The common sense sound of Bernie Sanders
by digby
Watching the right wing go looney tunes over Bernie Sanders is so much fun I’m beginning to enjoy politics again. They’re so used to having their basic assumptions validated all the time that when somebody takes them on directly they get very agitated. Matt Bruenig at Demos points to one perfect instance:
Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said this:
If 99 percent of all the new income goes to the top 1 percent, you could triple it, it wouldn’t matter much to the average middle class person. The whole size of the economy and the GDP doesn’t matter if people continue to work longer hours for low wages and you have 45 million people living in poverty. You can’t just continue growth for the sake of growth in a world in which we are struggling with climate change and all kinds of environmental problems. All right? You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.
Naturally, some media sorts exploded with self-satisfied criticism (I, II, III, among many others). Jim Tankersley’s response at Wonkblog was typical:
The literal implication of that last sentence is that there some kind of a national trade-off between antiperspirant/Air Jordan variety and food for children. This makes sense if you believe that the government should be allocating the resources in the economy — in this case, directing fewer of them to personal hygiene and footwear and more to child nutrition.
It makes less sense if you look at economic history.
Except of course, this is not at all what Sanders is arguing. While I don’t expect the man on the street to necessarily catch Sanders’ drift here, self-styled wonks should see it immediately.
Whenever someone argues that we should distribute the national income more evenly so as to reduce poverty and inequality (as Sanders does), the very first thing someone says in response is that doing so will reduce growth and innovation. Sanders is mocking this argument, saying he’d gladly cut poverty and inequality even if it meant a reduction in superficial product innovation.
If the company that determined there was big money to be made by innovatively telling teen boys that using a certain brand of deodorant would cause attractive women to have sex with them decided not to go through with creating Axe because taxes were too high, Bernie is saying he is OK with that. You might have less brands to choose from on the deodorant aisle, but on the plus side kids will get to eat.
Bernie is not arguing, contrary to what Tankersley suggests, that we spend too much buying deodorant. This should be pretty obvious as he didn’t talk about the quantity of deodorant being consumed, but instead the dizzying (and socially useless) number of products in the deodorant category. The massive prizes our economic system pays out to someone who can capture deodorant market share with slick advertising may indeed incentivize them to innovate new branding strategies, but, Bernie amusingly asks, would cutting that incentive really be so bad?
This is the most substantive argument in the presidential campaign so far, and may be the most substantive argument uttered in electoral politics for a long while.
Contrary to Bruenig, I actually think the man on the street easily gets this. That there something wrong about spending ridiculous sums on various brands of consumer items which are basically the same while allowing children to go hungry is a common sense observation. I hear people say it all the time. I’ve said it. It’s not that anyone thinks the government should take over the market and ban all competition and innovation, it’s that we think any society that can afford to provide such a vast array of similar consumer goods should also be able to take care of its children. That it doesn’t is shameful.
Good for Bernie Sanders for saying this on the campaign trail. Maybe he’ll even make it socially acceptable for politicians to talk like real people again without having to sound like a conqueror or a cowboy. There are a lot of real people in America who don’t sound that way.
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