Bernie Sanders: An Economic Agenda for America: 12 Steps Forward

[Playinghardball]

The American people must make a fundamental decision. Do we continue the 40-year decline of our middle class and the growing gap between the very rich and everyone else, or do we fight for a progressive economic agenda that creates jobs, raises wages, protects the environment and provides health care for all? Are we prepared to take on the enormous economic and political power of the billionaire class, or do we continue to slide into economic and political oligarchy? These are the most important questions of our time, and how we answer them will determine the future of our country.

The long-term deterioration of the middle class, accelerated by the Wall Street crash of 2008, has not been pretty. Today, we have more wealth and income inequality than any major country on earth. We have one of the highest childhood poverty rates and we are the only country in the industrialized world which does not guarantee health care for all. We once led the world in terms of the percentage of our people who graduated college, but we are now in 12th place. Our infrastructure, once the envy of the world, is collapsing.

Real unemployment today is not 5.8 percent, it is 11.5 percent if we include those who have given up looking for work or who are working part time when they want to work full time. Youth unemployment is 18.6 percent and African-American youth unemployment is 32.6 percent.

Today, millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the median male worker earned $783 less last year than he made 41 years ago. The median woman worker made $1,337 less last year than she earned in 2007. Since 1999, the median middle-class family has seen its income go down by almost $5,000 after adjusting for inflation, now earning less than it did 25 years ago.

The American people must demand that Congress and the White House start protecting the interests of working families, not just wealthy campaign contributors. We need federal legislation to put the unemployed back to work, to raise wages and make certain that all Americans have the health care and education they need for healthy and productive lives.

As Vermont's senator, here are 12 initiatives that I will be fighting for which can restore America's middle class.

1. We need a major investment to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure: roads, bridges, water systems, waste water plants, airports, railroads and schools. It has been estimated that the cost of the Bush-Cheney Iraq War, a war we should never have waged, will total $3 trillion by the time the last veteran receives needed care. A $1 trillion investment in infrastructure could create 13 million decent paying jobs and make this country more efficient and productive. We need to invest in infrastructure, not more war.

More here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-bernie-sanders/an-economic-agenda-for-am_b_6249022.html

[abelenkpe]

1. more...

8. In today's highly competitive global economy, millions of Americans are unable to afford the higher education they need in order to get good-paying jobs. Further, with both parents now often at work, most working-class families can't locate the high-quality and affordable child care they need for their kids. Quality education in America, from child care to higher education, must be affordable for all. Without a high-quality and affordable educational system, we will be unable to compete globally and our standard of living will continue to decline.

9. The function of banking is to facilitate the flow of capital into productive and job-creating activities. Financial institutions cannot be an island unto themselves, standing as huge profit centers outside of the real economy. Today, six huge Wall Street financial institutions have assets equivalent to 61 percent of our gross domestic product - over $9.8 trillion. These institutions underwrite more than half the mortgages in this country and more than two-thirds of the credit cards. The greed, recklessness and illegal behavior of major Wall Street firms plunged this country into the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. They are too powerful to be reformed. They must be broken up.

10. The United States must join the rest of the industrialized world and recognize that health care is a right of all, and not a privilege. Despite the fact that more than 40 million Americans have no health insurance, we spend almost twice as much per capita on health care as any other nation. We need to establish a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system.

11. Millions of seniors live in poverty and we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country. We must strengthen the social safety net, not weaken it. Instead of cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and nutrition programs, we should be expanding these programs.

12. At a time of massive wealth and income inequality, we need a progressive tax system in this country which is based on ability to pay. It is not acceptable that major profitable corporations have paid nothing in federal income taxes, and that corporate CEOs in this country often enjoy an effective tax rate which is lower than their secretaries. It is absurd that we lose over $100 billion a year in revenue because corporations and the wealthy stash their cash in offshore tax havens around the world. The time is long overdue for real tax reform.


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This should be the democratic party platform.

[jwirr]

2. Excellent. Finally someone tell us the plan. Does anyone know if anyone in the Democratic Party

has done this?

[TheNutcracker]

21. Never, Bernie will show them how it's done!

[phantom power]

3. recommended

[think]

4. k&R /nt

[rogerashton]

5. Let's go still further.

1) A tax on net wealth over, say, about five million for a family. That's wealth, not income -- stocks, bonds, businesses, real estate, partnerships, hoards of gold, anything with an asset value, minus indebtedness. Of course, to make that work we would have to find where the wealth is hidden, but that will be a matter of criminal law enforcement.

2) A tax on corporate value added, minus income payments to American residents, up to some maximum. Value added -- revenue minus payments to other businesses -- is collected at the point of sale and thus much easier to compute and collect than a tax on "profits." Of course, payments to branches of the corporation in other countries would NOT be deducted against value added.

3) Create a sovereign wealth fund with the proceeds of the above two taxes. The sovereign wealth fund would buy up the stock of corporations, thus transferring them to public property.

[brooklynite]

9. I don't think ANYONE, including Sanders, will go after wealth...

Nor will confiscatory tax policy get much support, even from the working class.

[rogerashton]

14. confiscatory?

Call it what you will, if you want a democracy -- rather than a plutocracy -- some upper limit on the concentration of wealth is necessary. Otherwise, practice saying "Yassuh, boss," like you really mean it.

[brooklynite]

15. Name a "Social Democratic" State that taxes wealth...

[rogerashton]

17. Naturally, as progressives, we propose new things. eom

[brooklynite]

19. Knock yourself out; I just don't see it as being remotely possible to achieve.

[rogerashton]

22. Nobody said progress is easy.

Naysayers like Brooklynite make it all the more difficult.

[brooklynite]

29. I see: your strategy can't stand up to a piece of criticism?

Best wishes going forward.

[rogerashton]

32. What criticism?

You just said you don't like it. That's a statement about you, not about my -- not strategy, actually -- policy proposal.

[hifiguy]

6. Now THIS is the kind of plan

I can wholeheartedly support.

Run, Bernie, Run!!

[JaneyVee]

7. Sounds Presidential to me.

[Orsino]

27. Alas, it sounds much better than presidential. n/t

[mindwalker_i]

8. I would love to see him run

just to hear the all-out, unrelenting tidal wave of a whine-fest coming from the Koch brothers. They would spend billions to have him defeated, and just maybe, people would take note of what they're fighting against and why we need it.

[liberal_at_heart]

10. A living wage, not a minimum wage.

Education, living wages, unions, single payer healthcare, pensions, Social Security. I would love to see Sanders challenge both the Republicans and the Democrats on the economic issues. We need someone to speak for the people and so far Sanders is one of the only ones doing that.

[rogerashton]

18. Right, and

the legislated wage should be indexed, NOT to the "cost of living," but to nominal GDP. Thus, if labor productivity increases, the legislated wage would increase with it -- not the case if the legislated wage is indexed to the "cost of living" and not the case, for the most part, in the last 40 years.

[woo me with science]

11. Amen. Thank you, Bernie.

I would add one more very important thing, though. This is Bernie last month (also talked about this recently on Moyers):

To keep the billionaire class from turning our democracy into an oligarchy, we must also focus on campaign finance reform and public funding of elections. Billionaires like the Koch brothers and others should not be able to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on campaigns while candidates who are not rich or dependent upon the rich are unable to have their voices heard. That's why we need public funding of elections. That's why we need a constitutional amendment to overturn the disastrous 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United that let billionaires and corporations spend unlimited sums to tilt elections in their favor

Finally, a real representative of the people in a sea of liars and corporate sellouts.

[liberal_at_heart]

12. You're absolutely right. We probably won't see any progress on any of the other issues until we

address campaign finance reform.

[aspirant]

23. President Bernie

First step; An executive order to require corps with govt contracts to disclose all political contributions. Bring these dark lurkers into the light and ripe for boycotts.

[WillyT]

13. HUGE K & R !!! - Thank You !!!

[ChisolmTrailDem]

16. Ok. So, let's match this up with Hillary's plan. Er...ahem..uuuuhhhhh...

I know it must be laying around here somewhere...Hillary's plan? Anyone seen that? If you find it, please do post. I'll continue looking through the fast-food wrappers on the GD coffee table...

[TheNutcracker]

20. Bernie never wastes a syllable! All economist's say the same things regarding the

economy and the relationship it has with the middle class.

GO BERNIE!!! ALL THE WAY! I'M VOTING FOR Y O U !

[Orsino]

24. Madame Secretary, your ante. n/t

[Stellar]

25. She's not having a good time winning over the public now.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/what-might-persuade-hillary-clinton-not-to-run-in-2016/

What Might Persuade Hillary Clinton Not To Run In 2016

[Orsino]

26. Won't matter. Clinton really is inevitable, once she does decide to run.

I wish it were not so, or she might feel an obligation to match or better Sanders' plan. Only enough Americans taking notice and demanding a respinse will elicit one.

[Autumn]

28. I have made my decision. The democratic party leaders are content with the way things are.

We have demanded for years that the Congress and the White House start protecting the interests of working families. The Democratic party has tossed us a bone, with all the meat carefully removed and shown a slight concern for the middle class. It's a fucking joke. Their wars and tax breaks for the corporations and the wealthy are paid for by taking food out of the mouths of the most vulnerable among us. These politicians, and I include Obama in that can't even bring themselves to pretend to care about the poor. They tout that they have given us "health care reform" which is nothing more than a tax payer funded giveaway to insurance companies and we ignore the fact that the the only real reform we got was that preexisting conditions are now covered IF you can afford the treatment. Buying health insurance does not give Americans health care. Our young ( and old) are burdened by debt, our Veterans sleep in the streets. Our children are shot dead in the streets by a militarized police force and our democratic president decides that the police need to account for the military equipment that they are given and that they use to wage war on our citizens. Meanwhile we leave one war zone to go to another leaving equipment behind that goes to terrorists and then Obama decided that we must increase troop levels and send troops back into war zones where he "ended the war" is on his list of accomplishments.
The bankers and Wall Street who crashed our economy and got bailed out while the people they harmed will take years to recover, if ever, are swimming in profits and the president appoints them to key positions in our government.

Fuck that. Tell me again why I need to vote for any of these democrats that are in the "running" . Go on ahead give me one fucking reason.

[antigop]

30. and the Third Way sycophants are satisfied with the status quo. nt

[Initech]

31. Now this is what our next president should be!