The Brits and the Europeans on here love Bernie Sanders because they are all products of the "Welfare State". They are used to having their hands out, they have never experienced anything else Sanders wants to give everything free of charge, not seeming to realise you never really appreciate anything unless you have worked for it.
I'm neither Brit nor European.
The main reason I support Sanders because he isn't going to go around the world selecting countries to bomb. Clinton is the least hawkish of the remaining candidates, and her resume includes Iraq and Libya. ISIS and anarchy, respectively, along with hundreds of thousands of deaths.
As an Indian, I also am a fan of welfare states. Some people classify India as one, and we do have huge government programs, but not much spending (as a proportion of GDP), so I don't know. I have never been handed anything by this welfare state. Instead, all the handouts I received were from my parents, since they were rich enough that they could afford to put me in a private school, take the time to teach me after school, and could pay for my college.
What I do know is that these welfare programs are the difference between life and death for infants and mothers, between a hand-to-mouth existence and a semi-stable life for many villagers, and between destitution and not-hopelessness for widows. I know that these programs are filled with corruption and leakages, but the newer ones are better -- and anyway, that's an argument to fix corruption, not abolish the program.
I know that in the west, social mobility is declining rapidly. That the wealth of your parents can determine how well your schooling goes, especially since people who dislike the "welfare state" don't think it's worthwhile to provide pre-school for kids. I know that in the world's sole superpower, people can go destitute if they get ill. Maybe they
really appreciate doctors now that they must pay through their noses, but I think they'd appreciate them well enough if they got treated for free too.
