8 ms·

I don't know much about Bernie Sanders. Where does he propose to get the funding for projects like this?

akhilcacharya 7y ago
Realistically it would be deficit spending, something I don't have an issue with.
black_puppydog 7y ago
cough progressive income tax cough 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".
- JasonFruit 7y ago
  I find it quite remarkable how deeply ingrained the notion is that limiting the agency of government limits "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.
  - tracer4201 7y ago
    The problem with government is accountability. The government apparatus can make all kinds of promises, meanwhile, the citizens are too busy blaming each other - getting into partisan games - while the incompetent people just keep getting re elected without making progress. Exhibit A: Congress. A lot of folks who prefer this seem to believe that the government will make progress on its promises that it won’t just waste away tax payer money. 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.
    - JasonFruit 7y ago
      A couple counterpoints: first, sustainable profit in general happens when you serve your customers well. If you don't satisfy your customers, you don't make money — at least for long. The perverse incentive structures you mention are largely the result of unwise legislation and regulation. 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.
      - jimbokun 7y ago
        > If you don't satisfy your customers, you don't make money — at least for long. Unless you have a monopoly or a cartel or capture government regulation of your industry.
      - tracer4201 7y ago
        You can serve your customers and make a profit either way because you have effectively a monopoly. In the example of social media, you see FB now open and even advocating the government regulate social media - because it only makes it that much harder for the new guy to jump through the hoops whereas FB is already at more than critical mass. 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.
        JasonFruit 7y ago
        I understand your criticism of my second point, but notice that for your criticism to be valid, there needs to be a government involved in forcefully regulating private industry. I reject that sort of government.
  - jimbokun 7y ago
    > 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? 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.
    - JasonFruit 7y ago
      I'd like to point out that the industries you enumerate as serving the customers the worst are the most highly regulated. Is it possible that government intervention contributes to their poor quality and high prices?
      - jimbokun 7y ago
        Can you draw plausible cause and effect lines from regulations to lower quality and higher costs? (If it's higher costs enforcing higher quality, arguably the regulations are working as desired.) 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.
        JasonFruit 7y ago
        First, I'm completely in agreement on the Republican party. Both the main parties are a disaster, and their competition is stunted and ineffective. Part of that is because the two main parties are given all sorts of regulatory advantages by state and federal governments, and their competition is unfairly hobbled by the same. The favored parties' competitive abilities atrophy, and their competition cannot fully develop. 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).
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  > 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?" 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.
kick 7y ago
The lack of broadband in rural areas is more a legislation problem than a funding problem: presently, legislation is set in a way to strongly encourage localized monopolies in rural areas. There's little funding needed to pass laws to prevent this from happening, and half of what he seems to be proposing is legislation. 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/ https://berniesanders.com/issues/tax-increases-for-the-rich/
- ThrowawayR2 7y ago
  So, it's the usual "(try to) soak the rich" plan, with the inevitable extension down to more and more people when it generates less revenue than expected? No thanks. I mean, the stated goals are something that we should want, for the most part, but the funding schemes range from fantasyland to nonexistent.
minikites 7y ago
>Where does he propose to get the funding for projects like this? 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.
lidHanteyk 7y ago
From [0], the actual funding is a $150b fund from the Green New Deal, and $500m/yr in grants which will have to be allocated separately. The latter is puny from a federal POV. Note that the fund has a $7.5b earmark for Indian and Native relations, which is quite likely to find bipartisan support on its own and could be broken out into a smaller battle independent of Green New Deal. 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/ https://berniesanders.com/issues/high-speed-internet-all/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser%27s_law
siffland 7y ago
I will preface this with, my internet costs a ton and i would love it to be cheaper. 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.
archie2 7y ago
He thinks fleecing the top one tenth of the one percent through taxes will actually be effective. In reality, he's just a power hungry cranky socialist old man.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
allemagne 7y ago
Gesture widely at "billionaires", "wall street", and "military spending" as wells of resources that will also get us free universal health care, free college, a federal jobs guarantee, and free public housing (and more). 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.
Rebelgecko 7y ago
It would be significantly cheaper than the recent Trump tax cuts

Realistically it would be deficit spending, something I don't have an issue with.

cough progressive income tax cough 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".

JasonFruit 7y ago
I find it quite remarkable how deeply ingrained the notion is that limiting the agency of government limits "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.
- tracer4201 7y ago
  The problem with government is accountability. The government apparatus can make all kinds of promises, meanwhile, the citizens are too busy blaming each other - getting into partisan games - while the incompetent people just keep getting re elected without making progress. Exhibit A: Congress. A lot of folks who prefer this seem to believe that the government will make progress on its promises that it won’t just waste away tax payer money. 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.
  - JasonFruit 7y ago
    A couple counterpoints: first, sustainable profit in general happens when you serve your customers well. If you don't satisfy your customers, you don't make money — at least for long. The perverse incentive structures you mention are largely the result of unwise legislation and regulation. 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.
    - jimbokun 7y ago
      > If you don't satisfy your customers, you don't make money — at least for long. Unless you have a monopoly or a cartel or capture government regulation of your industry.
    - tracer4201 7y ago
      You can serve your customers and make a profit either way because you have effectively a monopoly. In the example of social media, you see FB now open and even advocating the government regulate social media - because it only makes it that much harder for the new guy to jump through the hoops whereas FB is already at more than critical mass. 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.
      - JasonFruit 7y ago
        I understand your criticism of my second point, but notice that for your criticism to be valid, there needs to be a government involved in forcefully regulating private industry. I reject that sort of government.
- jimbokun 7y ago
  > 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? 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.
  - JasonFruit 7y ago
    I'd like to point out that the industries you enumerate as serving the customers the worst are the most highly regulated. Is it possible that government intervention contributes to their poor quality and high prices?
    - jimbokun 7y ago
      Can you draw plausible cause and effect lines from regulations to lower quality and higher costs? (If it's higher costs enforcing higher quality, arguably the regulations are working as desired.) 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.
      - JasonFruit 7y ago
        First, I'm completely in agreement on the Republican party. Both the main parties are a disaster, and their competition is stunted and ineffective. Part of that is because the two main parties are given all sorts of regulatory advantages by state and federal governments, and their competition is unfairly hobbled by the same. The favored parties' competitive abilities atrophy, and their competition cannot fully develop. 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).
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> 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?" 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.

kick 7y ago

The lack of broadband in rural areas is more a legislation problem than a funding problem: presently, legislation is set in a way to strongly encourage localized monopolies in rural areas. There's little funding needed to pass laws to prevent this from happening, and half of what he seems to be proposing is legislation. 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/ https://berniesanders.com/issues/tax-increases-for-the-rich/

ThrowawayR2 7y ago
So, it's the usual "(try to) soak the rich" plan, with the inevitable extension down to more and more people when it generates less revenue than expected? No thanks. I mean, the stated goals are something that we should want, for the most part, but the funding schemes range from fantasyland to nonexistent.

minikites 7y ago

>Where does he propose to get the funding for projects like this? 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.

lidHanteyk 7y ago

From [0], the actual funding is a $150b fund from the Green New Deal, and $500m/yr in grants which will have to be allocated separately. The latter is puny from a federal POV. Note that the fund has a $7.5b earmark for Indian and Native relations, which is quite likely to find bipartisan support on its own and could be broken out into a smaller battle independent of Green New Deal. 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/ https://berniesanders.com/issues/high-speed-internet-all/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser%27s_law

siffland 7y ago

I will preface this with, my internet costs a ton and i would love it to be cheaper. 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.

archie2 7y ago

He thinks fleecing the top one tenth of the one percent through taxes will actually be effective. In reality, he's just a power hungry cranky socialist old man.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

allemagne 7y ago

Gesture widely at "billionaires", "wall street", and "military spending" as wells of resources that will also get us free universal health care, free college, a federal jobs guarantee, and free public housing (and more). 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.

Rebelgecko 7y ago

It would be significantly cheaper than the recent Trump tax cuts