Checking in from r/all. I hope this isn't taken amiss, but I feel like nobody's talking about this on this sub, and as a lifelong democrat, this is the major thing that would prevent me from voting for Sanders.
Look up his net worth, he's broke AF for a senator.
And a problem you guys will have to face that I don't think I've ever seen discussed here is that to a lot of people, this is unsettling.
Although the figures are a bit squiffy, before his wife retired/left her post, he was making something like $280,000-500,000/yr as a household income.
To have a net worth equal to your annual income isn't laudable or good. That's a financial management strategy that will have Dwayne Johnson's character from Ballers beating down your door to save you from yourself. Especially when you're talking about income numbers like he has and his age; nobody making mid-6 figure sums in his 70's should have a net worth that could barely buy a middle class home in New Jersey. He's literally poorer than my high-school educated 25-years-widowed grandma, who was a hospice nurse her whole career, and they're the same age. This, despite Sanders personally earning about 5x what she ever did in a single year.
Sanders is generous, but he's not Warren Buffet generous. The numbers tell a different story: This is a guy who doesn't have a good grip on how money is earned, retained, or grown. As a (middle class) business owner, that scares me because it means he's undertaking to attempt to regulate and grow enterprises like mine without even a basic understanding of how they work, which makes sense, because that's typically about where career politicians fall on the spectrum of economic fluency.
I'm happy that he isn't in the pocket of industry, but he needs to understand how money is earned and grown on some basic level of he can never be presidential. If he's not going to learn (and it's a bit late to teach the dog new tricks), he needs to convince me by hiring some god tier economic policy advisers and unequivocally stating that his personal notions of equality and class will be filtered through a practical and achievable lens by people who deal in what's possible and practical and not what is utopian or idealistic.