Bernie Sanders Would Hurt America If Elected

I appreciate Con introducing me to his intriguing perspectives. It is unfortunately, and blatantly apparent though, that Con underhandedly dodged a substantial amount of my arguments, or perhaps didn’t want to focus on the entirety of them to focus on other points. Either way, Con has yet to refute statistics that don’t quite go hand in hand with his beliefs, however, I’ll let it slide. It allows us to give our final arguments some more depth. That being said, Con makes a habit out of claiming that my sources and studies are not credible. I find this interesting, considering the fact that a large majority of my sources were often the only research centers pointing out the bias, miscalculations, and outright falsities, found within the commonly cited liberal and/or Keynesian studies or mainstream outlets. For example, the source which I am about to cite, funnily enough points out the bias of the World Health Organization, which spreads misleading information about the American healthcare, leading them to want to model the failed or failing, medicinally-socialized countries. It’s only fair that I quote a study from the Mises Institute, whose factual and scholarly research is unsettling and a blow to Con’s ideology, “The WHO takes into account a number of factors that say little to nothing about the real quality of a country’s healthcare system, and in many cases are definitional in being biased against real free-market healthcare. While the US healthcare system relative to other countries does look poor on paper according to the WHO, what the U.S. would be giving up in order to look better in the eyes of the WHO, many could reasonably claim is of greater value than what would be gained in order to achieve that higher standing: quality in exchange for equality.” http://tinyurl.com...;Con makes no attempt to justify, or even address, his platform’s obviously biased statistics, and instead attacks Pro’s sources for emphasizing the problems within his own. Onto the argument that “while increasing taxes won’t solve inequality, the scope of the entire plan will”. Here is where Con’s argument begins to go downhill, from the previous somewhat-reasonable point. The main goal of Sanders plan, in summary, is to right the ‘wrong’ of economic and social inequality. http://tinyurl.com...;I’ll run through a majority of his platform. He plans to raise the minimum wage to a “living wage”, because “nobody working forty hours a week should be living in poverty. He phrases this in such a way, that it would appear that if you oppose him, you agree that they should be living in poverty, which of course is untrue. Most capitalists would argue though that 1. Nobody working 80 hours a week doing something meaningful and taking enormous risk, should have men with guns taking around 90% of their income. 2. Nobody is actually working 40 hours a week and living in poverty. The average poor household (not individual people, but multiple people living in a household) has a grand total of 16 hours worked per week. Studies show that if the entire household were to split a 40 hour week, they would be lifted out of poverty entirely. Statistically this holds true, and the poor actually aren’t as impoverished as we have been lead to believe. 43% of poor households are homeowners. On average, they have a 3 bedroom house with 1½ baths, a garage, and a patio. 83% of poor households have air conditioning. Only 6% are actually overcrowded. The average American has more living space than a person living in Paris, Vienna, Athens, London, or other cities in Europe. But here’s the catch: that is comparing poor people in the U.S. to average people in Europe! It’s better to be poor here than rich in the famously leftist European continent! http://tinyurl.com...;A full meta analysis of minimum wage also showed that out of 102 studies done on the minimum wage in the U.S. and across the world, only 8 showed any positive indication of the minimum wage working at all. That is about 7.8%. 85% of the most credible studies have shown that the minimum wage does not help at all whatsoever. In addition, statistically by adopting higher minimum wage laws, higher unemployment will follow. As of right now, the top 50% in the income bracket pay 97% of all income taxes. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the rate of participation in the labor force is currently about 60%, meaning that about 40% of the country isn't working at all. It´s difficult to sustain an economy when nearly half of your country doesn't have a job. In 38 of the states in the U.S., plus the District of Columbia, it is actually more profitable to not work, and receive welfare, than it is to have a job. It is not easy to have the tax burden of the entire country on your shoulders, as well as having to support yourself and your family. http://tinyurl.com... Another aspect is making college free by taxing successful people. He has recently proposed a bill that would make college “free”. Nothing is free; it involves State theft, and seeing that he has dehumanized his victims through taxation, it is easy to make a population buy into the myth of infinite resources. Johnson attempted to give everyone free college loans back in the day, saying it is “an investment in our future”, and oddly enough, prices of higher education skyrocketed and mean income did not increase. So as far as an investment goes, this is the equivalent of me investing a trillion dollars to have the value of the thing I invested in, decrease, and my own personal worth remain stagnant. This is a very bad investment, as the cost of both public and private university education has tripled since 1965. Participation in higher education has been increasing for some time, but the rate of participation in the labor force has been in decline since 1997. What me must realize is that giving out college indiscriminately is not a logical solution. Not all majors are created equal. If you are going to be an electrical engineering major, you’ll have plenty more success after college than an art major. There is no reasonability to treat all people as they are the same. The value of college has far overstated 48% of college graduates are in jobs that do not require a college degree. In 2011, 53% of college graduates under 25 were actually unemployed. 40% of graduates that are employed, are not employed in the field that they studied in. Your IQ is fixed after 18. College can´t make you smarter. However, when you diffuse people that naturally don’t belong in higher education, it will hurt the quality of college. http://tinyurl.com... Onto the 1%, the reason the 1% are so powerful is because they have the State to lobby, since the growth of the welfare state that is when we saw income inequality increase, actually the biggest boom in income inequality. In the Roaring Twenties, which is often portrayed as huge income inequality era - it actually wasn’t as bad as it is now, and it wasn’t ever as bad as today until the 1960s when we saw the Great Society legislation by leftist Lyndon Johnson that would essentially push the growth of the welfare state and the State in general. This was very left-wing, something Sanders would support, and that is largely what has lead to the growth of the State - of which these billionaires can now use. That is how we have this issue of poverty. Now, one may say that “That isn’t how income inequality happened. It wasn’t as bad in the 50s when progressive tax rates were way better as Eisenhower taxed the 1% so high”. Except back then, we didn't spend as much and the State was far smaller. Empirically, the rise in problems we have today began with the welfare state. We’ve spent roughly $23 trillion on poverty since Great Society - more money than is currently in circulation. We’ve just redistributed that from the rich to the poor, we have all of this income inequality, and we still have this wealth gap. Next, he states we must change to a UHS, specifically to model the UK’s NHS, which is currently at its worst since the 1990s. A top doctor in Britain has even said that their system of healthcare is “not fit for the future”, one of the reasons being, ironically, that general practitioner surgeries require more resources to meet the high demand in the UK; the laws of supply and demand have caught up with the capitalistically-repressive healthcare system. This is not just one doctor’s opinion, empirical data backs this up. Waiting time targets for A&E, hospital treatment and cancer care all being missed towards the end of the parliament. Bed occupancy increasing to "very high levels", while delays in discharging patients have "risen significantly". Funding being increased by 0.8% a year on average - higher than was predicted mainly because of the low levels of inflation.” Now there have been some achievements of the system, but they are not without disadvantages. Onto taxation, if I didn’t make it clear, my view is not one of pacifism as Con implies, rather one of opposing the initiation of aggression upon peaceful people. Taxation is the implication that “we’re going to charge you money for being here”. In America, there is this concept of civic duty, that everyone must pay their “fair share”. If they do not pay this fair share of their rightly earned and owned product of labor, they will thrown in jail. The threats of force and coercion are always present in the act of taxation, even if the violent act (men with guns coming to your house and locking you in a cage), the use of force, is a few steps removed. I strongly advise you to look into the story of Irwin Schiff if you are doubtful. http://tinyurl.com...;I propose an alternate and more efficient system, one where a violent and coercive monopoly on force is not intrinsic, but that is for another discussion. This though, is why the act of taxation, of which Con asked me to prove, is inherently immoral. Again, I thank Con for the enjoyable debate.