In going through each item individually, it's clear to see that the agenda is truly 12 steps backwards. Away from a free market, and away from the institutional foundation that is key to prosperity in America.
1. Rebuilding Our Crumbling Infrastructure
In Sanders' first proposal, his goal is twofold. First, to artificially create 13 million "decent paying" jobs, to be accomplished by the second goal of $1 trillion "investment" in infrastructure. To start out with, that is a staggering amount of taxpayer money to be spending on anything. Moreover, his use of the catch-all term "infrastucture" is dubious, as it includes not only roads and bridges, but also schools and waste water plants.
While infrastructure repair may be necessary for the future, Sanders' proposed spending levels are outrageous. Moreover, part of the justification for this massive sum is to "create jobs". One of the most enduring economic fallacies in America today is that the government can, in fact, create jobs. The workers in this proposed infrastructure plan would be paid by the federal government, which in turn can only get funds through taxation or borrowing.
Either way, that money has to be diverted from other uses in order to be used by the government. While it is true that these 13 million people would have jobs (however temporarily), it's also true that those trillion dollars could have been used to potentially create more or better jobs, groundbreaking technological advancements, or a whole host of other things. None of that will come to fruition, however, because the money was taxed away to be spent on something else.
2. Reversing Climate Change
Next, Sanders proposes sweeping subsides to "sustainable energies" among other environmental pet projects. The entire project reeks of cronyism (which Sanders purports to be against) by picking winners and losers in the energy market.
Alternative energies are famously expensive and comparatively inefficient. Diverting more tax dollars in the form of subsidies would indeed "create good paying jobs", as Sanders claims, but only for those in the alternative energy space. What about the lost jobs in coal and oil? What about the more expensive power and heat for Americans across the country? Sanders is silent on this, but these concerns are likely beneath his lofty goal of an American-led climate change reversal.
3. Creating Worker Co-ops
This marks the first appearance of Sanders' economic nationalism, where he proposes "new economic models", such as a co-operative, in order to counter corporations who "send jobs to China". I actually agree with part of his outrage (over the massive targeted tax breaks given to said corporations), but Sanders doesn't seem to oppose cronyism in general, just for the stuff he doesn't like.
His solution is to "provide assistance" from the government in order to restructure business as worker owned co-operatives, wherein workers invest in and own the business, and collectively make democratic business decisions. Can you imagine the chaos of just a mid-sized company making every decision democratically? There would be an immense time cost in just the administration of such an affair, and it would result in more time bogged down in democratic meetings and less time actually working. Far from increasing job creation and productivity, the plan would easily flounder in a loss of productivity.
There are indeed situations where worker owned co-ops may make economic sense, but pushing for it at a national level would be a failure.
4. Growing the Trade Union Movement
Currently, union membership in the United States is at 11.1%, a .2% fall from the year prior. Sanders believes that it is only through collective bargaining and union membership that workers will be able to get higher wages and benefits. While it is true that union members, on average, have higher wage increases than non-union workers, there's more to the story. To begin, the more expensive it is to employ a worker, the less workers will be employed. In other words, unions can often lead to less jobs, not more.
Unions are in general a benefit to workers in them, but not necessarily always. In many workplaces (particularly, in states without a Right to Work law), workers are compelled to pay union dues (even if they deny association with the union). A portion of these dues are channeled into the political arm of these unions, who in turn funnel to the money to politicians like...Bernie Sanders.
Indeed, in many states, union membership is a condition of employment, regardless of what the individual worker wants. Though Sanders does not target Right to Work laws (at least, not here), it's clear that he remains on the side of Big Labor.
5. Raising the Minimum Wage
In one of his more widely accepted proposals, Sanders calls for an increased minimum wage. Though not cited here, he supports a $15 per hour national minimum wage. Approximately 3.3 million Americans (roughly 1% of the nation) currently earn at or below the minimum wage. And roughly 42% of American workers earn under his proposed minimum of $15 per hour. Isn't this a good thing? Shouldn't we want people to make mroe money?
The push for a higher minimum wage (for the benefit of workers) is largely counterproductive. The recent strikes specifically from fast-food workers to earn $15 per hour have led to increased automation in fast-food restaurants, again resulting in less employment, not more. It's economic lunacy to assume that you can double the cost of labor with no negative consequences on employment. Businesses don't have a massive store of money with which they can fund such huge increases in labor costs. The best solution, then, is to eliminate the need for labor as much as possible with greater capital investment.
Even if it weren't for that, businesses simply can't afford to continue employing the same amount of people at a doubled wage. There would be lay-offs and even greater unemployment as a result.
While Sanders pushes this plan so that nobody who works full time "should live in poverty", it will simply make even more people live in poverty with greater unemployment.
6. Pay Equity for Women Workers
Continuing his pandering to his base, Sanders next proposes complete pay equity, that is, "equal pay for equal work". He's addressing the alleged wage gap that exists between perfectly equal men and women working the same job, and cites that women only earn 78% of what men earn.
At face value, this assertion already shouldn't hold much water. To begin, businesses could save a tremendous amount of money by solely employing women (which doesn't happen). The wage gap exists for many reasons, but blind discrimination isn't one of them.
First off, there's the problem of aggregation. To compile this statistic, the Census Bureau just compares male annual earnings to female, again, in aggregate. This ignores the fact that men and women tend to make different choices in the field of work they go into. In general, more men than women go into high-earning jobs, and vice versa. This is not an issue of mass societal discrimination, it's simply a matter of choice.
Another key cause of the gap is that women, moreso than men, tend to leave the workforce to raise children or after marriage. Men also tend to work in more higher-risk jobs (like fishing and logging), which again means more pay.
Apparently for Sanders, none of that matters, and he feels free to continue propogating the myth of the discrimination wage gap.
(You can find Part 2 here)
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