He's not even advocating real reform, that's the fucked up thing.
I'm making a thread on this later I think (I wanna hash it out beyond this simplistic angle) but he's not chagning anything on a basic level. He's just trying to take our already broken systems and then slap his changes on top of them, which misses the point.
Free college education is a GREAT IDEA, if you completely reform the American education system and gear it towards producing technically qualified workers like you see in other westernized countries. You can't do free college with the UK-styled 4-year-bachelors program that forces 2 years of gen ed before you even get to your specialist program. It is too expensive and no other country in the world does it like that, it's absurd. I actually liked Obama's idea about promoting and reforming Junior Colleges as tech schools, but a better movement would be to stop demanding that all Federal jobs require a bachelor's degree. Change the standard, completely change the system, don't just waffle on about "free education" when the underlying issue is the system itself that would remain unaltered.
The reason I dislike Bernie so much is because he's taking ideas that I genuinely support and want to see, and butchering them. You only get ONE CHANCE at a single payer system, if you fuck it up, we turn our back on it and never go back. Same with college reform, same with immigration reform, same with income shifts and tax plans and every significant change you can make. You need to do it right for it to last.
Honestly, my biggest personal failing in this cycle?
Out of all my Facebook notes, statuses, social media stuff in general that people actually pay attention to, that I've devoted to attacking Bernie's platform, every single one is more or less entirely on the basis that the budgeting doesn't add up, which albeit true leaves out the fact that things like the "free college" plank are naive as they currently exist
at best for the reasons you just laid out.
The financial sector "reforms" do nothing to address potential negative side effects on the economy and in fact he pretends that none exist.
The criminal justice reforms ignore the fact that the overwhelming majority of prisoners are held at the state and local levels in states that are not gonna be willing to cooperate short of their governors being sent to the Phantom Zone & their rural populations being deported to a parallel universe.
The wage increases ignore differences between costs of living at the local level and in fact his campaign's basically disavowed Alan Krueger's research on the matter.
Like, there's a few good things in there - lifting the payroll cap, spending on infrastructure - that would be hard to fuck up. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be the focus.