Of course they were delusional, that's all the workinhg class and soon the fallen out liberal class that'll struggle to pay their student debts. My point is that while Clinton would've obviously been less of a catastrophe, it wouldn't have made a significant impact, that's the delusional part. It's not in their interest to do so since that's not the constituency they serve. In fact, republicans and energy monopolies are more likely to invest in perilous short term exploitation with some hourly wage shit jobs trickle down.
You're missing my point. Bernie would've been able to do shit, and Clinton would've been able to do shit with a republican congress. And even if they had somehow managed to pull out a slim majority and then blew up the fillibuster, the moment they did anything major Republicans would have a rally, take a chamber of Congress and prevent laws from being adjusted. No law is perfect from the moment it is written and will eventually need to be adjusted, Obamacare(It should've been different from the start, but it could've done well if reworked as problems came up) is a good example of that.
And even if Bernie Sander rapid fired through his campaign promises in the first 2 years, most economists saw his plans as leading to nothing less than economic disaster.
I'll cite the site you used earlier
http://www.economist.com/news/unite...es-would-sink-sanders-economic-plan-vote-what:
A costing of Mr Sanders's plans by Kenneth Thorpe of Emory University, using more conservative assumptions, found that the plan was underfunded by nearly $1.1 trillion (or 6% of GDP) per year. If Mr Thorpe is right, higher taxes will be required to make the sums add up. In 2014 Mr Sanders' own state, Vermont, abandoned a plan for a single-payer system on the basis that the required tax rises would be too great.
Getting health-care costs down is easier than it sounds. Mr Sanders hopes to save a bucketload on administration. But 20% of health spending flows to doctors, nurses and the like. A study published in Health Affairs, a journal, in June 2015 found that the average nurse earns about 40% more, and the average doctor about 50% more, than comparably educated and experienced people in other fields. To bring costs down to British or Canadian levels, these salaries would have to fall. Half a million Americans work in the private health-insurance industry, which would shrink or disappear if Mr Sanders had his way.
Mr Sanders' plans tend to suffer from a fallacy of composition. Although the average American might not mind paying higher taxes instead of a health-insurance premium, some—such as firms that do not provide health insurance—would face big losses. With such concentrated costs, Mr Sanders's plans would have no chance of making it past Congress, even an improbably friendly one.
So, no, Bernie wouldn't have fundamentally changed anything and I have serious doubts that his base would deal well with the disappointment of finding out that fact.
Economic boons and contractions are cyclical.
You don't say? Wow, I never knew this. Thanks for pointing that out. Really.
Clinton was a natural progression of Reagan, who had to fight inflation for a large market shock, with a few corrective measures in place. Wage increase was married to a gutted social security, unemployment was affected by the rise of the industrial prison complex and mass imprisonment. NAFTA had negative effects in wages despite gains in profits for corporations. Clinton oversaw the dot com bubble and a favourable exchange rate, both which has very little with his specific policies.
http://auapps.american.edu/blecker/www/research/01blecker.pdf
Clinton was not a natural progression of Reagan, Reagan cut taxes to such an insane extent that H Bush was forced to raise them. The only other president that tried to handle the economy like Reagan was W. Bush.
Falling of the bottom-line wage which you keep citing was going to happen regardless with constantly increasing levels of automation decreasing the amount of decent paying unskilled jobs, on the other hand middle class jobs increasing was not necessarily going to happen anyway.
You keep citing the dot com bubble, but all you've proven is that it was a factor for economic growth at the time but, considering that the economy kept growing except for one or two spots afterward, you've yet to make a reasonable case for why the median wage shot up.
On NAFTA:
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/naftas-impact-u-s-economy-facts/
Twenty-three years later, scholars and policy makers often disagree about the impact that NAFTA has had on economic growth and job generation in the U.S. That impact, they say, is not always easy to disentangle from other economic, social and political factors that have influenced U.S. growth.
Supporters of NAFTA estimate that some 14 million jobs rely on trade with Canada and Mexico combined, and the nearly 200,000 export-related jobs created annually by NAFTA pay an average salary of 15% to 20% more than the jobs that were lost, according to a PIIE study.
Which both explains the loss of low wage jobs and the rapid increase in high wage jobs in the years immediately afterward. Not all economists agree completely on the net positive of this, obviously, but you definitely heavily favor citing the ones that don't.
During the late 90's, wages between skilled labour and unskilled labor saw a dramatic gap, caused by a large uptake of the former that benefitted urban areas mostly. Clinton repealing Glass Steagal precipitated the financial breakdown where commercial bank's new mortgage underwriting standards came from these banks allowing themselves to take extra risks through a new networking system between commercial banks and investment banks. Debt peonage allows for unsustainable rising consumption with impossible to pay debts and mortar collapses.
Did I mention repealing Glass Steagal? Yeah, repealing it was a bad idea in hindsight(and it wouldn't have happened if Clinton didn't have to work with a Republican Congress), but being against ever removing regulations in order to prevent a repeat(and labeling anyone who wants to get rid of any regulation "neoliberal") is as absurd as the Republican view that never increasing taxes is a good thing. I'm well aware of what happened there.
David Harvey explains it best with "accumulation through dispossession". Where neoliberalism doesn't generate wealth but instead redistributes it upwards, restoring or even creating class power.
It's a bit of a rant I know, but it's key to understand how voracious the system is and that tiny corrections placed by democrats are beyond lacking.
David Harvey is a PHD in
geography, not politics, not economics, and a self-proclaimed marxist(not necessarily a bad thing, but it gives a rather obvious bias) who rants about politics and economics. Yeah, I read the whole thing, and as you said it's a rant that basically blames every single economic problem of the last 30 years on "Neoliberals" and gives them absolutely none of the credit for the times that median wage grew with the economy in order to form his argument.
I'm really not sure why you highlighted the bit about the slavetrade either, as I'm pretty sure every candidate is against that, but half of the things you highlighted don't even vaguely apply to Bill Clinton or most democrats. There's a bit of intellectual dishonesty involved in where you see that X and Y(But A, B, C, D, etc. aren't) are true so Z must be the democrat's final plan and they are all "neoliberals".
