I like both Bernie and Hillary. I like Bernie’s promise to regulate and tax Wall Street. The Walmart employees are taxed on their salary, the factory worker is taxed on his salary. On the same basis, the one who makes his/her income from stock trading on Wall Street should be taxed on the income.
Bernie is in favor of regulating Wall Street and I agree with this completely. When all businesses were local and competitive, there was little need for government regulation. The competition for workers boosted wages and the competition for business kept prices in check. The entrepreneur made a reasonable profit because his competition had basically the same costs and expenses as he had. When there is no competition, government needs to regulate both wages and profits to protect the consumer.
In the small town where I live, there were three car washes and a basic wash cost $2.00. One of them bought out the other two and suddenly a basic wash was $6.00. Where there is no competition, the consumer gets gouged.
I also like Bernie’s promise to break up the big banks. When I worked for Gamble Store, B.C. Gamble bought the Western Auto chain. But the Federal Trade Commission would not let him combine the businesses because it would be too many stores in too small an area and would tend to create a monopoly. He sold Western Auto again for a profit. What happened to these kind of regulations? Today, I see businesses buying or joining the competition on a regular basis and becoming bigger and bigger and eliminating the competition that served as a controlling factor.
I like Bernie’s idea of expanding Medicare to cover everyone in the nation. We have the highest cost health care in the world and only a mediocre result, at least partly because insurance companies are skimming off such a high percentage of the health care dollar. The insurance companies are not in the business of protecting the health of their clients. They are in the business of making the highest profits possible at the expense of their clients. I once had a doctor complain to me that he could not practice the best medicine he knew because some nurse employed by the insurance company to keep costs down was always second guessing him without ever seeing the patient.
Both Bernie and Hillary have expressed concern for the middle class, for eliminating the wage gap between men and women and for raising the minimum wage. And Hillary has a long history of concern for medical care.
Hillary has a lot of foreign policy experience and already knows the leaders of many of the nations of the world. I am not convinced that the United States needs to demonstrate its greatness by being a bully among the nations of the world. ISIS is a real and serious threat to world peace. They need to be dealt with in a serious way but they are not a threat to the United States itself. They are a threat to individuals within the United States but statistically not as great a threat as that posed by Right Wing Christian Terrorists.
I believe Hillary would be better at working with other nations to neutralize the ISIS threat with a minimum of US military involvement rather than injecting a major part of our nation’s military into the midst of a religious war between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.
Considering all factors, if I am able to get to the Iowa Caucus (since I don’t drive after dark), I will be caucusing for Hillary Clinton.
At the present time, the ticket I would most like to see is Hillary Clinton for President and Bernie Sanders for Vice-President. Considering the respect they showed for each other in the early part of the campaign, I believe they could work together and complement each other for the good of our nation.