JustOneMinute: That Big Debate Last Night

That Big Debate Last Night

America was undoubtedly riveted by the Biden-Sanders debate. FWIW, Biden seems to have responded well to a mix of rest and Adderall. Oh, I say that - he might have just been hopped up on Sudafed. The old SudaFed. Worked for me!

Bernie stuck to hammering his fifty-year old solutions to the current crisis, which made him seem even more unplugged than usual. A line from his closing statement stuck with me (and NO, I'm not going to look it up. My memory is MY truth!). His gist: To address the coronavirus crisis we must address what is wrong with America. Why are we propping up oil companies when 500,000 people are sleeping under bridges?

Biden came off as a guy with actual executive branch experience. Bernie came off as a guy with fifty years experience in freshman dorm bull sessions. (Yes, AOC is his inevitable heir.)

At one point Bernie was bemoaning the idea that the Fed would be giving banks an additional trillion in liquidity at a time when something bad is happening to someone else somewhere else (Was it a cat stuck up a tree? Maybe!). Biden snorted another Sudafed and explained that absent bank loans a lot more cats would get stuck up trees. Or something... hmm... Didn't I read that confusion is one coronavirus symptom? Either Joe or I should get tested.

GROAN: Here we go.

Bernie Sanders: (30:29)
But to answer your question where we are right now, we need to stabilize the economy, but we can’t repeat what we did in 2008. Joe voted for that. I voted against it. Because we have got to do more than save the banks or the oil companies. Our job right now is to tell every working person in this country, no matter what your income is, you are not going to suffer as a result of this crisis of which you had no control.

Ilia Calderón: (30:56)
Vice President Biden.

Joe Biden: (30:56)
Had those banks all gone under, all those people Bernie says he cares about would be in deep trouble. Deep, deep trouble. All those little folks… we’d have gone out of business… they’d find themselves in the position where they would lose everything that they had in that bank, whether it was $10 or $300 or a savings account. This was about saving an economy, and it did save the economy, and the banks paid back and they paid back with interest. I agree with Bernie, some of them should have gone to jail. That was the big disagreement I had in terms of bailing out, but the question was, they paid back. In addition to that, also part of that was bailing out the automobile industry, saving thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs over time. He voted against that as well.

BRING ON THE DANCING UNICORNS: The Times only glances at the absurdity of Bernie's ideas on health care and the coronavirus:

In an early barb directed at Mr. Biden, Mr. Sanders said it would take a direct confrontation with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries to remedy the situation, including enacting his proposal for a “Medicare for all”-style system that he has championed.

“Do we have the guts to take on the health care industry, some of which is funding the vice president’s campaign?” Mr. Sanders asked.

But Mr. Biden pushed back aggressively on the notion that Mr. Sanders’s signature proposal could mitigate the virus, invoking Europe’s hardest-hit country.

“With all due respect to Medicare for all, you have a single-payer system now in Italy,” he said, arguing that such a system “would not solve the problem.”

Well, yes. Biden's actual quote was more forceful:

With all due respect to Medicare for all, you have a single-payer system in Italy. It doesn’t work there. It has nothing to do with Medicare for all. That would not solve the problem at all.

Left unremarked: Bernie's Medicare For All financing pipe dream includes using (low) Medicare reimbursement rates for hospitals and their workers. No one takes that seriously, yet Bernie rattles on like this:

We’re spending so much money, and yet we are not even prepared for this pandemic. How come we don’t have enough doctors? How come hospitals in rural areas are shutting down?

Well, how will paying doctors and hospitals less bring out more supply and keep rural hospitals open, hmm?

Posted by Tom Maguire on March 16, 2020 | Permalink

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