Sanders: ‘Nobody I Know Who Is Running For Office Talks About Defunding The Police’

 

Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday with host Jake Tapper, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) pontificated that the majority of Americans prefer his leftist policies while insisting “nobody I know who is running for office talks about defunding the police.”

Sanders argued, “When you talk about raising the minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour, when you’re talking about expanding health care to all people as a human right, when you talk about effectively taking on climate change, when you talk about making public colleges and universities tuition-free, these are not far-left ideas. These are commonsense ideas that the majority of the American people support.”

In an analysis of the progressive plan to make college “free,” National Review noted in 2018:

While “free community college for all” programs promise to increase the number of college graduates for relatively little cost, national data reveal it to be a poor strategy. According to a recent study by Indiana University, only 30 percent of community-college students completed their two-year program within six years, and only 7.7 percent completed a bachelor’s degree at a four-year institution within a six-year timeframe. More significantly, almost half of all first-time community-college students — 47.3 percent — stopped attending without earning any type of degree.

Jason Delisle of the American Enterprise Institute also addressed potential problems with the plan:

Funding shortages and limited access aren’t merely theoretical effects of free college; they are a standard part of the international experience with it. For example, Finland offers free public universities, but it can’t afford to offer them to all citizens. Its universities end up rejecting two-thirds of applicants each year. And when public universities — especially the elite institutions — have to ration limited seats, they raise admissions standards, denying entry to low-income students who tend to have lower test scores than their more affluent peers. That exact pattern was what ultimately convinced Australia and England to abandon their free-college policies and start charging tuition decades ago. Access to higher education actually increased as a result.

During his appearance on CNN, Sanders also posited, “Nobody I know who is running for office talks about defunding the police,” adding, “What we talk about is making police officers accountable, making sure that police departments do what they can do best, figuring out how you deal with mental illness, how you deal with homelessness, whether those are, in fact, police responsibilities, making sure that police officers are not killing innocent African-Americans.”

On Friday, in the wake of some Democrats, including Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), having bitterly criticizing the hard-left members of her party for their rhetoric after the Democrats lost seats in the House of Representatives, Senator John Warner (D-VA) was asked, “Do you agree sir, that the progressives need to reform their ‘reform language’ and not use something like ‘defund the police’ which is so easy to mischaracterize?” Warner answered, “I think the ability — using terms like ‘defund the police’ have led to Democratic losses in this past year.”

Sanders also boasted, “Young people voted overwhelmingly for Biden. And young people, by and large, are the most progressive generation facing this country.”