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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Krugman on Sanders:
On finance: Sanders has made restoring Glass-Steagal and breaking up the big banks the be-all and end-all of his program. That sounds good, but it’s nowhere near solving the real problems. The core of what went wrong in 2008 was the rise of shadow banking; too big to fail was at best marginal, and as Mike Konczal notes, pushing the big banks out of shadow banking, on its own, could make the problem worse by causing the risky stuff to “migrate elsewhere, often to places where there is less regulatory infrastructure.”
On health care: leave on one side the virtual impossibility of achieving single-payer. Beyond the politics, the Sanders “plan” isn’t just lacking in detail; as Ezra Klein notes, it both promises more comprehensive coverage than Medicare or for that matter single-payer systems in other countries, and assumes huge cost savings that are at best unlikely given that kind of generosity.
edited 20th Jan '16 3:50:38 PM by Achaemenid
Schild und Schwert der ParteiI think you mean "Krugman on Sanders". I think Krugman on Trump would just be "OH GOD, WHY?" written a few hundred times.
On the actual article: it makes me sad. I really respect Krugman and I want to pull for Sanders, given that he's left of Clinton and I like his ideas. But if Krugman says that Sanders is missing the point and fudging the numbers, then I've got to believe him. Damnit.
I guess the best thing to hope for now is for Sanders to pull Clinton farther left, but Clinton to win in the end.
Krugman is talking about Sanders, but what Achaemenid wrote was "Krugman on Trump".
edited 20th Jan '16 3:42:37 PM by NativeJovian
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.Yeah, I was saddened by that. Krugman has been very much in favor of Clinton without coming right out and saying it; he's fundamentally a moderate liberal, not one for radical change. Really, though, the key economic and social positions that most of us agree upon are center-left by objective standards; it's just that the political climate in the United States has swung so far rightward (although it is slowing coming back) that they look extreme by comparison.
If Sanders is dropping magic asterisks in his plans, it belies his promise that the American people would be willing to support his ideas if they are sufficiently informed about them.
edited 20th Jan '16 3:38:27 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Is their even such a thing as objective standard when it comes to the overton window?
Edit: If Sanders's welfare state is more generous than those in Europe I doubt it will survive, let alone be passed. They are already buckling under the strain of their systems. Mind you Krugman isn't god and his words are not infallible, I really disagree with him on the space program for example.
edited 20th Jan '16 3:44:54 PM by JackOLantern1337
I Bring Doom,and a bit of gloom, but mostly gloom.It occurs to me that Sanders' drawing the youth vote as much as he is, based on polls, is because a lot of the younger voters he'd be drawing from were essentially screwed by the 2008 crisis. They saw their own futures get fucked up, college debt hanging over them that they were never adequately explained about, and saw these big banks and businesses not get utterly burned to the ground or punished.
Well, I half wonder if those that would vote for him want things done simple, and honestly want blood.
Slow progress isn't good enough for some people. I think which is the appeal here. Especially with gutting the banks and doing something about the current state of Student Debt. To a fair number of people, that is one of the things that should of happened. Had the banks been chopshopped by Obama, or people had gotten debt forgiveness, I think Sanders might not be as strong.
Not that they're the sole issue, but not breaking up the big banks is a major sore point for a lot of people, especially since the average American didn't get a 'bailout'. And ditto the Student Debt for the young.
edited 20th Jan '16 3:58:50 PM by PotatoesRock
How would making the risky stuff go elsewhere make things worse?
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Lots of pro-union people vote SNP, due to the SNP being reasonable and left wing.
edited 20th Jan '16 4:26:27 PM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranI find Krugman's statements strange. Even though he talks about imaginary numbers the crux of his argument is very much one of "political reality" which he reiterates in this follow up where he brings up Vermont's attempt to bring about a single payer system.
It just kind of disingenuous from someone who has riled against seemingly timid action on issues in the past. Admittedly those were different issues, but I don't know why he is being so particularly cynical about this issue.
A lot of the technocrats/moderate leftists are basically already exhausted from trying to defend Obamacare that they're very upset that Sanders is basically pulling "NOT PURE ENOUGH" out, and demanding them refight a battle that Republicans are already giving them infinite grief over, I believe is the issue?
(Also Krugman is tired of years of Magic Asterisks being pulled out of Paul Ryan's ass that he's tired of seeing people go HOPE. DREAMS. CHANGE. Without offering good solid math.)
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The fact that it'd be a major political battle was already obvious to anyone paying attention. Politics you can deal with. The fact that the math of his plan doesn't work, though? That's a dealbreaker. It's the difference between "this would be really hard, but we can make it work" and "this won't work, period".
That's it in a nutshell, yeah. A single payer system would be preferable to Obamacare, but even Obamacare was such a hard sell that a lot of people don't want to have a massive health care fight again. Of course, people tend to phrase it as pitching out Obamacare and running the risk of the Republicans sending us back to the bad old days pre-Obamacare, but I don't really see that being a possibility — worst case scenario is that, due to Republican meddling, the new healthcare bill is an enormous clusterfuck that's actually worse than Obamacare... at which point, President Sanders vetoes it for being a step backwards instead of a step forwards, and we're no worse off than we were before.

""Donald Trump will make Anime real."
edited 20th Jan '16 1:06:17 PM by speedyboris