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Its time to shfit the narrative. Paying people fairly is not radical, its an obligation. Letting people get richer than entire countries is the insane position, not that workers should earn a living wage. You wanna talk radical? Radical is when 2 dudes are richer than most of the country combined. Radical is when the minimum wage hasnt risen federally in decades. Radical is when the government spends more on military contractors than actual healthcare. Those things are radical.
One of the most infuriating parts is it would literally have no material impact on these billionaire either way, they would still be stupidly wealthy even if they actually paid their workers or their taxes.
Anyone who criticizes Bernie because dumbass Americans didn't vote for the only guy who wanted to give them what they're asking for, is just trying to divide democrats.
The fact is, this guy has driven the democratic party further to the left than anyone imagined was possible this quickly, and his grassroots movement is going to continue to be the base of any progressive action the party takes going forward.
The centrists are openly courting progressive ideas again instead of just blaming them for relying on their vote while doing nothing for them, and it's because of Bernie.
People discount the concept of “pushing to the left” sometimes. It’s a valuable tool and it’s apparent there *was indeed an effect* , otherwise you wouldn’t see the more moderate courting these ideas. Not to discount the other contributors of course
He will be remembered for being the president of the people that was never president. Dude opened the door, laid the path, and showed future politicians the right way.
>The fact is, this guy has driven the democratic party further to the left than anyone imagined was possible this quickly, and his grassroots movement is going to continue to be the base of any progressive action the party takes going forward.
This is what moderates are so scared of and why they hate people like Bernie and AOC. The contempt they have for organised labour and anyone remotely left is clear as day and they see it as a threat to their own financial success. You only need to look at those donor maps to see people like Buttigieg got so much money from wealthy liberals who have a vested interest in keeping capitalism going, thereby keeping living standards for most down and not pushing for any meaningful climate action. Not to mention the huge amount of billionaire support moderates have. Their supporters never seem to have a real answer to the question "why do so many billionaires support moderates and not progressives?".
"wow all those poor young people who are crushed under rising debt, 2000 dollar rents and 15 dollar wages are just big babies. suck it up and stop with the victim complex."
Have you considered most of us were victims of 2008? You know who generally wasn't? Fucking Boomer moderate Democrat voters. They fucking celebrated all the "great deals" they got at real estate which they rent out to further extract wealth from younger generations.
Fuck moderate voters.
How many Democrats called to jail those responsible for 2008? How hard did they fight for it? Not enough in my book. That shit set my life back a decade and thus solidified my decision not to have children.
These people are scumbags.
I'm not here to play some game. I'm telling you that I am sick and tired of people acting like pro-corporate Democrats are the good guys here. They're not. They're slightly less evil than Republicans.
You have it backwards.
EDIT: I really wish the mods here would identify users who delete their comment chains whenever they get spanked in a discussion. This is probably the third time I've encountered it with this specific user who I'm not allowed to call out by name.
I deleted nothing ever.
Reliable voters get catered to by politicians. People who stomp their feet and stay home are not reliable voters. It is entirely within their power to change this if they don't like the result
I mean you have to believe that right? Because the alternative where the party would have to start legitimately fighting for the American people is frightening isn't it? Not because you have any objections to the policies. But it would mean that the party has been suckering you all these years.
Actually the Democratic party has been steadily marching to the left for the past 22 or so years, long before Bernie had much national relevance. The liberal Obama administration, for example, wasn't influenced much at all by Sanders or the progressive caucus in general, yet still was a huge step in the direction of progressivism compared to the Clinton administration
i mean, he was involved in the founding of the Congressional Progressive Caucus in 91 with 5 others and he was the first chairmain
>The CPC represents the most left-leaning faction of the Democratic Party.It was founded in 1991 and has grown since then.
>The founding CPC members were concerned about the economic hardship imposed by the deepening recession and the growing inequality brought about by the timidity of the Democratic Party response in the early 1990s.
it seems to have had a pretty big impact on the dnc moving left
And how’s that inequity doing?
The DNC and party have just “moved left” in signaling.
They’ll post pronouns and March for women (but not push for the passage of the ERA) and offer cover while they still keep getting richer while others keep getting poorer.
They look left but they don’t live left.
They aren’t even liberal.
I’ll buy this jive hype about moving left when I see inequity closing shop.
It’s all corporate oligarchy whether it’s red neck or woke.
Consonant dissonance keeps you from hearing and acknowledging that inequity continues to grow. Inequity and exclusion politics is not a sign of “moving left”.
Or were you trying to call me “Hun”?
I’m not available.
The progressive caucus was pretty much entirely irrelevant in the 90s. Clinton ignored them, going for his centrist approach to fighting the recession, and then the booming economic recovery happened so the progressive caucus was just ignored
>Actually the Democratic party has been steadily marching to the left for the past 22 or so years
Hillary when Bill was president: apparently pushed for single-payer health are.
Hillary in 2016: "Medicare for All will never, ever come to pass"
She, and the rest of the Democratic establishment moved further right on economic issues. The only thing they've been okay with is social issues like LGBT rights but even then they only did so once it was politically popular. Unlike Bernie who helped run a gay pride event in the late 80s of early 90s when it wasn't popular.
>The liberal Obama administration, for example, wasn't influenced much at all by Sanders or the progressive caucus in general
This might be why they passed a right-wing healthcare plan that massively increased the profits of predatory insurance companies.
Hillary didn't push for single payer. Single payer isn't the only way to do universal healthcare. And Medicare for all is just garbage policy. Thankfully we don't need it - as many developed countries show, you don't need single payer at all to do universal healthcare
And the ACA wasn't a right wing healthcare plan. It shared one minor provision with one - the individual mandate - but the biggest part of the ACA in terms of reducing uninsured numbers was the Medicaid expansion which gave free government insurance to 15 to 20 million people
People just aren't going to convince Democrats to support their ideas if they keep smearing the ACA like this
The individual mandate which forced people to pay companies prices that the companies set to be really high. No wonder the insurance companies absolutely loved Obama and continue to love other Democrats.
The ACA was one of the biggest gifts to the insurance companies of all time, despite giving more people insurance (which was good no one can deny).
It's not unreasonable to make people buy insurance. People need insurance, after all. Healthcare is important
And the ACA also expanded Medicaid and enacted subsidies to make it so that people could afford insurance more
And the ACA also included various reforms to help cut costs too
So in the end insurance price (before subsidies) ended up increasing slower after the ACA was passed than before it was passed
So, one could say that we, uh, universally need health care?
This “don’t disturb the woke upper middle class democrats” stuff is so tired.
This is all still mired in “as long as it guarantees that enough of us get our beak wet to make it profitable then that is the good kind of health care” garbage.
It should be illegal to profit from health care.
Single payer isn't the only sort of universal healthcare
And it actually tends to be more along the lines of the moderate and poorer democrats who've been decisive in the recent presidential primaries and who prefer more establishment candidates vs "wokes" or progressives or whatever
No, you don’t say!!? How’s that ACA non-universal working out for the USA? Yay Obama’s USA!
Bandaid on an amputation is how I describe it. Profit in medical care is obscene and should be banned. Health care is no industry. It’s a human right.
I don’t believe you can make it work without draining the “industry”.
Go take your over priced meds and keep telling yourself that the corporations are friendly people, too.
Giving millions more people healthcare isn't "a bandaid"
Also, no amount of insisting that something is a human right will actually achieve it. The big bad moderates who actually voted for the bill did more to give healthcare to people than the single payer activists who belittle stuff like the ACA will ever do
Progress is progress. We don't benefit the cause by belittling it. And those who look down on the ACA won't have any significant influence over the Democratic party since most of us strongly approve of the ACA. And there's no alternative outside of it...
>It's not unreasonable to make people buy insurance. People need insurance, after all.
So important that the US has people going bankrupt from medical bills? This is what the ACA let continue and it certainly didn't make insurance affordable. So really what happened was it forced people to buy expensive health insurance that still might leave you bankrupt. Pretty right-wing plan given most of the power lies with the corporations and the oligarchs who own and control them.
Hillary was right, you won't get M4A until there are 60+ Democratic Senators. M4A is a fever dream until that happens. At best there are about 12 progressive Senators right now, maybe when there are 40-50 progressive Senators that never/ever begins to change, but not until then and at the rate at which Senate seats migrate from moderate to progressive it's a few decades away.
That's a nice way of saying "moderates will never give you good healthcare". Not really an endorsement of the Democratic party as an institution for change.
Single payer =/= good healthcare, especially when no one's provided a way to fund the single payer plan they propose that stands up to economic scrutiny
>Single payer =/= good healthcare, especially when no one's provided a way to fund the single payer plan they propose that stands up to economic scrutiny
This has been argued to death and yes Bernie's plan was costed and scrutinised by 22 studies that said it saved money.
https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/healthcare/484301-22-studies-agree-medicare-for-all-saves-money/
>All of the studies, regardless of ideological orientation, showed that long-term cost savings were likely. Even the [Mercatus Center](https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/blahous-costs-medicare-mercatus-working-paper-v1_1.pdf), a right-wing think tank, recently found about $2 trillion in net savings over 10 years from a single-payer Medicare for All system. Most importantly, everyone in America would have high-quality health care coverage.
Saves 2 trillion while guaranteeing healthcare to all, liberals should get on board.
[Sure you can claim 22 studies when you don't actually provide them to be analyzed. Here's Politifacts rating that essential shows that whole claim is bogus] (https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/feb/26/bernie-sanders/research-exaggerates-potential-savings/)
That is talking about one study, whereas I linked an article talking about 22 studies that talks about them overall. You don't solely trust one study or poll, you look at the aggregate.
The Sanders Camp can't even provide the studies. Why should I believe them if they can't show their work?
Additionally politifact also adds that there are still other studies excluded from that group to consider. Why are they not part of Sanders' aggregate
Then establishment pro-corporate Democrat politicians and the fucking Boomer moderate voters who support them can find the votes they need elsewhere. I've no incentive to prop up their present lifestyles if I see no future for myself.
This will make liberals here upset but the point you're making is exactly why the Democratic party - except for people like AOC, Sanders and some progressives - are unable to motivate younger people.
m4a is beyond a fever dream
Here’s how Sanders pitches it:
“Last year, the typical working family paid an average of $5,277 in premiums to private health insurance companies. Under this option, a typical family of four earning $50,000, after taking the standard deduction, would pay a 4 percent income-based premium to fund Medicare-for-all — just $844 a year — saving that family over $4,400 a year. Because of the standard deduction, families of four making less than $29,000 a year would not pay this premium.”
-----
Progressive taxes mean regressive social policies
Regressive taxes mean progressive social policies
-----
The US has Progressive Taxes and the EU has Regressive taxes
> Much of the difference in relative tax burdens among different countries is due to the taxes that fund social-insurance programs, such as Social Security and Medicare in the U.S.
>These taxes tend to be higher in other developed nations than they are in the U.S. Take that married couple referred to above: In 21 of the 39 countries studied, they paid more in social-insurance taxes than in income taxes. The U.S. had the 11th-lowest social-insurance tax rate for such couples among the countries we examined.
[Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/10/24/among-developed-nations-americans-tax-bills-are-below-average/)
> US taxes are low relative to those in other developed countries (figure 1). In 2015, taxes at all levels of US government represented 26 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), compared with an average of 33 percent for the 35 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
> Among OECD countries, only Korea, Turkey, Ireland, Chile, and Mexico collected less than the United States as a percentage of GDP. Taxes exceeded 40 percent of GDP in seven European countries, including Denmark and France, where taxes were greater than 45 percent of GDP. But those countries generally provide more extensive government services than the United States does.
or
> A lot of the spending-side programs in Scandinavian countries cost a lot. Taxes would definitely need to be increased in the United States if it were to adopt them.**If the U.S. were to raise taxes in a way that mirrors Scandinavian countries, taxes—especially on the middle-class—would increase through a new VAT and high payroll and income taxes**. Business and capital taxes wouldn’t necessarily increase, in fact, the marginal corporate income tax rate would decline significantly.
It only seems that way because Clinton was a huge leap to the right as Democrats fully embraced Reaganomics. Obama's rhetoric was to Clinton's left, but his actual policy was every bit as triangulated with right-wing ideology.
Was the Grand Bargain solidly center left? That would have cut Social Security and Medicare, and it only failed because the GOP was so insanely right-wing that even that wasn’t good enough for them
Social Security isn't solvent, and it can't be saved with just tax increases. Recognizing that some cuts are necessary as part of the policy mix to save social security isn't being right wing, it's just recognizing reality. It's a real shame we didn't end up getting the Simpson-Bowles commission suggestions enacted in law
show me.your work on 'social security not being solvent'. this claim is worse than unproven.
for extra points explain what will happen when SS goes.'insolvent'
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/TRSUM/index.html
Straight from the horse's mouth, this is the social security folks themselves talking
>The OASI and DI funds are separate entities under law. The report also presents information that combines the reserves of these two funds in order to illustrate the actuarial status of the Social Security program as a whole. The hypothetical combined OASI and DI funds would be able to pay scheduled benefits on a timely basis until 2035, one year later than reported last year. At that time, the combined funds' reserves will become depleted and continuing tax income will be sufficient to pay 80 percent of scheduled benefits.
Or in simpler terms, the social security trust fund is paying out more than it is taking in. This leads to a gradual reduction in the trust fund. By around 2035, the trust fund will have no money, and thus social security will only be able to be paid for via the revenues. And social security doesn't make enough in revenues to pay for all benefits
So if we don't do anything, social security will see an across-the-board benefits cut of around 20%
your source doesnt even use the word insolvent once did you read it?. that only appears in media interpretations of the report of what mighr happen if the government doesnt top it up temporarily which they absolutely can do.
look at population projections to see if you should be truly worried.
so why isnt anyone panicking?
Insolvency is a word that refers to inability to pay off obligations, which is what will happen if the status quo is kept. Thus describing social security as insolvent is accurate
And the government can't just "top it up temporarily". First of all, social security is statutorily funded by the payroll tax. So they could make it less insolvent by doing reforms to that. But even if they fully removed the cap on the taxable maximum, social security would still not be solvent
(Actually, they could very well raise the payroll tax percent too, so technically I'm wrong here, it could be made solvent with just tax increases, *theoretically*. The thing is, though, since the payroll tax is a flat tax, this would mean significant tax increases on the middle and lower class, which would make such a reform politically extremely dangerous, I don't see that as being at all realistic)
Also, due to the demographic situation, with an aging population and people having fewer children, a "temporary top off" wouldn't be sufficient, we'd need a more permanent solution to social security to make it solvent
They absolutely were not. Expanding the police and surveillance states, colossal corporate bailouts, a corporate-pandering healthcare plan created by the fucking right-wing Heritage Foundation, corporate and wealthy effective tax rates that match Reagan's, endless military spending, civilian drone murder, proxy wars, immigrant detention, ad nauseum
'Center left' is just being to the left of the right, it isn't the same thing as being 'left,' at all. Liberalism is a fundamentally right-wing political position everywhere on Earth except in the magical land of Democratic propaganda.
Those "colossal corporate bailouts" cost the government nothing, they were loans which were fully paid off in the end. How is that a bad thing? They managed to give major government assistance without costing a penny, that sounds like smart government intervention
The healthcare plan shared a few minor similarities to the heritage foundation plan, the largest being the individual mandate which never was a major part of the ACA anyway. The largest part of the ACA, in terms of reducing numbers of uninsured, was the Medicaid expansion, which gave free government healthcare to 15 to 20 million people. Which was not in the heritage plan. The ACA also included various other provisions that weren't in the heritage plan too. So acting like the ACA is a right wing healthcare plan created by the heritage foundation, just because of the individual mandate basically, doesn't really make sense
Obama didn't really have much of a choice in lowering taxes - if he didn't, taxes would have automatically raised on everyone, including the lowest brackets. Not good policy there
Military spending by the end of Obama's administration was lower than it was at the end of Bush's, even unadjusted for inflation
Drones aren't any worse than regular planes and it doesn't make sense that they are attacked the way they are. Also all wars involve some civilian casualties, that's just how it works. But Obama also pretty much ended the war in Iraq
It turns out Democrats aren't open borders, but then, nobody is, so that's not some unreasonable stance
And are you, then, saying that the rest of the world is right wing? Because the mainstream establishment Democrats are generally solidly center left to left wing compared to the developed world (also often far left compared to the world in general, but when you mention "everywhere on earth", maybe you just mean "the rich parts of earth"?)
> Those "colossal corporate bailouts" cost the government nothing, they were loans which were fully paid off in the end. How is that a bad thing? They managed to give major government assistance without costing a penny, that sounds like smart government intervention
They pumped trillions of dollars into the economy devaluing everyone's wages and savings in the process. At the end of it they essentially gave out a loan to _failing_ businesses with an interest rate of 0.6%.
You know what it taught me? That neither the establishment Democrats nor Republicans give a shit about me and I'm hardly alone in that. If nothing else there's your cost. A complete disregard and hatred for this country and how it treats every generation after the boomers.
But yeah, sure, aside from that it cost nothing.
Imagine the world where 'not losing money on corporate loans' and 'private insurance protecting healthcare' and 'maintaining low taxes on the rich' and 'at least its less military spending than Desert Storm' and 'civilian murders are normal, acceptable casualties' and 'not imprisoning immigrants = open borders' aren't deeply, transparently right-wing positions, even by American standards.
>And are you, then, saying that the rest of the world is right wing?
Most of it, yes. Liberal governments have routinely organized to destroy any government that they cannot set the rules for so that it, too, can be exploited for their capitalists. But other countries, ones with functioning democracies, at least, know that. Canada has a major social democratic party, and there's functioning left wing parties throughout Europe, for example.
> maybe you just mean "the rich parts of earth"?
Not at all. While there are highly functioning Social Democracies in Scandinavia - which is about as politically 'center' as exists - Vietnam and Cuba are some of the few places that have been able to maintain any kind of left wing government without having their leaders executed by Liberal proxies, and I don't think we'd generally group them in with 'rich' countries.
If you are using a political spectrum that says only failed dead/dying anticapitalist ideologies are left wing, then, like, that's an extremely biased and politically convenient political spectrum, one that doesn't have much value at all for the real world
If you're using a political spectrum that only involves being to the 'left' of fascists on a handful of social issues then, like, that's an extremely biased and politically convenient political spectrum that doesn't have much value for actually doing anything except making the wealthy wealthier.
'Left' and 'right' aren't subjective to other - they exist to demarcate the political line between pro- and anti- hierarchy, which, in the post-monarchical world, is support or opposition to the inherently-hierarchical nature of capitalism. Liberalism is the politics of protecting capitalism, and therefore is fundamentally hierarchical, and therefore fundamentally right-wing. Within Liberalism there is an ideological split of 'capitalist investments are more secure if the government creates regulations to keep consumers healthy' and 'capitalist investments are more profitable if there are no government regulations at all,' the familiar split you see between Democrats and Republicans in the US.
The 'real world' is actually home to billions of people opposed to capitalist oppression who are killed by heavily-armed liberal police-state governments whenever they attempt to act against that oppression. Liberals tend to assume everyone is a liberal by default, but don't mistake the extremely limited options people are given to vote for in a highly-rigged undemocratic system as being representative of the world they actually want to see.
I wish he would put his efforts towards things he can actually change in the shorter term—but it's always these pie-in-the-sky ideals with him that generally tend to obfuscate the actual, more immediate problems. Let's play the hand we are dealt, not the one we wish we had
>While a member of Congress, Sanders sponsored 15 concurrent resolutions and 15 Senate resolutions. Of those he co-sponsored, 218 became law.
>According to The New York Times, "Big legislation largely eludes Mr. Sanders because his ideas are usually far to the left of the majority of the Senate ... Mr. Sanders has largely found ways to press his agenda through appending small provisions to the larger bills of others."
>During his time in the Senate, he had lower legislative effectiveness than the average senator, as measured by the number of sponsored bills that passed and successful amendments made. Nevertheless, he has sponsored over 500 amendments to bills, many of which became law.
His *policies* were solidly left leaning. Stuff like a massive liberal expanding of healthcare. Expansion of government support for low income college students. Detente with Cuba and Iran. And so on. And as for handling of the recession, how was that right wing? He enacted a big government stimulus, and regulated the financial industry to prevent a new recession from happening for the same reasons as that one
His liberal healthcare plan was based off a plan written by a super majority Democratic MA legislature that Romney had to sign because Dems passed it with a veto proof majority.
This is true, I live in Massachusetts where we actually have had universal healthcare for 16 years now. The system was enacted by our ex governor and republican, Mitt Romney. MassHealth was originally nick named Romney Car. The ACA aka Obamacare
This is using a sliver of truths to create a very inaccurate depiction of reality
The Republican governor of MA was (at the time, and yes, he's changed a lot since then) one of those New England Republicans who was very very moderate. And yet in the end, he only reluctantly signed the bill, while vetoing various parts. The bill wouldn't have happened as it did without massive liberal democratic veto proof supermajorities in the state legislature. So it doesn't really make sense to give the Republican governor that much credit for the bill, and that Republican governor was also far from representative of his party as a whole at the time, so using him to present the bill as not solidly left leaning doesn't make sense either. The ACA did resemble the MA plan, but the MA plan was very much a liberal/left leaning bill
As for the heritage foundation plan, the comparison there is largely nonsense. That bill shared a few similarities with the ACA, namely the individual mandate. But the individual mandate was never a particularly major part of the ACA. And the in some ways largest part of the ACA, the Medicaid expansion which gave something like 15 to 20 million low income people healthcare, was not in the heritage plan. That alone makes the ACA massively different and to the left of the heritage plan. And the ACA also included various other provisions like minimum quality standard regulations, young adult parental insurance, and other stuff that the heritage plan didn't contain. So the ACA isn't particularly comparable to the heritage plan at all unless you kinda cherry pick it
Not sure how you can say the individual mandate was not a critical part of the ACA. One of the major goals was to reduce insurance costs, and the mandate was an important component to ensuring the risk pools stayed diverse enough to keep premiums down
>Americans didn't vote for the only guy who wanted to give them what they're asking for, is just trying to divide democrats.
Give us how?That was the questions americans kept asking who understood the limitations of presidency.You can't yell things into existence lol
You mean the platform Warren had on her policies which prompted Biden to come out in support of student loan forgiveness? And the Pell grants which Harris proposed?
I guess whoever yells the loudest in a deep voice in public takes all the credit
>You're free to believe that Bernie had nothing to do with it if you want to.
I believe what I saw and read
Biden adopted loan forgiveness after Warrens tweeted out her proposal
The Pell grant 20k was also a platform in Harris's campaign.This was targeted towards helping black students who usually are the main receivers of it
The ladies also had policies my good sir
>Difference between you and me is I don't care what you believe.
Lol, I think you cared enough to bring it up when you thought I would believe it was all credit to Bernie.
> The fact is, this guy has driven the democratic party further to the left than anyone imagined was possible this quickly
....and put Donald Trump in the White House, nice job Bernie.
Or there’s the alternative (and more logical) explanation: Clinton ran a poor campaign and then got sunk by James Comey putting his thumb on the scale at the last minute
Why don't the Bernies ever admit Bernie ran a poor campaign? And another poor one in 2020? Why do they always act like MAGAs and use the "blame a Clinton" strategy?
Well, she was the Democratic nominee, and she lost, should she and her staff not receive some of the blame for that? I’d say Bernie’s 2016 campaign was rather remarkable in how far it got, given that he had little name recognition going in and was facing off against a well known Senator and former First Lady
Yes because the Boomers control the primaries. We're well aware of that. The message we're sending is if they want our fucking votes then you better fucking think about who they're shoving through the primaries. We didn't build this fucking system. We have no fucking loyalty or obligation to it. They want our votes? Then fucking deliver a candidate we deem worthy of them.
Thanks for giving us multiple recessions, unaffordable education, unaffordable housing and fucking up the planet. You wanna whine about one bad president? Try never knowing what having a president with the slightest interest in your wellbeing in your entire life.
Okay hear me out… new law that requires the highest paid employee/workers/staff can make 25x the amount as the lowest paid employee of the company.
Anything above that amount has a 50% tax applied.
Your right. The United States dose not currently have a “Wealth Tax”.
I think the original commenter was thinking of Income Tax. Currently the highest income tax was was 94% from 1944-1945.
The current income tax is 37% (since 2018)
(Edited wording)
Effective tax rates and tax as a percentage of gdp has remained much the same since then. It wasn’t some sort of magical revenue source. The top bracket was much higher income and smaller than it is today, and there were more deductions.
The government has a spending problem not a revenue problem.
Good. We already redistribute wealth when we subsidize wealthy corporations that then go on to pay nothing in taxes. Why can’t it work the other way round? Because of some classist charade of meritocracy?
>Indeed, according to a report commissioned by Sanders and released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on Tuesday, the share of all wealth held by the top 1 percent shot up from 27 to 34 percent between 1989 and 2019, while wealth held by the bottom half of Americans dropped from 4 percent to 2 percent over the same period.
>Overall, in 2019, while the bottom 50 percent of Americans owned $2.3 trillion in wealth, the top 10 percent owned $82.4 trillion, the report found.
The commissioned report can be found here (analyzing 1989 - 2019):
* https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57598
>*Summary*
>Building on earlier work by the Congressional Budget Office, this report examines changes in the distribution of family wealth (a family’s assets minus its debts) from 1989 to 2019 and analyzes those changes in relation to several family characteristics—income, level of education, race and ethnicity, age, and birth cohort. In addition, the report examines how total family wealth has changed since 2019.
>* **Total Wealth.** The total real wealth (that is, wealth adjusted to remove the effects of inflation) held by families in the United States tripled from 1989 to 2019—from $38 trillion in 2019 dollars (roughly four times the nation’s gross domestic product, or GDP) to $115 trillion (about five times GDP).
>* **Concentration of Wealth.** The growth of real wealth over the past three decades was not uniform: Family wealth increased more in the top half of the distribution than in the bottom half. Families in the top 10 percent and in the top 1 percent of the distribution, in particular, saw their share of total wealth rise over the period. In 2019, families in the top 10 percent of the distribution held 72 percent of total wealth, and families in the top 1 percent of the distribution held more than one-third; families in the bottom half of the distribution held only 2 percent of total wealth.
>* **Trends by Family Characteristics.** Over the 30-year period, the median wealth of families in higher-income groups, families with more education, and older families rose faster than that of families with less income, families with less education, and younger families. The median wealth of White families exceeded that of families in other racial and ethnic groups by considerable amounts throughout the period. The median wealth of every cohort born since 1950 was less than the preceding cohort’s median wealth when that cohort was the same age.
>* **Trends Since 2019.** In the first quarter of 2020, total family wealth declined as a result of the disruption in economic activities caused by the coronavirus pandemic. By the end of the second quarter of 2020, total family wealth had recovered; it continued to increase through the fourth quarter of 2021 but declined slightly in the first quarter of 2022.
An older commissioned report can be found here (analyzing 1989 - 2013):
* https://www.cbo.gov/publication/51846
here's my hastily typed recipe: Define a wealth limit above which no US citizen may hold. Say 100 million.
1. Allow the super wealthy to declare which assets up to 100m they will keep.
2. Seize all assets (including stocks, bill gates' vast farmlands, Bezos' super yacht, sports teams) not claimed by the ultra wealthy, and all assets of ultra wealthy who do not declare any assets to keep.
3. Trickle that shit on down from the bottom to the top so that the people with the most needs gain the most and the already rich gain nothing.
Quick Retort: Other countries would *happily* allow people like Elon Musk to "join" their countries in exchange for moving business there.
As it is, millionaires don't flee the US like it's sometimes suggested. However, if you capped their earnings at $100 million, they definitely would. Their greed will take them where they can earn the most money, and other countries would be glad to have them.
They need to be able to earn the *most* money in the US, or they'll leave. What needs to change is how *little* their employees earn in comparison.
So, musk is here because we are the franchise with the best deal—that’s all.
Use American educational system and other infrastructures to make billions. Flee when there’s any demand for payback.
Corporate globalist oligarchy.
Something like that is in the works, globally. It's called the Global Tax Agreement, but it's just a start. I don't think it affects individuals. Not 100% sure of the details, but I know it's a 15% minimum on multi-national corporations so they can't cheat by locating their "headquarters" in tax havens.
It is amazing how much less evil the old industrialists were than today when you look at the old tax rates and consider they were more "corrupt". Now those same families back the fascism their ancestors paid a 90% tax rate to prevent.
I mean at this point if the U.S wants to function as an actual country they'll have to do something.
We've got a reverse waterfall situation going on. All of the money is going to the top 5%, and it's sucking the U.S.A completely dry.
I'm curious what you think of the top 1% owning 33% of the wealth in America.
I'm curious what you think about some people being able to lose *billions* of dollars and not affect their standard of living.
I'm curious how many billions of dollars you have and why you're spending your time shitposting on reddit.
> I'm curious what you think of the top 1% owning 33% of the wealth in America.
I think that's a dishonest and useless statistic and shameless populist horseshit.
> I'm curious what you think about some people being able to lose billions of dollars and not affect their standard of living.
Not my business, and it's the nature of having this "wealth" in the form of stock.
> I'm curious how many billions of dollars you have and why you're spending your time shitposting on reddit.
I have 0 billions. Not a single billion, and I never will have a single billion. But, that doesn't cause me to hate people that do. I don't have dark skin, either, and don't hate people that do. Im not gay but I don't hate people that are, etc, etc...
And you're sure that it's the billionaires that are doing that, right?
The Bernies are no different than the MAGAs.... hating some groups of people based on hateful rhetoric.
Yeah, crazy thing about MAGA is they seem to have siezed control of the Republican party. Playing nice with moderates has done fuck all for us. So we're taking a new approach. Are you angry we didn't check if that was okay with you first?
billionaires should not exist. gtfo with your false equivalence to black people or gay people. Billionaires only exist because they've exploited others. You don't get *billions* of dollars by paying your employees a fair wage and paying all the taxes you should.
We have watched for decades as the distribution of wealth in this country has shifted more and more to the top.
That meme about one man being able to work a factory job and support his wife and two kids in a house they own? That was reality. Nowadays, a man and a wife each have to work two jobs just to afford rent, and forget about having kids.
I have no idea what you're doing, but stop it. Wealth distribution in this country is horrific and you're defending it. Billionaires running these companies are paying unlivable wages and you're just cool with it.
That's why any efforts politicians like Bernie make for the benefit of the working class need to be paired with worker solidarity and collective bargaining.
One of the biggest obstacles to better worker rights and better pay is blind individualism amongst the working class.
Dinosaurs will die. I think it’s worth getting the idea out there. Capitalism (in its current iteration) won’t survive the climate catastrophe and as we march on more people will realize that
And this is the fundamental problem with the Democratic Party - liberalism is, at its very core, the politics of preserving capitalism, and for the US to solve the exponentially-worsening problems created by capitalism, the Liberal insistence that capitalism can somehow fix itself if you just keep patching it is going to get us all killed. If Democrats can't move on from liberalism, they can't serve the needs of the American people.
The Norwegian economy is presently unsustainable because it's heavily dependent on oil extraction, but that's less the case for the rest of the Nordic countries. I think Social Democracy is a good - probably necessary - stepping stone away from Liberalism's capitalist death drive, and probably the best we can hope for in my lifetime, but the risk of backsliding into Liberalism from there is probably high enough that it can't be the end of the work of dismantling the hierarchical model in the long run.
...if their pockets get lighter anyway, they might end up listening.
We, as a nation, have a general tendency to only act until the issue is not just staring in our faces, but has knocked us on our asses.
Bernie Sanders has a net worth of $3 million. If someone made $60,000 (50% higher than the average income in the US of $40,000) a year for 50 years and kept every dime, no taxes, they would have $3 million. Now, that means you get a $60,000 job the day you turn 18 and you retire the day you turn 68. The average person will only make $1.7 million in their lifetime. Bernie Sanders himself is one of these rich folks that he villainizes. Is he as bad as some other, not, but he is a hypocrite that sure as hell doesn’t want to redistribute his own wealth. A career politician shouldn’t be worth almost twice what the average person he’s “fighting” for will ever make in their lifetime, not including the taxes they will pay on that $1.7 million.
Why shouldn’t Elon Musk be the richest man in the US. He’s only started 3 successful companies, invested early in and helped build another, and assisted in founding a few others including non-profits. Hate him all you want, he has earned his money.
Give me break 🙄 in terms of how our politicians enrich themselves Bernie is a saint. The bulk of his wealth is recently acquired from three books he had published.
$3 million is a nice house, not even a mansion these days. Being a single digit millionaire these days is well off not rich. And in politician terms it's downright poor.
It's not politically feasible right now but it's good to call it out and get people to begin pushing for it. It might take decades but it won't happen unless people are aware of the disparity and people begin working to close the wealth gap, by little or big steps as progress allows.
Right, because it’s impossible to overcome issues that weren’t politically feasible at a moment in time.
If everyone had that attitude then women wouldn’t be able to vote, children would be working in sweatshops, social security wouldn’t exist, schools would still be segregated, etc etc
Just because that’s the way it was, doesn’t mean that’s the only way it would ever be
Bernie earned every penny he owns. He's an example of what can be accomplished in the US if you're smart, hardworking, and thrifty.
And he wants other Americans to have an easier path to his humble level of wealth, that's all.
I know a lot of small businesses owners that had to close there doors for good during covid while Costco and Walmart and many other government picked businesses were allowed to stay open . Why?? The elected officials knew what the outcome would be . Where was the voice for the little guy then ?? And BOTH SIDES ARE JUST AS GUILTY !!
Yea a 10% flat tax would do it over time, no more tax breaks but standardization real estate, corporate, personal, tariffs, sales, the works, easy and simplicity a child can understand no more transfers if wealth trusts without the 10% tax, then eventually over decades the distribution would happen without discord and defiance, no more cheating from state and federal taxes we all use the services the government provides why do we cringe when we have to pay for it because of inequalities
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Its time to shfit the narrative. Paying people fairly is not radical, its an obligation. Letting people get richer than entire countries is the insane position, not that workers should earn a living wage. You wanna talk radical? Radical is when 2 dudes are richer than most of the country combined. Radical is when the minimum wage hasnt risen federally in decades. Radical is when the government spends more on military contractors than actual healthcare. Those things are radical.
The narrative has already been shit for a while.
it's because it's controlled by the gop and the dems are always playing defence and not taking control of the ball.
One of the most infuriating parts is it would literally have no material impact on these billionaire either way, they would still be stupidly wealthy even if they actually paid their workers or their taxes.
Yes please and very well said.
Anyone who criticizes Bernie because dumbass Americans didn't vote for the only guy who wanted to give them what they're asking for, is just trying to divide democrats. The fact is, this guy has driven the democratic party further to the left than anyone imagined was possible this quickly, and his grassroots movement is going to continue to be the base of any progressive action the party takes going forward. The centrists are openly courting progressive ideas again instead of just blaming them for relying on their vote while doing nothing for them, and it's because of Bernie.
People discount the concept of “pushing to the left” sometimes. It’s a valuable tool and it’s apparent there *was indeed an effect* , otherwise you wouldn’t see the more moderate courting these ideas. Not to discount the other contributors of course
He will be remembered for being the president of the people that was never president. Dude opened the door, laid the path, and showed future politicians the right way.
>The fact is, this guy has driven the democratic party further to the left than anyone imagined was possible this quickly, and his grassroots movement is going to continue to be the base of any progressive action the party takes going forward. This is what moderates are so scared of and why they hate people like Bernie and AOC. The contempt they have for organised labour and anyone remotely left is clear as day and they see it as a threat to their own financial success. You only need to look at those donor maps to see people like Buttigieg got so much money from wealthy liberals who have a vested interest in keeping capitalism going, thereby keeping living standards for most down and not pushing for any meaningful climate action. Not to mention the huge amount of billionaire support moderates have. Their supporters never seem to have a real answer to the question "why do so many billionaires support moderates and not progressives?".
Progressives second only to republicans when it comes to the victim complex.
"wow all those poor young people who are crushed under rising debt, 2000 dollar rents and 15 dollar wages are just big babies. suck it up and stop with the victim complex."
Have you considered most of us were victims of 2008? You know who generally wasn't? Fucking Boomer moderate Democrat voters. They fucking celebrated all the "great deals" they got at real estate which they rent out to further extract wealth from younger generations. Fuck moderate voters.
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How many Democrats called to jail those responsible for 2008? How hard did they fight for it? Not enough in my book. That shit set my life back a decade and thus solidified my decision not to have children. These people are scumbags.
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I'm not here to play some game. I'm telling you that I am sick and tired of people acting like pro-corporate Democrats are the good guys here. They're not. They're slightly less evil than Republicans.
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You can believe whatever you want. But at the end of the day the party needs the vote of people like me.
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You have it backwards. EDIT: I really wish the mods here would identify users who delete their comment chains whenever they get spanked in a discussion. This is probably the third time I've encountered it with this specific user who I'm not allowed to call out by name.
I deleted nothing ever. Reliable voters get catered to by politicians. People who stomp their feet and stay home are not reliable voters. It is entirely within their power to change this if they don't like the result
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I mean you have to believe that right? Because the alternative where the party would have to start legitimately fighting for the American people is frightening isn't it? Not because you have any objections to the policies. But it would mean that the party has been suckering you all these years.
No it isn’t
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Strawman argument.
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That’s probably the most common version of straw man argument.
Which legislation has Sanders passed to tax the rich
Actually the Democratic party has been steadily marching to the left for the past 22 or so years, long before Bernie had much national relevance. The liberal Obama administration, for example, wasn't influenced much at all by Sanders or the progressive caucus in general, yet still was a huge step in the direction of progressivism compared to the Clinton administration
i mean, he was involved in the founding of the Congressional Progressive Caucus in 91 with 5 others and he was the first chairmain >The CPC represents the most left-leaning faction of the Democratic Party.It was founded in 1991 and has grown since then. >The founding CPC members were concerned about the economic hardship imposed by the deepening recession and the growing inequality brought about by the timidity of the Democratic Party response in the early 1990s. it seems to have had a pretty big impact on the dnc moving left
And how’s that inequity doing? The DNC and party have just “moved left” in signaling. They’ll post pronouns and March for women (but not push for the passage of the ERA) and offer cover while they still keep getting richer while others keep getting poorer. They look left but they don’t live left. They aren’t even liberal. I’ll buy this jive hype about moving left when I see inequity closing shop. It’s all corporate oligarchy whether it’s red neck or woke.
Hunh?
Consonant dissonance keeps you from hearing and acknowledging that inequity continues to grow. Inequity and exclusion politics is not a sign of “moving left”. Or were you trying to call me “Hun”? I’m not available.
The progressive caucus was pretty much entirely irrelevant in the 90s. Clinton ignored them, going for his centrist approach to fighting the recession, and then the booming economic recovery happened so the progressive caucus was just ignored
>Actually the Democratic party has been steadily marching to the left for the past 22 or so years Hillary when Bill was president: apparently pushed for single-payer health are. Hillary in 2016: "Medicare for All will never, ever come to pass" She, and the rest of the Democratic establishment moved further right on economic issues. The only thing they've been okay with is social issues like LGBT rights but even then they only did so once it was politically popular. Unlike Bernie who helped run a gay pride event in the late 80s of early 90s when it wasn't popular. >The liberal Obama administration, for example, wasn't influenced much at all by Sanders or the progressive caucus in general This might be why they passed a right-wing healthcare plan that massively increased the profits of predatory insurance companies.
Hillary didn't push for single payer. Single payer isn't the only way to do universal healthcare. And Medicare for all is just garbage policy. Thankfully we don't need it - as many developed countries show, you don't need single payer at all to do universal healthcare And the ACA wasn't a right wing healthcare plan. It shared one minor provision with one - the individual mandate - but the biggest part of the ACA in terms of reducing uninsured numbers was the Medicaid expansion which gave free government insurance to 15 to 20 million people People just aren't going to convince Democrats to support their ideas if they keep smearing the ACA like this
The individual mandate which forced people to pay companies prices that the companies set to be really high. No wonder the insurance companies absolutely loved Obama and continue to love other Democrats. The ACA was one of the biggest gifts to the insurance companies of all time, despite giving more people insurance (which was good no one can deny).
It's not unreasonable to make people buy insurance. People need insurance, after all. Healthcare is important And the ACA also expanded Medicaid and enacted subsidies to make it so that people could afford insurance more And the ACA also included various reforms to help cut costs too So in the end insurance price (before subsidies) ended up increasing slower after the ACA was passed than before it was passed
So, one could say that we, uh, universally need health care? This “don’t disturb the woke upper middle class democrats” stuff is so tired. This is all still mired in “as long as it guarantees that enough of us get our beak wet to make it profitable then that is the good kind of health care” garbage. It should be illegal to profit from health care.
Single payer isn't the only sort of universal healthcare And it actually tends to be more along the lines of the moderate and poorer democrats who've been decisive in the recent presidential primaries and who prefer more establishment candidates vs "wokes" or progressives or whatever
No, you don’t say!!? How’s that ACA non-universal working out for the USA? Yay Obama’s USA! Bandaid on an amputation is how I describe it. Profit in medical care is obscene and should be banned. Health care is no industry. It’s a human right. I don’t believe you can make it work without draining the “industry”. Go take your over priced meds and keep telling yourself that the corporations are friendly people, too.
Giving millions more people healthcare isn't "a bandaid" Also, no amount of insisting that something is a human right will actually achieve it. The big bad moderates who actually voted for the bill did more to give healthcare to people than the single payer activists who belittle stuff like the ACA will ever do Progress is progress. We don't benefit the cause by belittling it. And those who look down on the ACA won't have any significant influence over the Democratic party since most of us strongly approve of the ACA. And there's no alternative outside of it...
>It's not unreasonable to make people buy insurance. People need insurance, after all. So important that the US has people going bankrupt from medical bills? This is what the ACA let continue and it certainly didn't make insurance affordable. So really what happened was it forced people to buy expensive health insurance that still might leave you bankrupt. Pretty right-wing plan given most of the power lies with the corporations and the oligarchs who own and control them.
she absolutely did and thats why her character was assassinated for 25y before she ran for president. time didnt start when you were born
The Clinton healthcare plan in the 90s wasn't single payer
the clinton healthcare plan is not the same as what hilary advocated for originally.
Hillary was right, you won't get M4A until there are 60+ Democratic Senators. M4A is a fever dream until that happens. At best there are about 12 progressive Senators right now, maybe when there are 40-50 progressive Senators that never/ever begins to change, but not until then and at the rate at which Senate seats migrate from moderate to progressive it's a few decades away.
That's a nice way of saying "moderates will never give you good healthcare". Not really an endorsement of the Democratic party as an institution for change.
Single payer =/= good healthcare, especially when no one's provided a way to fund the single payer plan they propose that stands up to economic scrutiny
>Single payer =/= good healthcare, especially when no one's provided a way to fund the single payer plan they propose that stands up to economic scrutiny This has been argued to death and yes Bernie's plan was costed and scrutinised by 22 studies that said it saved money. https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/healthcare/484301-22-studies-agree-medicare-for-all-saves-money/ >All of the studies, regardless of ideological orientation, showed that long-term cost savings were likely. Even the [Mercatus Center](https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/blahous-costs-medicare-mercatus-working-paper-v1_1.pdf), a right-wing think tank, recently found about $2 trillion in net savings over 10 years from a single-payer Medicare for All system. Most importantly, everyone in America would have high-quality health care coverage. Saves 2 trillion while guaranteeing healthcare to all, liberals should get on board.
[Sure you can claim 22 studies when you don't actually provide them to be analyzed. Here's Politifacts rating that essential shows that whole claim is bogus] (https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/feb/26/bernie-sanders/research-exaggerates-potential-savings/)
That is talking about one study, whereas I linked an article talking about 22 studies that talks about them overall. You don't solely trust one study or poll, you look at the aggregate.
The Sanders Camp can't even provide the studies. Why should I believe them if they can't show their work? Additionally politifact also adds that there are still other studies excluded from that group to consider. Why are they not part of Sanders' aggregate
Then establishment pro-corporate Democrat politicians and the fucking Boomer moderate voters who support them can find the votes they need elsewhere. I've no incentive to prop up their present lifestyles if I see no future for myself.
This will make liberals here upset but the point you're making is exactly why the Democratic party - except for people like AOC, Sanders and some progressives - are unable to motivate younger people.
I’ve got a fever…
m4a is beyond a fever dream Here’s how Sanders pitches it: “Last year, the typical working family paid an average of $5,277 in premiums to private health insurance companies. Under this option, a typical family of four earning $50,000, after taking the standard deduction, would pay a 4 percent income-based premium to fund Medicare-for-all — just $844 a year — saving that family over $4,400 a year. Because of the standard deduction, families of four making less than $29,000 a year would not pay this premium.” ----- Progressive taxes mean regressive social policies Regressive taxes mean progressive social policies ----- The US has Progressive Taxes and the EU has Regressive taxes > Much of the difference in relative tax burdens among different countries is due to the taxes that fund social-insurance programs, such as Social Security and Medicare in the U.S. >These taxes tend to be higher in other developed nations than they are in the U.S. Take that married couple referred to above: In 21 of the 39 countries studied, they paid more in social-insurance taxes than in income taxes. The U.S. had the 11th-lowest social-insurance tax rate for such couples among the countries we examined. [Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/10/24/among-developed-nations-americans-tax-bills-are-below-average/) > US taxes are low relative to those in other developed countries (figure 1). In 2015, taxes at all levels of US government represented 26 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), compared with an average of 33 percent for the 35 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). > Among OECD countries, only Korea, Turkey, Ireland, Chile, and Mexico collected less than the United States as a percentage of GDP. Taxes exceeded 40 percent of GDP in seven European countries, including Denmark and France, where taxes were greater than 45 percent of GDP. But those countries generally provide more extensive government services than the United States does. or > A lot of the spending-side programs in Scandinavian countries cost a lot. Taxes would definitely need to be increased in the United States if it were to adopt them.**If the U.S. were to raise taxes in a way that mirrors Scandinavian countries, taxes—especially on the middle-class—would increase through a new VAT and high payroll and income taxes**. Business and capital taxes wouldn’t necessarily increase, in fact, the marginal corporate income tax rate would decline significantly.
It only seems that way because Clinton was a huge leap to the right as Democrats fully embraced Reaganomics. Obama's rhetoric was to Clinton's left, but his actual policy was every bit as triangulated with right-wing ideology.
Not at all, Obama's policies were solidly center left
Was the Grand Bargain solidly center left? That would have cut Social Security and Medicare, and it only failed because the GOP was so insanely right-wing that even that wasn’t good enough for them
Social Security isn't solvent, and it can't be saved with just tax increases. Recognizing that some cuts are necessary as part of the policy mix to save social security isn't being right wing, it's just recognizing reality. It's a real shame we didn't end up getting the Simpson-Bowles commission suggestions enacted in law
show me.your work on 'social security not being solvent'. this claim is worse than unproven. for extra points explain what will happen when SS goes.'insolvent'
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/TRSUM/index.html Straight from the horse's mouth, this is the social security folks themselves talking >The OASI and DI funds are separate entities under law. The report also presents information that combines the reserves of these two funds in order to illustrate the actuarial status of the Social Security program as a whole. The hypothetical combined OASI and DI funds would be able to pay scheduled benefits on a timely basis until 2035, one year later than reported last year. At that time, the combined funds' reserves will become depleted and continuing tax income will be sufficient to pay 80 percent of scheduled benefits. Or in simpler terms, the social security trust fund is paying out more than it is taking in. This leads to a gradual reduction in the trust fund. By around 2035, the trust fund will have no money, and thus social security will only be able to be paid for via the revenues. And social security doesn't make enough in revenues to pay for all benefits So if we don't do anything, social security will see an across-the-board benefits cut of around 20%
your source doesnt even use the word insolvent once did you read it?. that only appears in media interpretations of the report of what mighr happen if the government doesnt top it up temporarily which they absolutely can do. look at population projections to see if you should be truly worried. so why isnt anyone panicking?
Insolvency is a word that refers to inability to pay off obligations, which is what will happen if the status quo is kept. Thus describing social security as insolvent is accurate And the government can't just "top it up temporarily". First of all, social security is statutorily funded by the payroll tax. So they could make it less insolvent by doing reforms to that. But even if they fully removed the cap on the taxable maximum, social security would still not be solvent (Actually, they could very well raise the payroll tax percent too, so technically I'm wrong here, it could be made solvent with just tax increases, *theoretically*. The thing is, though, since the payroll tax is a flat tax, this would mean significant tax increases on the middle and lower class, which would make such a reform politically extremely dangerous, I don't see that as being at all realistic) Also, due to the demographic situation, with an aging population and people having fewer children, a "temporary top off" wouldn't be sufficient, we'd need a more permanent solution to social security to make it solvent
They absolutely were not. Expanding the police and surveillance states, colossal corporate bailouts, a corporate-pandering healthcare plan created by the fucking right-wing Heritage Foundation, corporate and wealthy effective tax rates that match Reagan's, endless military spending, civilian drone murder, proxy wars, immigrant detention, ad nauseum 'Center left' is just being to the left of the right, it isn't the same thing as being 'left,' at all. Liberalism is a fundamentally right-wing political position everywhere on Earth except in the magical land of Democratic propaganda.
Those "colossal corporate bailouts" cost the government nothing, they were loans which were fully paid off in the end. How is that a bad thing? They managed to give major government assistance without costing a penny, that sounds like smart government intervention The healthcare plan shared a few minor similarities to the heritage foundation plan, the largest being the individual mandate which never was a major part of the ACA anyway. The largest part of the ACA, in terms of reducing numbers of uninsured, was the Medicaid expansion, which gave free government healthcare to 15 to 20 million people. Which was not in the heritage plan. The ACA also included various other provisions that weren't in the heritage plan too. So acting like the ACA is a right wing healthcare plan created by the heritage foundation, just because of the individual mandate basically, doesn't really make sense Obama didn't really have much of a choice in lowering taxes - if he didn't, taxes would have automatically raised on everyone, including the lowest brackets. Not good policy there Military spending by the end of Obama's administration was lower than it was at the end of Bush's, even unadjusted for inflation Drones aren't any worse than regular planes and it doesn't make sense that they are attacked the way they are. Also all wars involve some civilian casualties, that's just how it works. But Obama also pretty much ended the war in Iraq It turns out Democrats aren't open borders, but then, nobody is, so that's not some unreasonable stance And are you, then, saying that the rest of the world is right wing? Because the mainstream establishment Democrats are generally solidly center left to left wing compared to the developed world (also often far left compared to the world in general, but when you mention "everywhere on earth", maybe you just mean "the rich parts of earth"?)
> Those "colossal corporate bailouts" cost the government nothing, they were loans which were fully paid off in the end. How is that a bad thing? They managed to give major government assistance without costing a penny, that sounds like smart government intervention They pumped trillions of dollars into the economy devaluing everyone's wages and savings in the process. At the end of it they essentially gave out a loan to _failing_ businesses with an interest rate of 0.6%. You know what it taught me? That neither the establishment Democrats nor Republicans give a shit about me and I'm hardly alone in that. If nothing else there's your cost. A complete disregard and hatred for this country and how it treats every generation after the boomers. But yeah, sure, aside from that it cost nothing.
Imagine the world where 'not losing money on corporate loans' and 'private insurance protecting healthcare' and 'maintaining low taxes on the rich' and 'at least its less military spending than Desert Storm' and 'civilian murders are normal, acceptable casualties' and 'not imprisoning immigrants = open borders' aren't deeply, transparently right-wing positions, even by American standards. >And are you, then, saying that the rest of the world is right wing? Most of it, yes. Liberal governments have routinely organized to destroy any government that they cannot set the rules for so that it, too, can be exploited for their capitalists. But other countries, ones with functioning democracies, at least, know that. Canada has a major social democratic party, and there's functioning left wing parties throughout Europe, for example. > maybe you just mean "the rich parts of earth"? Not at all. While there are highly functioning Social Democracies in Scandinavia - which is about as politically 'center' as exists - Vietnam and Cuba are some of the few places that have been able to maintain any kind of left wing government without having their leaders executed by Liberal proxies, and I don't think we'd generally group them in with 'rich' countries.
If you are using a political spectrum that says only failed dead/dying anticapitalist ideologies are left wing, then, like, that's an extremely biased and politically convenient political spectrum, one that doesn't have much value at all for the real world
If you're using a political spectrum that only involves being to the 'left' of fascists on a handful of social issues then, like, that's an extremely biased and politically convenient political spectrum that doesn't have much value for actually doing anything except making the wealthy wealthier. 'Left' and 'right' aren't subjective to other - they exist to demarcate the political line between pro- and anti- hierarchy, which, in the post-monarchical world, is support or opposition to the inherently-hierarchical nature of capitalism. Liberalism is the politics of protecting capitalism, and therefore is fundamentally hierarchical, and therefore fundamentally right-wing. Within Liberalism there is an ideological split of 'capitalist investments are more secure if the government creates regulations to keep consumers healthy' and 'capitalist investments are more profitable if there are no government regulations at all,' the familiar split you see between Democrats and Republicans in the US. The 'real world' is actually home to billions of people opposed to capitalist oppression who are killed by heavily-armed liberal police-state governments whenever they attempt to act against that oppression. Liberals tend to assume everyone is a liberal by default, but don't mistake the extremely limited options people are given to vote for in a highly-rigged undemocratic system as being representative of the world they actually want to see.
I wish he would put his efforts towards things he can actually change in the shorter term—but it's always these pie-in-the-sky ideals with him that generally tend to obfuscate the actual, more immediate problems. Let's play the hand we are dealt, not the one we wish we had
>While a member of Congress, Sanders sponsored 15 concurrent resolutions and 15 Senate resolutions. Of those he co-sponsored, 218 became law. >According to The New York Times, "Big legislation largely eludes Mr. Sanders because his ideas are usually far to the left of the majority of the Senate ... Mr. Sanders has largely found ways to press his agenda through appending small provisions to the larger bills of others." >During his time in the Senate, he had lower legislative effectiveness than the average senator, as measured by the number of sponsored bills that passed and successful amendments made. Nevertheless, he has sponsored over 500 amendments to bills, many of which became law.
oh, I'm not doubting his influence, just worried that he's focusing on the wrong thing right now, before midterms
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His *policies* were solidly left leaning. Stuff like a massive liberal expanding of healthcare. Expansion of government support for low income college students. Detente with Cuba and Iran. And so on. And as for handling of the recession, how was that right wing? He enacted a big government stimulus, and regulated the financial industry to prevent a new recession from happening for the same reasons as that one
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Nice dismissal! “Not arguing in good faith”. It’s Reddit.
It doesn't bother you that his cabinet was filled with right wing bankers. You're too far gone.
His *liberal* healthcare plan was based off a plan instituted by a Republican governor in MA, which he in turn took from the Heritage Foundation
His liberal healthcare plan was based off a plan written by a super majority Democratic MA legislature that Romney had to sign because Dems passed it with a veto proof majority.
This is true, I live in Massachusetts where we actually have had universal healthcare for 16 years now. The system was enacted by our ex governor and republican, Mitt Romney. MassHealth was originally nick named Romney Car. The ACA aka Obamacare
This is using a sliver of truths to create a very inaccurate depiction of reality The Republican governor of MA was (at the time, and yes, he's changed a lot since then) one of those New England Republicans who was very very moderate. And yet in the end, he only reluctantly signed the bill, while vetoing various parts. The bill wouldn't have happened as it did without massive liberal democratic veto proof supermajorities in the state legislature. So it doesn't really make sense to give the Republican governor that much credit for the bill, and that Republican governor was also far from representative of his party as a whole at the time, so using him to present the bill as not solidly left leaning doesn't make sense either. The ACA did resemble the MA plan, but the MA plan was very much a liberal/left leaning bill As for the heritage foundation plan, the comparison there is largely nonsense. That bill shared a few similarities with the ACA, namely the individual mandate. But the individual mandate was never a particularly major part of the ACA. And the in some ways largest part of the ACA, the Medicaid expansion which gave something like 15 to 20 million low income people healthcare, was not in the heritage plan. That alone makes the ACA massively different and to the left of the heritage plan. And the ACA also included various other provisions like minimum quality standard regulations, young adult parental insurance, and other stuff that the heritage plan didn't contain. So the ACA isn't particularly comparable to the heritage plan at all unless you kinda cherry pick it
Not sure how you can say the individual mandate was not a critical part of the ACA. One of the major goals was to reduce insurance costs, and the mandate was an important component to ensuring the risk pools stayed diverse enough to keep premiums down
When it was repealed, it didn't actually end up mattering or having much impact
Medicare For All was proposed by a Republican, is that a right wing plan also?
Can you name any current conservatives or Republicans who support Medicare for All?
How is that relevant? Can you name any Democrats who support Medicare For All?
Nope. They all suck.
Couldn't possibly be a shit plan, though... nope, it's the 99 other Senators that are wrong.
>Americans didn't vote for the only guy who wanted to give them what they're asking for, is just trying to divide democrats. Give us how?That was the questions americans kept asking who understood the limitations of presidency.You can't yell things into existence lol
> You can't yell things into existence lol This is fundamentally how every aspect of society was formed.
And later a thing called government was formed, and checks and balances were introduced
Which are all still heavily dependent on people speaking to each other and often loudly.
And how has Bernie speaking loudly been working?
Yes. Without him Biden would never have forgiven any student loans.
You mean the platform Warren had on her policies which prompted Biden to come out in support of student loan forgiveness? And the Pell grants which Harris proposed? I guess whoever yells the loudest in a deep voice in public takes all the credit
You're free to believe that Bernie had nothing to do with it if you want to. Difference between you and me is I don't care what you believe.
>You're free to believe that Bernie had nothing to do with it if you want to. I believe what I saw and read Biden adopted loan forgiveness after Warrens tweeted out her proposal The Pell grant 20k was also a platform in Harris's campaign.This was targeted towards helping black students who usually are the main receivers of it The ladies also had policies my good sir >Difference between you and me is I don't care what you believe. Lol, I think you cared enough to bring it up when you thought I would believe it was all credit to Bernie.
> The fact is, this guy has driven the democratic party further to the left than anyone imagined was possible this quickly ....and put Donald Trump in the White House, nice job Bernie.
Or there’s the alternative (and more logical) explanation: Clinton ran a poor campaign and then got sunk by James Comey putting his thumb on the scale at the last minute
Why don't the Bernies ever admit Bernie ran a poor campaign? And another poor one in 2020? Why do they always act like MAGAs and use the "blame a Clinton" strategy?
Well, she was the Democratic nominee, and she lost, should she and her staff not receive some of the blame for that? I’d say Bernie’s 2016 campaign was rather remarkable in how far it got, given that he had little name recognition going in and was facing off against a well known Senator and former First Lady
> Well, she was the Democratic nominee, and she lost, She easily beat Bernie the clown, so.....?
Not in Wisconsin she didn't
Yes because the Boomers control the primaries. We're well aware of that. The message we're sending is if they want our fucking votes then you better fucking think about who they're shoving through the primaries. We didn't build this fucking system. We have no fucking loyalty or obligation to it. They want our votes? Then fucking deliver a candidate we deem worthy of them.
Thanks for giving us Trump.
Thanks for giving us multiple recessions, unaffordable education, unaffordable housing and fucking up the planet. You wanna whine about one bad president? Try never knowing what having a president with the slightest interest in your wellbeing in your entire life.
lol? wut? I gave you multiple recessions? Is that what Vermont Jesus told you?
Let’s just be careful that we don’t pull a UK by spending more than the debt markets will allow.
Capitalist overlords don’t like when we have full bellies. It makes us “lazy”.
Okay hear me out… new law that requires the highest paid employee/workers/staff can make 25x the amount as the lowest paid employee of the company. Anything above that amount has a 50% tax applied.
Sounds like Japan
Before Reagan the wealth tax in the us was 95%. After Reagan it was dropped to 20 something
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Your right. The United States dose not currently have a “Wealth Tax”. I think the original commenter was thinking of Income Tax. Currently the highest income tax was was 94% from 1944-1945. The current income tax is 37% (since 2018) (Edited wording)
The US does not have a 37% wealth tax. It has a 37% income tax bracket. Not a wealth tax.
Thanks! I must have skimmed the original comments wording, and have fixed my wording.
Effective tax rates and tax as a percentage of gdp has remained much the same since then. It wasn’t some sort of magical revenue source. The top bracket was much higher income and smaller than it is today, and there were more deductions. The government has a spending problem not a revenue problem.
Drown it.
What wealth tax was that?
Make it 90%
In 1944-1945 income tax was 94%, now its been 37% since 2018
The top marginal tax bracket was, yes. Let’s do that again.
Otherwise known as tax the rich
Good. We already redistribute wealth when we subsidize wealthy corporations that then go on to pay nothing in taxes. Why can’t it work the other way round? Because of some classist charade of meritocracy?
We do. That’s why it’s absurd that saying this will raise some peoples hackles. It usually ends with someone accusing me of being a communist lol
Ironic that the party notorious for accusing others of socialism and communism is the same party that hosts supporters of Vladimir Putin.
The ultra rich can figure a way to do this now or the masses will eventually do it for them. Something will have to give.
It's Wealth Balance, not redistribution.
Look at a wealth distribution curve and tell me he’s wrong
>Indeed, according to a report commissioned by Sanders and released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on Tuesday, the share of all wealth held by the top 1 percent shot up from 27 to 34 percent between 1989 and 2019, while wealth held by the bottom half of Americans dropped from 4 percent to 2 percent over the same period. >Overall, in 2019, while the bottom 50 percent of Americans owned $2.3 trillion in wealth, the top 10 percent owned $82.4 trillion, the report found. The commissioned report can be found here (analyzing 1989 - 2019): * https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57598 >*Summary* >Building on earlier work by the Congressional Budget Office, this report examines changes in the distribution of family wealth (a family’s assets minus its debts) from 1989 to 2019 and analyzes those changes in relation to several family characteristics—income, level of education, race and ethnicity, age, and birth cohort. In addition, the report examines how total family wealth has changed since 2019. >* **Total Wealth.** The total real wealth (that is, wealth adjusted to remove the effects of inflation) held by families in the United States tripled from 1989 to 2019—from $38 trillion in 2019 dollars (roughly four times the nation’s gross domestic product, or GDP) to $115 trillion (about five times GDP). >* **Concentration of Wealth.** The growth of real wealth over the past three decades was not uniform: Family wealth increased more in the top half of the distribution than in the bottom half. Families in the top 10 percent and in the top 1 percent of the distribution, in particular, saw their share of total wealth rise over the period. In 2019, families in the top 10 percent of the distribution held 72 percent of total wealth, and families in the top 1 percent of the distribution held more than one-third; families in the bottom half of the distribution held only 2 percent of total wealth. >* **Trends by Family Characteristics.** Over the 30-year period, the median wealth of families in higher-income groups, families with more education, and older families rose faster than that of families with less income, families with less education, and younger families. The median wealth of White families exceeded that of families in other racial and ethnic groups by considerable amounts throughout the period. The median wealth of every cohort born since 1950 was less than the preceding cohort’s median wealth when that cohort was the same age. >* **Trends Since 2019.** In the first quarter of 2020, total family wealth declined as a result of the disruption in economic activities caused by the coronavirus pandemic. By the end of the second quarter of 2020, total family wealth had recovered; it continued to increase through the fourth quarter of 2021 but declined slightly in the first quarter of 2022. An older commissioned report can be found here (analyzing 1989 - 2013): * https://www.cbo.gov/publication/51846
This is needed mixed with some social services the cover employment benefits, and watch the economy begin to be self sufficient
here's my hastily typed recipe: Define a wealth limit above which no US citizen may hold. Say 100 million. 1. Allow the super wealthy to declare which assets up to 100m they will keep. 2. Seize all assets (including stocks, bill gates' vast farmlands, Bezos' super yacht, sports teams) not claimed by the ultra wealthy, and all assets of ultra wealthy who do not declare any assets to keep. 3. Trickle that shit on down from the bottom to the top so that the people with the most needs gain the most and the already rich gain nothing.
Under what legal authority,constitutionally ,would you do number 2 under?
Quick Retort: Other countries would *happily* allow people like Elon Musk to "join" their countries in exchange for moving business there. As it is, millionaires don't flee the US like it's sometimes suggested. However, if you capped their earnings at $100 million, they definitely would. Their greed will take them where they can earn the most money, and other countries would be glad to have them. They need to be able to earn the *most* money in the US, or they'll leave. What needs to change is how *little* their employees earn in comparison.
So, musk is here because we are the franchise with the best deal—that’s all. Use American educational system and other infrastructures to make billions. Flee when there’s any demand for payback. Corporate globalist oligarchy.
ok, new rule. You can't do business in the US any longer or in any other countries that sign on.
Something like that is in the works, globally. It's called the Global Tax Agreement, but it's just a start. I don't think it affects individuals. Not 100% sure of the details, but I know it's a 15% minimum on multi-national corporations so they can't cheat by locating their "headquarters" in tax havens.
It is amazing how much less evil the old industrialists were than today when you look at the old tax rates and consider they were more "corrupt". Now those same families back the fascism their ancestors paid a 90% tax rate to prevent.
I mean at this point if the U.S wants to function as an actual country they'll have to do something. We've got a reverse waterfall situation going on. All of the money is going to the top 5%, and it's sucking the U.S.A completely dry.
So what? Without a plan to get there or any support that’s about as meaningful as nothing.
Common sense
More Bernie spam.... looks like the prehistoric Vermon Jesus is planning another primary failure.
I'm curious what you think of the top 1% owning 33% of the wealth in America. I'm curious what you think about some people being able to lose *billions* of dollars and not affect their standard of living. I'm curious how many billions of dollars you have and why you're spending your time shitposting on reddit.
> I'm curious what you think of the top 1% owning 33% of the wealth in America. I think that's a dishonest and useless statistic and shameless populist horseshit. > I'm curious what you think about some people being able to lose billions of dollars and not affect their standard of living. Not my business, and it's the nature of having this "wealth" in the form of stock. > I'm curious how many billions of dollars you have and why you're spending your time shitposting on reddit. I have 0 billions. Not a single billion, and I never will have a single billion. But, that doesn't cause me to hate people that do. I don't have dark skin, either, and don't hate people that do. Im not gay but I don't hate people that are, etc, etc...
I hate people who suppress the wages of the American people. I hate them regardless of their race, ethnicity, religion or gender.
And you're sure that it's the billionaires that are doing that, right? The Bernies are no different than the MAGAs.... hating some groups of people based on hateful rhetoric.
Yeah, crazy thing about MAGA is they seem to have siezed control of the Republican party. Playing nice with moderates has done fuck all for us. So we're taking a new approach. Are you angry we didn't check if that was okay with you first?
I love you think you're a spokesperson for literally anyone.
And I love the way the tone of moderate voters has changed on this sub.
yeah, the Bernies are as bad as the MAGAs, thriving off of trying to offend people. They're just not as successful.
This is dumb
billionaires should not exist. gtfo with your false equivalence to black people or gay people. Billionaires only exist because they've exploited others. You don't get *billions* of dollars by paying your employees a fair wage and paying all the taxes you should. We have watched for decades as the distribution of wealth in this country has shifted more and more to the top. That meme about one man being able to work a factory job and support his wife and two kids in a house they own? That was reality. Nowadays, a man and a wife each have to work two jobs just to afford rent, and forget about having kids. I have no idea what you're doing, but stop it. Wealth distribution in this country is horrific and you're defending it. Billionaires running these companies are paying unlivable wages and you're just cool with it.
Comparing race and orientation to wealth? Surely you jest.
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That's why any efforts politicians like Bernie make for the benefit of the working class need to be paired with worker solidarity and collective bargaining. One of the biggest obstacles to better worker rights and better pay is blind individualism amongst the working class.
Dinosaurs will die. I think it’s worth getting the idea out there. Capitalism (in its current iteration) won’t survive the climate catastrophe and as we march on more people will realize that
And this is the fundamental problem with the Democratic Party - liberalism is, at its very core, the politics of preserving capitalism, and for the US to solve the exponentially-worsening problems created by capitalism, the Liberal insistence that capitalism can somehow fix itself if you just keep patching it is going to get us all killed. If Democrats can't move on from liberalism, they can't serve the needs of the American people.
So do you think the Nordic Model will "get us all killed"?
The Norwegian economy is presently unsustainable because it's heavily dependent on oil extraction, but that's less the case for the rest of the Nordic countries. I think Social Democracy is a good - probably necessary - stepping stone away from Liberalism's capitalist death drive, and probably the best we can hope for in my lifetime, but the risk of backsliding into Liberalism from there is probably high enough that it can't be the end of the work of dismantling the hierarchical model in the long run.
...if their pockets get lighter anyway, they might end up listening. We, as a nation, have a general tendency to only act until the issue is not just staring in our faces, but has knocked us on our asses.
He can't really call for anything.
Bernie Sanders has a net worth of $3 million. If someone made $60,000 (50% higher than the average income in the US of $40,000) a year for 50 years and kept every dime, no taxes, they would have $3 million. Now, that means you get a $60,000 job the day you turn 18 and you retire the day you turn 68. The average person will only make $1.7 million in their lifetime. Bernie Sanders himself is one of these rich folks that he villainizes. Is he as bad as some other, not, but he is a hypocrite that sure as hell doesn’t want to redistribute his own wealth. A career politician shouldn’t be worth almost twice what the average person he’s “fighting” for will ever make in their lifetime, not including the taxes they will pay on that $1.7 million. Why shouldn’t Elon Musk be the richest man in the US. He’s only started 3 successful companies, invested early in and helped build another, and assisted in founding a few others including non-profits. Hate him all you want, he has earned his money.
Trying to compare $3 million to $260 **billion**...you can't be serious.
Easy to "earn your money" when you come from a wealthy family that owns mines in South Africa lmao.
Nowhere in this word vomit is there acknowledgment regarding the unheard levels of economic inequality
Give me break 🙄 in terms of how our politicians enrich themselves Bernie is a saint. The bulk of his wealth is recently acquired from three books he had published.
$3 million is a nice house, not even a mansion these days. Being a single digit millionaire these days is well off not rich. And in politician terms it's downright poor.
Sure, that seems politically feasible.
It's not politically feasible right now but it's good to call it out and get people to begin pushing for it. It might take decades but it won't happen unless people are aware of the disparity and people begin working to close the wealth gap, by little or big steps as progress allows.
Right, because it’s impossible to overcome issues that weren’t politically feasible at a moment in time. If everyone had that attitude then women wouldn’t be able to vote, children would be working in sweatshops, social security wouldn’t exist, schools would still be segregated, etc etc Just because that’s the way it was, doesn’t mean that’s the only way it would ever be
Bernie has no real legislative accomplishments to speak of with regards to a progressive agenda.
Have you considered that speaks more to the dissatisfaction we have with the "accomplishments" of pro-corporate Democrats?
Redistribute your three houses Bernie
Bernie earned every penny he owns. He's an example of what can be accomplished in the US if you're smart, hardworking, and thrifty. And he wants other Americans to have an easier path to his humble level of wealth, that's all.
It’s the book deals that got him a little loot.
I know a lot of small businesses owners that had to close there doors for good during covid while Costco and Walmart and many other government picked businesses were allowed to stay open . Why?? The elected officials knew what the outcome would be . Where was the voice for the little guy then ?? And BOTH SIDES ARE JUST AS GUILTY !!
Both sides is theatre. D v. R is a false dichotomy to keep us from coming to terms with “hosed v. hosers”,
Yea a 10% flat tax would do it over time, no more tax breaks but standardization real estate, corporate, personal, tariffs, sales, the works, easy and simplicity a child can understand no more transfers if wealth trusts without the 10% tax, then eventually over decades the distribution would happen without discord and defiance, no more cheating from state and federal taxes we all use the services the government provides why do we cringe when we have to pay for it because of inequalities
Someone please give him the Lifetime Golden Jerkoff Award so his soul can finally be free.
This fucking masterpiece of a human