Bernie Sanders appeared on CBS Morning News earlier this week and I watched/listened with interest. It was his usual stump speech, likely statements you’ve heard before, and I want to offer a bit of a critique.
We know he supports free college tuition for all and student debt relief. Points I have to take exception with include his specific claim earlier this week that some medical students graduate with $100,000 in debt, which he said was a terrible burden for them.
What? They’ve invested in themselves and stand to make many millions of dollars in their careers as doctors (depending on their specialty, some of which will pay many, many millions). The debt is not a burden on them. They’ve worked hard to graduate medical school and to do residencies, but I’d like to find an investment that requires $100,000 in debt but pays many millions in dividends!
He also touted the usual nonsense about the value of a four-year college degree. The trick here, as always, is in aggregating data, then ignoring that some degrees pay more than others – a lot more – and some students work harder than others, graduating with better grades and, more importantly, better work habits and specific skills. It’s this latter group who earn more lifetime by going to college. The college degree in and of itself is just a piece of paper. (If Sanders really was worried about student debt, he’d go after the colleges and universities – bloated administrative staffs, constant building programs, huge advertising budges and “media relations” departments, tenured faculty who may teach only one or two classes a semester, and other wasteful habits – maybe they should reimburse student debt themselves.)
I was disappointed, too, that he never talked about post-secondary (as opposed to “college”) education. There is nothing wrong with training as a mechanic (auto, truck, airplane, farm equipment, etc.). There is nothing wrong with training in HVAC, or becoming a union carpenter, and so on. Yet Progressives like Sanders seem to wonder why the Democratic Party is losing so-called “working class” voters. Just how insulting do they have to get before they understand the huge blunder they (Democrats, Progressives) have been making in recent years.
Let me make a point in about “working with your hands” as opposed “working with your head.” There is no skilled trade whatsoever where you don’t have to work with both your head and your hands. Mechanics diagnose and fix things; carpenters study blueprints in much the same way architects do, and so on. It’s just insulting to ignore this.
Drug Therapy
Sanders also said that Americans sometimes pay ten times what people in some other countries pay for the same drugs, the implication being that “Big Pharma” marks up their products by at least 1,000 percent. Drug prices are too high, but he knows better than what he said. Governments in many other countries (including Canada) give American drug companies a take-it-or-leave price, operating as monopolies and sometimes duopolies when it comes to purchasing. When American drug companies are forced to sell their products cheap to such countries it means we – the American consumer – are actually subsidizing citizens of other countries. Think about that for a minute. The subsidies are indirect, but mean we are the ones paying for the research costs, marketing and return on investment. Once the manufacturing plants and assembly lines are running, the cost of making the drugs typically is cheap per dose, and that’s all some foreign governments are willing to pay. But no drug company could survive if that’s all consumers everywhere were willing to pay.
The Billionaire Class
Sanders’ main talking point, as usual, was to go after the “one percent” and the billionaires who allegedly don’t pay their fair share of taxes, but who could cover the costs of seemingly everything (certainly drug prices and college tuition) if they did pay their fair share.
I’ve written before how the spread between the very-well-to-do and the lower income levels in America is huge and growing, and how we risk becoming like Brazil, with a small rich class and a vast impoverished class. We must avoid that, and Sanders is right to be so concerned. But the “billionaire class” or the “one percent” by themselves do not have enough money to pay for all these needs for all these other people. (Different economists say different things, but it always seems to break down on their political leanings, and I dare not do a deep dive into economics.) I can only add that we do not have (or do not enforce) a true progressive income tax where everyone pays their fair share. Right now, there are so many exemptions and deductions and loopholes and legal tax dodges that lots and lots of people in the upper middle class (apart from the “billionaire class”) also are not paying their fair share.
Someone, somewhere, has to define what is really meant by “fair share.” To me, a true sliding scale income tax with few if any deductions and so on is what we need. Even a flat rate tax would be better than what we have now, hence I certainly support a Progressive tax reform policy, but this harping on the “billionaire class” and the “one percent” is pretty close to hate speech, not a real program for reform at all.