Typical leftists–they want free stuff, but they don’t want to pay for it. In a poll conducted by Vox and Morning Consult during the first week in April, they found that supporters for Sen. Bernie Sanders unsurprisingly have strong support for things like free college tuition and universal health care. They register at 70+ percent in favor for both initiatives. Then, the question turns to how much are they willing to pay for Sanders' agenda. This is where support dips dramatically, especially when two in three Bernie-ites don’t want to pay more than $1,000 for a single-payer health care system. Furthermore, the amount that Sanders supporters are willing to pay for this socialist utopia doesn’t cover the costs that this disheveled democratic socialist has in store for the country (via Vox):
About 66 percent of Sanders supporters said they wouldn't be willing to pay more than an additional $1,000 in taxes for universal health care. This includes the 8 percent of Sanders supporters who aren't willing to pay anything at all.When we asked what percentage of their income they would pay, rather than a dollar figure, voters seem to be a bit more generous.
While half of Sanders supporters said they aren't willing to pay or that they're only willing to pay less than 5 percent of their income, a quarter said they would pay between 5 and 10 percent.
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Sanders supporters are far and away the most likely to want free public college tuition. Still, 14 percent said they don't want to pay additional taxes for it — and another half said they would only pay up to $1,000 a year
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Sanders's plan would put an additional $5,000 of federal tax liability on households earning $50,000, but in exchange he would nationalize vital services currently in the private sector.
That means at least some of the money we're now paying private companies would be paid to the federal government instead.
But the majority of Sanders supporters in our poll (much less all voters) aren't willing to pay enough to actually support those nationalized services.
It’s the classic case we see often in these top-down, controlled economic experiments. The costs are too great and the system eventually collapses due to lack of money. This economy, where vital services are completely in the hands of government, has been a total disaster for other countries. Just look at Greece. Yet, it does undercut the one of the main points pushed by Sanders on the campaign trail, which is that he is at the head of a political revolution that seeks to make America fairer by destroying the job creating and investing class and usurping a corrupt campaign finance system that Democrats have used to win back-to-back presidential elections. It’s hard to say this with this poll data that shows his most ardent backers don’t want to pay for anything he’s promising; they just want it. Moreover, it’s hard to say that we’re seeing the vestiges of some left wing swell in American politics when you can’t win in the South. It’s not a revolution then–it’s just some senior citizen saying what dumb college students want to hear. Alas, that’s the core of Sanders’ base: young, college-educated whites. That’s not really earth shattering, especially when you consider that Democrats have been losing the white vote nationally since the 1960s. Still, funny to see how the political left wants a ton of stuff from the government, but has no desire to pay for it.
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