The Case For Biden

I would hope it is an educated public opinion. Not a politicised public opinion.

Maybe the X men.

You're calling oralloy 'Ollie'?

Wisdom and education are different things. It turns out that ordinary people, whom many educated Progressives often scorn, were a good deal smarter than Profs Jonathan Gruber of MIT and Ezekiel Emanuel of Penn. , who together constructed the highly politicized (and convoluted) Obamacare program for "universal" health care insurance. They larded the required coverage up to meet their political objectives for birth control & abortion, and set the penalty for non participation far too low out of fear of the public reaction. The result was that the young and healthy, particularly males, chose not to participate at all, and enormous Federal subsidies (that were not appropriated) to the insurers would have been required to sustain it. Now there's little left of the program, and the public learned an important lesson : as it turned out you could not participate and keep either your insurance or your doctor, and the consolidation of servicer providers that quickly resulted from the law, further limited their available choices, instead of expanding them.

Things like this will likely have lingering effects on the public as they examine the lavish promises of (mostly stupid in my view) contemporary "progressive" politicians. They tend to believe that they alone know what's good for everyone else. but all of their programs come with restrictions on the freedom of choice of their supposed beneficiaries and significant new costs. Unfortunately for them, it turns out that the unwashed masses are pretty good at figuring out just what's really in their own self-interest.

President Macron of France recently got a surprise lesson in that area (though so far there's little reason to believe he learned anything from it). My impression of the current crop of Democrat Progressives is that they are even less capable of thinking things through than their predecessors, and they are likely to get an equivalent surprise in the next election.

Yes.

You sure use a lot of words to express absolutely nothing.

Ah ok.

George, what are the ‘restrictions in freedom’ you mention?

Government managed programs for almost anything restrict the freedom of choice of its citizens. Socialism restricts individual economic activity and limits the creation of independent businesses. It also sets the terms and conditions for labor independently of the choices of workers. Government managed health care systems generally set the prices to be paid for treatment and drugs (and in most cases also the treatments available) , limiting the otherwise independent suppliers of both and usually innovation and the development of new, improved techniques.

Nearly all such government management of the lives of its citizens is offered as the solution to some problem, usually the unequal or unfair distribution of wealth generally, or of the specific services themselves. However, in most cases the result is at best a fairly uniform mediocrity: in some it is poverty and catastrophe (consider Venezuela). In every case there is a loss of personal freedom.

Our country was founded on a principal of minimalist government, with then strictly limited and enumerated powers assigned to the Federal government, and a stated precedence for local government management of most issues, precisely to preserve the freedom and autonomy of our citizens.

We have evolved in many ways since then and Federal & State government intervention in the lives of our citizens has grown into new areas in an increasingly complex society. Happily we have done this sometimes reluctantly, and generally with more restraint than other countries. Much of this is necessary and beneficial, but nearly all of it has unforeseen side effects, most of them bad, many sufficient to negate or worsen the very "problem" they were created to solve (consider government managed and subsidized student loans).

Biden, Warren propose new plans to combat climate change

Interesting graphic on the correlation between religion and candidate support.

It is indeed !

Thanks

Yes, quite stunning. Note that Sanders boldly describes himself as "not particularly religious".

It looks like people who are less enslaved to dictated beliefs are freer of mind to move to something different.

I’m agnostic.

Bernie has explained his religion by saying, “When other people hurt, I hurt.” I like that religion.

Well it hurts to watch socialists talk about raising wages in a society/economy where people already drive and shop too much, and the resulting development is deforesting the land and preventing it from being reforested.

It hurts to watch socialists pretend like the answer to a spoiled consumerist society is to make more money spoil more people, in the name of equality.

Just as it hurts to watch your beloved children stomp and cry during temper tantrums because they are spoiled and stubbornly opposed to seeing what's good for them, it hurts to see people like Biden, Sanders, Warren, and AOC stubbornly pursue socialism.

When are the Democrats going to see that austerity, discipline, and transportation/infrastructure downsizing reforms are better solutions for poverty than pumping more money through the economy?

When are they going to see that giving people more purchasing power, to spend money that will stimulate more business and land-development is bad for the environment and sustainability and no amount of windmills or solar panels or electric cars are going to cause land-use and infrastructure to reform?

They have to see the big picture, but they can't because they have to appease the short-sighted visions of prosperity that their base currently holds.

It's also interesting if you project how independents will fall. My assumption (not well tested) is that Democrats as a whole are less religious, Republicans are more religious and independents are in the middle. If that is right, a candidate like Biden would be more successful with independents. I also wonder how this correlates with age. If older people are more religious and older people like Biden, that correlation might not be a reflection of religion so much as a reflection of the Sanders/Biden age affinity gap.

Just going by my own gut and not any sort of data (in others worth nothing, lol), I think it is the latter.

I believe your observations above are accurate, particularly with respect to Biden's prospects in the Democrat primary. However there may be other, perhaps more compelling, factors at work in the general election. The increasingly stark contrast between the vitriolic anti-Trump factions (here on A2K and in our shared world) and the general health of our economy and international situation is likely to turn many 'undecided' voters away from the increasingly hate filled "never Trump" forces.

Age could indeed be a factor: young left-leaning voters are likely to be less religious and more radical politically than their parents, on average.

However, independents are NOT in the middle. They are all over the political spectrum. They have no common characteristic, apart from feeling uncomfortable with both of the two major parties. One shouldn't put all the "independents" in one ideological box because what defines them is precisely their reluctance to be in that box.