Bernie Sanders scares the crap out of me. Sure, many people on the political right want to dismiss him as a joke, and, sure, it can be easy to make fun of him. The fact of the matter is, though, Mr. Sanders is being taken seriously by a lot of people. While his gains in the polls may be slowing, he's still seeing backing by 17% of Democrats, and national polls put him ahead of Donald Trump. For these reasons and a few others, Mr. Sanders really, really scares me.
The other reason I am so afraid of Mr. Sanders, though, has nothing to do with whether he will be elected. Even though the odds are good that Sanders will not top Clinton for the Democratic nominee, what really bothers me are the sheer amount of people who parrot his ideas. I see them every single day on Facebook and Twitter. I argue with friends and family over the absolute garbage they're parroting from a man who obviously devoted his life to studying the ideas of Carl Marx and John Maynard Keynes, and not much time actually paying attention to reality.
I'd like to spend some time refuting some of those ideas that the Sanders' crowd spews onto social media on a regular basis without getting mired in an argument with someone and trying to make my point in 140 characters or less (which is to say, I'm going to be verbose).
I'll start with the one I had to argue with my own sister about: college funding. Mr. Sanders would have you believe that everyone needs to go to college and that the government should fund it all. He's even come up with a new tax in order to help fund this idea. The fact is, though, that the reason so many people are struggling with college debt is that so many people are going to college and getting government assistance. Actually, as more people get more money from the government to pay for college, costs keep going up, to the tune of sixty five cents for every dollar the government spends. So please, let's send everyone to school for free; it should work out for the middle class about as well as all that free healthcare.
That last point more than anything gets people in my age group really fired up because, well, if they're anything like me, they're drowning in student loan debt. I know that I will personally be paying off my student loans for the next roughly 15-20 years. unless something major changes in my life. Frankly, I don't use a cent of that education, but being able to tell people that I have a degree has opened certain doors for me. What I can't figure out is, why? My coworker, who was brought in from doing manual labor in our job shop at my behest, is just as good at what she does as I am at what I do, if not better. She has no college degree, and thus had to wait ten years longer than I did to get out of manual labor and into a position that is far less punishing and pays better. I could have just as easily taken the same path and be working in a job shop or retail job in Western PA to this day had it not been for the fact that some piece of paper that I paid a bunch of money to obtain was valued more than honest knowledge and hard work. My solution to the student debt problem is fairly simple: stop sending so many people to school and stop subsidizing it. The system worked just fine before the government got involved, and plenty of people without degrees were able to work their way into the middle class or beyond without a load of debt holding them back. If we stop funding the problem, schools will be forced to cut back on expenses, and there won't be the problem of people like me going into a business with a degree in advanced mathematics to write up purchase orders all day. Maybe then employers will start looking at actual qualifications again instead of putting out a line that says "Bachelor's Degree or better required."
The other thing that Mr. Sanders supports that I just can't get behind is the idea of expanding workers' benefits. Mr. Sanders is a staunch supporter of raising the minimum wage, which is an idea discussed by so many people and refuted so fully that I need only link to one or two and not attempt to expand on some very well written rhetoric. He supports many other expansions, though, including expansions to Social Security, and increased parental leave for working people.
I can say that, as someone who is only a few years removed from making minimum wage, and who has many friends who make minimum wage or just about minimum wage, I can understand the allure for people my age. When I was 16 the wage minimum in the United States was increased from $5.15/hour to $7.25/hour. Anecdotal evidence, at the very least, would suggest this was not a benefit to me, though. I was making $5.50/hour before the wage was increased, but with the increase I did not increase to thirty five cents above the new minimum. Instead, I was only increased as much as legally necessary. The small restaurant I worked for immediately stopped hiring, squeezing as much work from as the least number of people as it possibly could. Finally, when that wasn't enough, I watched as, seemingly overnight, prices for our food increased by roughly 12%. I was only eligible for a certain discount on my meals, so eating at work suddenly became more expensive. At the same time, the cost of gasoline and other goods that I provided for myself and my family (assorted clothing and food items) showed increases as well. Sure, I was making roughly $50-60 more a week, but I was not really any better off financially. However, at that time, I wasn't drowning in student loan debt (see above), so I really didn't have that as a consideration. Many of the people posting on my various social network feeds are in a similar situation as I am, and a sudden raise would seemingly do wonders when it comes to attempting to pay off student loans and also attempt to find a way to have a life outside of one's parents' house. I only hope they'll reflect on my experiences and the two articles I linked to above and come to a difference conclusion.
Now, Social Security is not a huge concern to most people my age. We're (at least) 40 or so years removed from the idea of retirement, and most of us are more concerned with starting our lives than ending them. That doesn't change the fact that the program is already likely to become insolvent in twenty years or less. Increasing benefits will only increase the timetable for insolvency, leaving more people who are expecting and maybe relying on those benefits at a loss. For a great podcast on this topic, I suggest Free Thoughts most recent episode, "Going for Broke." The podcast discusses the Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid problems in much greater depth than I'm going to here, but they conclude by saying that we either need to tax more (to the tune of 18-19% compared to the current 12.5%), or pay out less. Now, I could see Mr. Sanders advocating for higher taxes, but the fact is, he's asking us to pay out more in Socials Security benefits, not less.
Many of my friends are recently becoming married and/or having children. I myself was married just two short years ago and my wife and I have been trying to have a child of our own. The idea of having time to spend with my newborn child is something that I look at as a beautiful dream. I live in California now, so I could realistically take 6 weeks of "paid" time off (paid at at rate of 50-70% of my normal pay depending on which program I am going through) for raising my newborn child. Now, much like the people that Mr. Sanders discusses in his campaign adds, though, I could not afford to do this even though I am eligible for this leave. I'm going to go anecdotal again here, so bear with me. Last year when I began my new position here in California, I had requested the services of a young woman who had previously been working in our job shop (see above). She was, unfortunately, due to have her baby just after I arrived, and I was only able to work with her for a few days before she left on maternity leave. (I might add here that, if not for her pregnancy and being required light duty work, my supervisors may never have seen her promise in her current position and I would likely never have had the chance to request her aide.) Putting that aside, though, between two different programs she was able to take approximately 12 weeks off work to be with her newborn child. Now, on one level, good for her. I'm glad she was able to afford that and to spend that very important time with her child. In fact, one of the programs that allowed her to take half of that time at a reasonable rate of pay was a private program endorsed by our employer, and as such I wouldn't have had a major problem with it. If she had returned after 6 weeks, I would have complained, but I wouldn't have been quite so worn thin. As it stood, though, being without her services for 12 weeks left me pulling the weight for what was obviously two people, and much of my work was half-done or neglected entirely. By the time she returned I was completely beaten down and it took me months to recover fully. If my wife were to get pregnant and I took that kind of time off, I honestly believe that much of the progress my coworker and I have made in the past year in our fledgling department would be completely lost.
Companies that can afford to offer these benefits to their employees, do. Much like the company I work for, there are private insurance plans that allow for leaves up to six weeks at some percentage of your regular wage that you pay into (or in my company's case, is paid into for you) and you can use at a time of need. I've worked for smaller businesses, though, and if I had requested six weeks off, my leave would have so crippled the business that I would have been replaced as soon as reasonably possible. My problem comes with the idea that a government can not only force an employer to keep my position open to me even if my leaving for that time period would cripple the regular business of the company, but can also take money from my wages and my employers' earnings to pay for me to take this time off. We could continue down this path until families are afford over a year of parental leave like in Sweden. We could also pay 49-60% of our wages in taxes, but I think most Americans would oppose that idea. Which begs the question, why are the Swedes okay with such high taxes, and why can't we make that work here? The fact is, we could never make such high taxes work in the United States, as even people like Mr. Sanders can only advocate collecting more taxes from the "well-off" without committing political suicide.
Mr. Sanders, please go back to Vermont and stop influencing the very influential youth. If you don't, I fear that soon we'll end up like Greece.
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