Here is the back of an Old Bernie tee shirt. A lot of people read this and shout right on Bernie, go get the bastards. There is only one problem … the facts.
Can’t take care of our elderly you say? Well, here is the federal budget, where is most of the money going? We are in fact doing a good job burdening our youth with great debt for the elderly.
And about those tax breaks for a few hundred people, the largest revenue loss to the federal government is the tax-free value of employer-provided health benefits; something that benefits the middle class almost exclusively.
Hey Bernie, remember this:
By the way, there are nowhere near 13 million unemployed in America and many of those that are won’t be qualified for infastructure jobs in any case.
These oversimplified and misleading messages and the people who buy into them are laughable if they weren’t downright dangerous.
QUINNSCOMMENTARY 
Numbers like the 13 million can only be evaluated based on when the statement was made, because they change with each new count of the unemployment/underemployment rate. Back in Feb. of this year, the number was more than 15 million, according to Forbes:
“9 million Americans unemployed. Approximately one-third of these individuals were unemployed for over 27 weeks.
6.8 million Americans underemployed. These individuals are working part-time but would prefer to be working full-time. They are working part-time because their hours were cut or they couldn’t find a full-time job.”
(http://www.forbes.com/sites/abbymccloskey/2015/02/18/more-than-one-in-ten-workers-unemployed-or-underemployed/)
The statement about “can’t take care of the elderly and children” was in response to Congressional and state cuts, and attempts to privatize Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security that the GOP are so enamored of. And if your statement about burdening the young with debt toward the old is correct, that’s not exactly taking care of either group, is it?
LikeLike
You prove my point about glib statements and misleading buzz words. While I don’t support it, how can one assume privatizing those programs (which will never happen), would be detrimental to seniors? And to imply infrastucture spending will put 13 million to work is ridicules. The number of people unemployed in the US peaked in October 2009 at 15,352,000. There are now 7,086,000 fewer people unemployed in the country. My point about the young is relative to the disproportionate spending on the elderly today. He implies we don’t spend enough and he glibly tries to convince people that all the ills of the Country can be fixed by raising taxes on billionaires.
LikeLike
But it’s a tee shirt! You can’t fit entire speeches, policies or TED talks on a shirt. Not enough space for text. You can’t fault makers of a shirt for simplifications that are unavoidably necessary. That’s like faulting “Black Lives Matter” for not saying “Black lives should matter as much as everyone else’s, but in random encounters with police they are instead subject to profiling and excessively violent response at a much higher rate than when encounters with non-black people occur.”
Simplicity isn’t “glib” by default. When done right, it’s getting to the point, to facilitate ease of communication.
LikeLike
I still believe it is indicative of his simplistic ideas and appeal.
LikeLike