent.”

Sanders makes me think of that movie with Peter Sellers, as the gardener who’s regarded as a political genius.

    Henry Hawkins in reply to GoldenAh. | January 14, 2016 at 11:42 pm

    You are exactly right. Sanders’ success is less a measure of Dem acceptance of him than it is their rejection of Hillary.

Sammy Finkelman | January 14, 2016 at 6:28 pm

It looks like Hillary Clinton is sacrificing her daughter’s credibility. Can this kind of thing last?

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/429754/chelsea-clintons-shameless-and-dishonest-attack-bernie-sanders

They are accusing Bernard Sanders of wanting to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the CHIP program, dismantle Medicare, and dismantle as well private insurance. Then sshe segues into Republicans. It’s saying things that are technically true, and then hoping people misunderstand.

Morning Jolt quiotes Hillary Clinton on Good Morning America:

“You know, I adore my daughter and I know what she was saying,” Clinton told “Good Morning America” about Chelsea Clinton. “Because if you look at Senator Sanders’ proposals going back nine times in the Congress, that’s exactly what he’s proposed. To take everything we currently know as health care, Medicare, Medicaid, the CHIP Program, private insurance, now of the Affordable Care Act, and roll it together.”

This contains two famous Hillary Clinton tells “You know” and “if you look at”

She is trying to make it sound like “roll it together” is the same thing as abolish and replace with nothing.

I *so* want Bernie as the Dem nominee. The defeat of the Dems would be Yuge!

Socialism’s Tax Slavery just one form of a Socialist’s Slavery

What do you mean, where? It’s from the government – it’s free!

This reminds me of when we were kids and at the store with Mom. We would see something that we wanted and ask for it. Mom would reply we don’t have the money for that.
And us kids would respond… Just write a check Mom!

So that is how all the grand programs that are proposed by Sanders will be paid for. By check! What could possibility go wrong with this?

I guess that he took this plan down that was suppose to save 18 trillion dollars while providing tons of free stuff:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/128090086