“if we want to beat Donald Trump and achieve big progressive goals, socialism is not the answer.”
John Hickenlooper
John Hickenlooper, a former governor of Colorado and mayor of Denver, stood before several thousand of the Democratic party’s most liberal activists and was boo’ed over the things he said.
Things such as “socialism is not the answer.” And that most people don’t want to give up their private health insurance for a government-run system. And that “we shouldn’t try to tackle climate change by guaranteeing every American a government job,”.
“Medicare for all may sound good, but it’s actually not good policy, nor is it good politics.”
John Delaney
Former Maryland congressman John Delaney criticized the proposed single-payer system that its backers have branded Medicare-for-all and received a chorus of boo’s.
“My plan to address gun violence is simple — we will make it harder for people who should not have a gun to get one,”
Cory Booker
Cory Booker proposes that every gun owner should be required to apply for a federal license, a process that would include not only a background check, but also safety training and an interview.
On the not-so-publicised down-side is that registries are useless on their own terms, which is why they have been abandoned in failure almost everywhere they have been tried.
Perhaps the best example of such failure comes from Canada, which founded a long-gun registry to great fanfare in 2003 and . . . abolished it just nine years later after it had cost over one thousand times more than was projected and had failed to help solve a single crime.
In Canada, in New Zealand, and at various levels within the United States, gun registries have routinely been exposed as expensive, pointless, and, because they divert resources from anti-crime measures that actually work, counterproductive.
Nothing more about Senator Booker’s plan gives us confidence that it would end differently.