In the name of fairness, things I don’t like about Bernie Sanders

Eh, I give the other candidates flak, and to be honest, while Bernie is a near perfect candidate, he’s not quite perfect. So I figured I’d share things I don’t like about Bernie in order to be “fair and balanced.”

1) He is anti nuclear power. Nuclear power is actually along the safest forms of power from what I heard, and while it’s expensive, it causes very few workplace deaths. Yes, we’ve had stuff like Chernobyl and Fukushima, but these are highly publicized incidents similar to terrorist attacks in visibility. Like terrorist attacks, they’re exceptions to the rule, not the rule. Yes, solar and wind manage to kill more people than nuclear. Think about that for a second.

2) He wants to label GMOs. GMOs are largely safe, and done in the interest of making more crops for humans to eat. We change the genome to make them more fit for our consumption. We’ve done this for thousands of years. Do you think bananas are a product of nature? Not really. Well, they are, but they’re nasty and full of seeds. Same with many many other foods we eat. People just get scared and think things need labelling because of weird sciency stuff we do.

3) Many of his ideas use fuzzy math. His free education plan would be funded by a financial transaction tax. This has been tried in other places before and the revenue is always underwhelming because of the massive distortionary effects. His healthcare plan has also been criticized as coming up short, although to be fair, he definitely has a proposal he can work with and modify when it hits congress. The fact that his ideas are not absolutely perfect may not be that huge of a deal because details can be worked out. Still, his plans are imperfect.

4) He doesn’t advocate for basic income. He seems open to the idea, much more so than Hillary Clinton, as I discussed in the previous post, but yeah, he’s not going to openly advocate for it in our current environment. Still, I must say he seemed somewhat open minded to it.

5) He’s endorsing Hillary Clinton. This article was supposed to be on my old blog a few days ago, so this point is a very current event. It’s no secret I don’t like Hillary Clinton. It’s no secret I think she’s a detriment to the progressive movement and will do little to advance our agenda. Sanders’ support of Clinton, done in desperation and buying into the whole party unity lesser of two evils, mentality, was expected, but it’s still a disappointment. Sorry Bernie, I can’t follow you here.

That being said, no, Bernie Sanders is not perfect in every way. Still, I see his flaws as incredibly minor relative to other candidates and would still happily support him if he ran on the democratic ticket. It looks like it isn’t happening, but yeah. He’s pretty much as close to perfect as one can realistically expect.