I don't know much about Bernie Sanders.
Where does he propose to get the funding for projects like this?
Where does he propose to get the funding for projects like this?
seriously though. over the last few decades, economies around the globe have taken tax load off the bigger shoulders, and now the argument against any progressive agenda is "how would you ever finance this?"
Not that it's a generally bad question to ask, but I find it quite remarkable how deeply ingrained the notion is that you can't simply raise funds as a government, and how much that limits the (perceived, and by extension practical) agency of a government and "the people".
Government isn't the only way people can get things done, and I think we should be resentful (and suspicious) of the argument that to fund and accomplish large tasks, we need to hold a gun to the heads of the people. Are we really so incapable of cooperation that we need tax men, followed by armed police, to ensure that businesses serve the customers who pay them? Just like Sears & Roebuck and Wells Fargo worked to bring good things from the cities to rural America, this situation could be resolved by private enterprise. I believe we would be farther along without government attempts to regulate the industry that have impeded its progress.
The problem with private enterprise is accountability too - they generally are accountable to someone, but that someone typically happens to be shareholders who truthfully don’t give a damn about much other than maximizing their returns. A lot of folks who blindly prefer this route are either the ones who have the most to gain (because they already have capital) or folks who just don’t understand the incentive structure.
Saying one side is always inherently better than the other is short sighted and more of a tribal belief in my opinion.
I don’t want FB to have my data and would prefer the government break up internet monopolies. I’m also not saying I want to live under Hugo Chavez. Unfortunately, at least in America, we love to go towards extremes. The civic discourse is lacking.
Second, there's a real moral difference between the voluntary association among people in business and the coercive foundation of government. One is built on people wanting to trade value for value, and the other is built on armed military, police, and jailers. I would rather promote the former, even if it sometimes would be more efficient on the surface to force people to cooperate.
Unless you have a monopoly or a cartel or capture government regulation of your industry.
I think your second point is overly simplifying a lot of complexity. I agree that government has this coercive function... However, it’s also true that unchecked private enterprise ends up influencing that government to meet their own special interests. You want to promote the former, but the former ends up making the large campaign contributions so they can have legislation written in their favor... laws that apply to the common person don’t apply to these big corporations. Hence, we socialize losses but privatize profits. The fat cats go to prisons (if ever) that are potentially comparable to high end hotels, nicer than the homes of many ordinary citizens.
As far as some moral conflict is concerned because of the policing powers of the state - that’s why we have something resembling a democracy, even if it’s imperfect.
Empirically, the answer seems to "yes", at least in the USA.
Hospitals and insurance companies, higher education, private prisons, private companies operating water systems, drug companies, local internet monopolies, all seem to have a business model of stepping right up to the line of outright defrauding their customers, occasionally crossing that line, and constantly finding ways to avoid competing with each other and extracting more money from their customers for worse quality and service.
We have given the "free market" plenty of opportunities to provide improving quality at lower prices (the mantra of capitalist ideology), but in many of the most important markets, it has completely failed.
Are there examples of countries with high quality outcomes and low costs where those industries are deregulated?
I would add the Republican party in the US is so incompetent and dysfunctional, they are unable to create concrete policy proposals or pass legislation, even when they had full control of the federal government. What concrete steps did they take to fix fundamentally broken industries like health care and higher education?
So I find myself drawn to Democrats like Bernie and Warren, at least they have plans to address these issues, and the status quo is unacceptable.
An analogous situation arises in business. When the government regulates quality and cost, it leaves businesses no natural path to profitability, so to allow them to survive, it must also interfere in competition, with subsidies, tariffs, and other measures, up to and including enforced monopoly. That keeps the natural economic processes that reward good quality and low price from operating --- the favored businesses cannot be displaced by their competition, and the effect of consumer dissatisfaction is blunted --- and provides the perverse incentives that create the problems you perceive in industry (and politics).
US Government spending as a percentage of GDP has been fairly stable for decades. It's higher now than it was in 1970 -- the only time it has ever been substantially higher than it is now was World War II, and a transient spike a decade ago because of the housing bailout.
There are only two ways the government has ever really been able to spend more money on something. Grow the economy so that the same percentage of GDP is more money, or cut some other spending.
However, the specific amount he's proposing ($120,000,000,000 for a national initiative) is nowhere near unheard of, and actually normal for large infrastructure projects (remember, the grants rarely happen all at once).
Judging by his site, he intends to make a lot more initiatives plausible at once via a progressive (in the tax sense, which means only after a certain level of value, and only on value after that level) estate tax, a proposed piece of legislation to prevent tax dodging, taxing market speculators at an increased rate and cutting preexisting tax breaks for people with billions:
https://berniesanders.com/issues/tax-increases-for-the-rich/
Sounds great, right? Does the math check out? Probably not, but it wouldn't matter anyway.
The president is not a king, and even with both houses of congress under democratic control (not even close to a given under a Sanders presidency), legislators in swing constituencies are not about to put their seat in jeopardy because of huge projects they never themselves ran under and committed to.
But Sanders loses nothing by making promises like this. It's all in hopes that his campaign gets traction before he loses Iowa/New Hampshire.
The same place we get money for the F-35, corporate welfare, and the hundreds of other bullshit handouts to the ultra-wealthy that benefit them at the expense of the rest of us.
My issues with the government running the internet is, first money. They say they are going to end price gouging, but they will spend billions, if they succeed wont the taxes the telecoms pay be gone and wont it cost more. Also then the US government controls the internet from your house. ISP's spying is bad enough.
I am probably wrong on both of these minor complaints, and i would love to see cheap fast internet.
In reality, he's just a power hungry cranky socialist old man.
Keep in mind that, even without this Green New Deal fund, much of the work he proposes is conceptually simple and cheap: Many folks believe that removing barriers to municipal and community-owned ISPs would be a profitable action for the USA on its own, and does not need further justification or funding. That is, it's seen as a problem of regulatory capture and corruption, and not of political willpower or constituent goodwill.
This is economic stimulus: The fund is expected to pay for itself by improving the lives of people around the country. If we use the 1/5 rule of thumb [1], then this is a wager that demolishing the ISP monopolies and regulatory capture, and supporting municipal ISP development and community-owned infrastructure, is worth $750b in toto, plus $2.5m/yr, over the next decade. [0] notes that there is an $40b/yr inefficiency in terms of ISP profit, so we could hope that over a decade, we might reap a $400b boon to the collective taxpayer's worth, and after paying back our portion of Green New Deal, and even if we only get 80% yield, that's still a $200b profit in our worth.
To be more clear: $20b/yr across ~100m taxpayers with cable bills is around $200/yr; Bernie's betting that he can not only improve our cable bills, but generally improve the wealth of the typical taxpayer/billpayer.
[0] https://berniesanders.com/issues/high-speed-internet-all/