I have to admit that I was a little surprised by those poll results reported in Rolling Stone. Apparently Sanders is more than just a mosquito on Hillary's forehead waiting to be swatted away. I am intrigued by your comments. What they suggest to me is that there is some complexity to your thinking. I like that. If everyone thought beyond straight left/right wing politics, we'd generally get better candidates elected.
What I don't like about Bernie is that he has been taken in hook line and sinker by the Global warming jihadists. (I'm a scientist, so I am not easily influenced by USA Today Headlines. I want to see and evaluate the science behind them.) Therefore I don't like the idea of Sanders pressing ahead full steam on something like Cap and Trade with so much strong evidence against a CO2 connection. It could be a horrible waste of time and money; money better spent elsewhere. On the other hand, I applaud his positions re taking marijuana off the controlled substance list and the minimum wage. Fifteen per hour sounds too high to me -- we must go to $9 or $10 first -- but If the idea is that a full time worker should be able to live off their income without taxpayer subsidy, than his figure of $15/hr is correct, but it would have to be phased in over several years -- that's actually his position, I think. A tax on Wall Street speculation, i.e., trading, is going to get us all riled up. That's how he'd subsidize public university education. Bernie must be talking about making up that 30% of undergraduate cost now paid by the student via tuition and fees. That might be money well spent, but the devil would be in the details. I'd have to be convinced controls are in place to keep admission standards from slipping. If such a tax had the effect of reducing trading volume it would be counterproductive.
There are a couple of his positions that, after reading the Stone article, I am wildly enthusiastic about! One is getting rid of private, for profit prisons. What a horrible idea that was in the first place; What a horrible conflict of interests!!! The other is his push to return to additional tax brackets and raise the upper- most bracket. This is something I have been preaching around here for some time now as a way to slow the damaging income redistribution that began in the 1980s. The loss of progressivity in our tax rates, along with the compounding effect of repeatedly taxing unearned income at a lower rate than earned, has decimated the lower middle class. When I recently read Piketty's "Capital..." I discovered very good support for my position, and was pleased to learn that the future Nobel Memorial Prize winner agrees with me. I also learned that the collapse of progressivity in the tax rates may have been a prime contributor to irrational executive compensation in the U.S. Corporate world. I am more convinced now than ever that we must attend to these things if we want to restore health to our economy. I haven't heard anything like this coming from any other candidate, Republican or Democrat!
Those who are pushing for single payer healthcare are going to love Bernie's position. He wants to bring everyone under Medicare and allow medicare to negotiate drug prices...
