tbf if your end goal is to spend as little money in a system as possible obamacare is retarded

if conservatives see universal healthcare as an inevitability (rofl), moving in on the ground floor so that the program we choose works as efficiently as possible would be 10/10 and work on the antitax thing the GOP loves.

Tl:dr but my father gave me a small loan of a million dollars.

If you look on Facebook and Twitter you'll see videos and pictures highlighting all these ideas Sanders has, and why he would make a good president. Boat loads of people retweeting and sharing them saying, "Yes!! this is the guy we need for president!!1!" (obviously many of them in the younger age demographic).

Yet a large portion of those people won't end up taking the time to actually go out and vote for him.

Quite disheartening.

This, So much this. If people that normally don't vote get out and vote, Sanders will win in a landslide.

No

Oh gosh don't get me started on Bernie Sanders. Him and Hilary are the types of people we don't need. We don't need any more career politicians in the white house. Sanders has been in congress for over 20 years.

The policies that he is pushing for are so brainless, it leads me to believe he has no idea about economics.

He's pushing for both free higher education, and a $15 minimum wage. Sounds great on paper right, everyone likes free stuff. But when you actually do the math, and calculate the economic implications of these highly socialistic or even borderline communistic policies, you find out how disastrous they really are.

$15 minimum wage. Again sounds great I wish it could work, but its not realistic. If it went into effect what happens?

1) Some business go out of business
2) Those that stay open, downsize and lay off employees
3) Many companies outsource jobs
4) Increases inflation. Labor increases cost of goods/services increases.
5) Increase in the gap between those in poverty and those earning a decent living (due to less jobs being available)

Who wins from the $15 minimum wage. Not America. China, India and Mexico win, because our jobs go to them.

As for free higher education? Who's going to pay for it? With University costing 20-30K a year on average, we're talking about trillions of dollars over the next few years. And some people want "debt forgiveness.' There is over 1.3 trillion in student debt right now.

I've been saying this for years. We don't have a higher education problem in the US, we have a jobs problem.

And all these economic policies are coming from Bernie sanders, a man thats spent over 20 years in congress earning 200,000 a year, and yet has a net worth of only a few hundred thousand. If he can't manage his own finances how could he possibly manage the nations.

minimum wage now is lower than its ever been, and we still haven't substantially changed the rates since its been in free fall. We have as many people employed now but at a lower rate of pay and as taxpayers we're directly subsidizing the payroll of walmart etc

there was a point when the US was directly funding the education of over half of all college students, as well as funding business and mortgages for as many other people, so its not like its impossible rofl

"20-30K a year on average"

nooooo

like when u look at public schools its cheaper and that's before considering the level of bargaining the full brunt of the US government could get. The actual cost to tax payers would be substantially cheaper.

like unless there's some massive difference in the economic power of the US and every other first world nation there's no real reason his ideas wouldn't work

http://www.upjohn.org/publications/upjohn-institute-press/what-does-minimum-wage-do

http://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/njmin-aer.pdf

http://i.imgur.com/VQi64Mz.gif

I don't think you a) are aware of all the countries that employ such "policies" (usually known as basic citizen rights) and do fine and b) know what the terms "socialistic" and "communistic" mean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu1y5g1O3-Y

very entertaining "interview" regarding the $15 minimum wage and free college

.

Not to present a huge argument here and all, but Germany recently introduced a minimum wage (€8.50, or $9.50), of which prominent business representatives said it would lead to huge layoff waves. Yet, unemployment is actually down in the wake of these policy changes. Again, this isn't proof of anything, but considering these data, claiming that minimum wage costs jobs on principle seems disingenuous at best.

EDIT: btw we have free colleges too

Who needs to eat food or live in a house when you can live on the street and eat garbage so you have a higher net worth?

trump is the cookiejake of politics :-)

OH yeah also, anyone that tries to judge a politicians economic stance based on their net worth is someone that has no right to deride anyone on anything remotely political because that might be possibly one of the dumbest things i've ever heard.

That would be a compliment to Cookiejake.

if I could personally euthanize every single Donald Trump supporter in the US I'd do it. He's out for a complete dismantling of every single thing that makes this country great.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/261062/carter-banned-iranians-coming-us-during-hostage-daniel-greenfield

man, seems like every president you have is worse than Hitler..

Lower than its ever been? How so? Lower than its ever been if you factor in inflation, yes, but from a dollars to dollars standpoint, no.

Taxpayers are subsidizing payroll of walmart? How so do you have a source for this? I know Walmart and other companies like Google, Apple etc, pay very little to no corporate taxes due to loop holes as well as having billions of dollars in offshore accounts.

If you adjust current wages for inflation and compare them with wages from 30, 40 or even 50 years ago, yes wages have not kept up with inflation. It's unfortunate, but how do you go about fixing it? I don't think thats up to the government. Shit happens, before wages were higher due to less international competition. Think about it, 90% of consumer goods on the shelves at major stores are internationally sourced. This was not the case 50 years ago. We had more manufacturing jobs, thus more management jobs, executive jobs etc (relative to the population at the time). With the surge of global trade, we are now competing to sell our goods on a global market, and directly competing against China, India and Mexico for some products. How do we compete with $15 an hour labor when their average might be $2-3?

US government gets good bargains? Is that why they pay their employees 40% more than standard private companies do? If the federal government established and ran schools everyone would be overpaid and underworked.

I actually believe if we started handing out "Free Higher Education" that costs would increase. Supply and demand. We'd need more teachers, so they'd be in high demand and thus their salaries would be higher.

Thank you. I saw that video a month ago or whenever it came out. I was actually just going to post it as well. To anyone that thinks free education / $15/hr is a good idea please watch this clip.

Regarding moving manufacturing overseas or moving it back to the United States.

I'll first state that, I've been running my own global trade business since 2009. I've developed my own products and had others develop products for me, which I've put into production. I've been reasonably successful with it and earn a very comfortable living.

Your statement about it being expensive to relocate manufacturing is generally incorrect. For most consumer products it is extremely affordable to relocate manufacturing. Just because you currently own and operate a factory in the US, doesn't mean you have to fully own and operate a factory overseas. Fully owning and operating a factory and hiring people to actually work and oversea production can be expensive, but as I mentioned above and will continue to talk about, that's not really necessary.

What I've done many times is find a supplier in a similar line of business and get them to produce my product in their factory along side of other products (contract manufacturing). Since most of my products are produced on CNC machines and the electronics are all done using automated assembly pick and pluck machines, the quality is generally top notch and is not something that could be done at a higher level of quality. As for the cost, maybe 1/4 the cost of getting it done in the US.

Now its one thing to employ people like you said that are "underpaid and under trained" to do things that actually matter and effect product quality, but today I would say that 75%+ of products require very little hands on assembly. Some companies get most of their parts assembled and sourced from China then bring them here for final assembly.

Companies like Apple and other very high tech companies honestly don't even have a choice as to where the majority of their products are produced. We don't even have high tech manufacturing facilities like those of Foxconn, Samsung, LG etc in the United States. Or at least not to near the same scale.

You would be surprised how many fast food jobs will and can either be outsourced or replaced by machines. There is absolutely no reason why McDonalds needs 10-15 people working per restaurant. Robots can flip ham burgers and do a lot of the tasks they are doing. Also you know drive through where they take your order? Some of these jobs are already being outsourced to people in call centers for some fast food chains.

Another example of jobs being outsourced for the food industry. Just the other day I read that the FDA approved US companies to ship Chicken to China for processing. They would process it package it and freeze it and ship it back.

I think you are ignoring a lot more of the economic implications of a 2x minimum wage hike than you realize.

When the government starts getting involved in a free market, they are bound to screw things up. Look what the Clinton administration did with home loans? They forced banks to issue loans to people that would otherwise not qualify. This increased demand for houses, skyrocketed prices, only to have them crash down again and to have huge banks and insurance companies go bankrupt. We need to learn from history or it is bound to repeat itself.

True, Obama, Carter, and Bush are directly responsible for the death of 6 million+ Americans. *protip* use common sense before posting

a good chunk of america thinks through a lot of concepts that it swears up and down couldn't possibly work while everyone else around america is doing fine with those very concepts

I mean... there's literally a state that already has double your federal minimum wage, and they're not exactly bleeding to death, no

Jobs won't get outsourced because of a $15 minimum wage, but they will be automated and replaced. Those jobs right now are not worth $15 and they never will be (until the rising tide of inflation floats them).

Vending machines, touchscreen menus, self-checkouts -- it's already happening in the USA and you need only look at Japan to see what an automated society really looks like. The minimum wage issue isn't an issue at all for people over ~30 years old. It's trumpeted by the Sanders crowd because of the demographics of the group. A livable wage selling merchandise or meals is not a means to a prosperous society, it is the byproduct of a prosperous society.

Sanders' policies work in Canada, Scandinavia, and Qatar because they are efficient for small homogeneous populations and subsidized by vast natural resources. We don't have that in the United States and more bureaucracy at the federal level will not create it.

Trump's policies won't work because... wait, does Trump even have policies?

The United States needs less gov at the Federal level and more gov & participation at the state level. You're seeing right now in the E.U. what happens when government takes a larger bite than it can chew.

I do have to say though my company has done work for one of Donald Trump's entities (or one named after him) and we were paid quickly!

LOL $9.47 an hour is a HUGE difference from $15. Also WA has a higher cost of living than about 90% of states, so it makes sense that they would have a higher minimum wage.

might want to read through an article to the end before arguing about it

http://puu.sh/lQ2nE/1b1c229093.jpg

You should get a sarcasm detector because I was making a jest to the poeple in this forum saying that people that would support Trump deserve to be "euthanised", after all, those are just undereducated redneck scum, right? It's pretty hard to beat the deathtoll of a dictator like that, unless you're communist. So it's utterly silly to compare Hitler and Trump; I mean before Hitler got elected, he already tried to do a putsch, and had mobs of SA troops beat up other extremists. And when Trump calls for an policy like that, it's easy to look back in history and see several other incidents where this happened. But rest assured, Bush+Obama foreign policies have and are still working on it at reaching that magical number, how many alone in Iraq?

4 million middle easterners since 1990.

I wish I could euthanize you too

Don't worry, that's legal over here. Don't think you have legal euthanesia implemented federally over there, becuase your clinics are making sure you are hooked up as long as possible while being a demented vegetable on the machines, as long as you have the money.