Bernie's first instinct (as was yours above) is to attack the pollsters simply because the data is inconvenient. But...(horrors)...the polling group was NBC...not exactly known as GOP friendly. Interesting.
Voters are bad. People vote these yahoos into office. As much as I hate Abbott and Cruz, I hate morons that vote for them more.
My first instinct is to attack the poll (or more accurately, the story/narrative being spun about it) which is engineered to gin up anger in the lizard brain. "What? Lazy entitled kids spending MY money on PHONES?!?!?!" If you give people largely between the ages of 25-39 an extra $300 bucks a month, do you actually expect them to not spend some of it on non-essentials? People's 'living' budgets (food, shelter, utilities, debt service, etc) are largely fixed and don't change month to month. So yeah, that extra money is going to go to non-essentials because there's nowhere else for it to go in the immediate term. Did you also know that this survey lumped investing into 'non-essentials'? So much for encouraging saving I guess? Also, from the pollsters themselves: This is just a classic case of ragebait and chasing clicks. The fact that "liberal" NBC led the charge on this should give you pause about how the true motivator here is the fight for your attention.
I looked over the poll and I don't think it's what is being represented. Actually, it definitely is not. NBC is not a polling group. The polling group was intelligent.com using pollfish. I didn't see anywhere where NBC even paid for it, not sure why Bill Maher said that. Firstly - polls are terrible at predicting behavior. So much so that you don't do it in any kind of legitimate study. They have no weight because, drum roll - the predictability from them is close to zero unless it's something you know it already going to happen (will you brush your teeth tomorrow?). Secondly, online polls are notoriously inaccurate because of sampling bias. And most importantly, they sample is made up of people who are no longer students. In other words, people already in the workforce. You don't know how many of them are currently making x salary or struggling with y debt - and from the poll there was nothing about normalizing it to the current population of students with debt.
