tschmath Loc: Los Angeles

From today's Huffington Post by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders:

Despite such terminology as "fiscal cliff" and "debt ceiling," the great debate taking place in Washington now has relatively little to do with financial issues. It is all about ideology. It is all about economic winners and losers in American society. It is all about the power of Big Money. It is all about the soul of America. In America today, we have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on earth, and more inequality than at any time period since 1928. The top 1 percent owns 42 percent of the financial wealth of the nation, while, incredibly, the bottom 60 percent own only 2.3 percent. One family, the Walton family of Wal-Mart, owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans. In terms of income distribution in 2010, the last study done on this issue, the top 1 percent earned 93 percent of all new income while the bottom 99 percent shared the remaining 7 percent. Despite the reality that the rich are becoming much richer while the middle class collapses and the number of Americans living in poverty is at an all-time high, the Republicans and their billionaire backers want more, more, and more. The class warfare continues. My Republican colleagues say that the deficits are a spending problem, not a revenue problem. What these deficit-hawk hypocrites won't talk about is their spending. They won't discuss what they did to dig the country into this $1 trillion deep deficit hole. They waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq without paying for them. They gave away huge tax breaks for the rich. They squandered taxpayer dollars on the pharmaceutical industry by making it illegal to let Medicare bargain for lower drug prices. They also rescinded financial regulations that enabled Wall Street to operate like a gambling casino, leading to a severe recession that eroded tax revenue and left more than 14 percent of American workers unemployed or underemployed. Now, despite the deficits their policies helped to create and despite the enormous suffering which exists in our society, the Republicans want to cut Social Security, veterans' programs, Medicare, Medicaid, education, nutrition programs, and virtually every program which benefits low- and moderate-income Americans. They choose to turn their backs on the economic reality facing a significant part of our population: high unemployment, reduced wages, 50 million without health insurance, college graduates saddled with enormous student debt and elderly people living in desperation. And they have tried to slam the door on any further discussion about how to raise revenue by ending tax loopholes and unfair tax breaks. Republicans like Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who say the revenue debate is over don't want you to consider these facts:

• Federal revenue today, at 15.8 percent of GDP, is lower today than it was 60 years ago. During the last year of the Clinton administration, when we had a significant federal surplus, federal revenue was 20.6 percent of GDP.
• Today corporate profits are at an all-time high, while corporate income tax revenue as a percentage of GDP is near a record low.
• In 2011, corporate revenue as a percentage of GDP was just 1.2 percent -- lower than any other major country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, including Britain, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, Norway, Australia, South Korea, Switzerland, Norway, Italy, Ireland, Poland, and Iceland.
• In 2011, corporations paid just 12 percent of their profits in taxes, the lowest since 1972.
• In 2005, one out of four large corporations paid no income taxes at all while they collected $1.1 trillion in revenue over that one-year period.

We know where the Republicans are coming from. What about the Democrats? Will President Obama fulfill his campaign pledge to "protect the middle class" or will he surrender to right-wing blackmail? Will Democrats in the House and Senate stand with the vast majority of our citizens and such organizations as AARP, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, the AFL-CIO, the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and every other veterans' organization in the fight against cuts to Social Security and veterans' programs, or will they agree to a disastrous corporate-backed "chained CPI" concept which makes major benefit cuts to those programs and raises taxes on low-income workers? The simple truth is there are relatively easy ways to deal with the deficit crisis -- without attacking the elderly, the children the sick or the poor. For example, we have got to eliminate loopholes in the tax code that allow large corporations and the wealthy to avoid more than $100 billion in taxes every year by setting up offshore tax shelters in places like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and the Bahamas. This situation has become so absurd that one five-story office building in the Cayman Islands is now the "home" to more than 18,000 corporations. Further, we must also end tax breaks for companies shipping American jobs overseas. Today, the United State government continues to reward companies that move American manufacturing jobs abroad, despite the fact that millions of American jobs have been outsourced to China, Mexico, and other low wage countries over the past decade. The Joint Committee on Taxation (the official revenue scorekeeper in Congress) has estimated that we could raise more than $582 billion in revenue over the next decade by eliminating these offshore tax loopholes. We must also recognize that Wall Street recklessness caused the economic crisis, and it has a responsibility to reduce the deficit. Establishing a 0.03 percent Wall Street speculation fee, similar to what we had from 1914-1966, would dampen the dangerous level of speculation and gambling on Wall Street, encourage the financial sector to invest in the productive economy and reduce the deficit by more than $350 billion over 10 years. We are entering a pivotal moment in the modern history of our country. Do the elected officials in Washington stand with ordinary Americans -- working families, children, the elderly, the poor -- or will the extraordinary power of billionaire campaign contributors and Big Money prevail? The American people, by the millions, must send Congress the answer to that question.

Blurryeyed Loc: NC Mountains.

LOL Good luck with that. Half of what he says in his screed comes from a very one sided POV and he employs simplification while addressing complex issues to draw an emotional response and rally the troops to encourage the president to be even worse at moving this economy forward than he has been in his first term...

Bernie Sanders, a self proclaimed Socialist has your vote Tschmath, how surprising!

Danilo Loc: Las Vegas

My thoughts, after reading the Huffpost article are simple:
1. Thank God we only get a small portion of the government we pay for.
2. I'm no longer surprised the Huffpost readership is so low.

eplain

"The only good Commie, is a dead Commie"

eplain

I couldn't disagree more.

"Small" ? really?

I can't believe there hasn't been a revolt due to the obscene portion we get. That day will come, and the first heads that roll (literally), will be the likes of these sorts of "men".

The strong (working) minority WILL, in the end, overpower the lazy masses.... I believe that.

For The Good know they are Good, and the Bad, know they are Bad.

Blurryeyed Loc: NC Mountains.

Danilo, I have to disagree with #1, if we actually were asked to pay for the government we receive then almost everyone would become conservative almost overnight, the problem with this country is is that no one is asking us to pay for our government resulting in more than 1/2 the country not being overly concerned with the DC fraud, waste and abuse. The big democratic lie is that someone else will be responsible to pay for this crappy mess that we call the federal government.

eplain

Uh oh.....wait until noon.... when the Commies wake up! HAHA

PrairieSeasons Loc: Red River of the North

I am strongly suspicious that some of these statistics are either outright lies or are taken so out of context that they have no real value other then priming the pump on this screed.

A couple of things really stand out, though. One is that a select tax ("speculation fee") would raise $350 billion over ten years. When we are spending $1,000 billion (that's 1 trillion for you math majors), PER YEAR that we don't have, we are barking up the wrong tree.

The big misdirection here, though, is to bemoan that federal revenues are only 15.8 percent of GDP. If that statistic is accurate, and if we are borrowing 40 percent of our federal spending, then our federal spending rate is more than 26 percent of GDP. Our economic and personal freedoms are at stake if that rate continues.

Blurryeyed Loc: NC Mountains.

Those numbers are correct, there are several large components of Sander's screed that if you really looked at are plainly partial facts, one being that the dems love to pound the Bush administration over the medicare drug program, they fail to talk about the fact that the Bush legislation as passed cost the federal government about 1/2 of the democratic proposal that failed, they also fail to mention that the Bush program is coming in way below projected program expenses. Dems love to bash the Bush tax cuts, here we have it, federal revenues have dropped by 4% of GDP, but what dems don't want you to know is that the bulk of the tax expenditure, using their own language, went to the middle and lower income taxpayers in our society, that is why that the recent Obama plan did little to offset the deficits, Bush's tax cut was the catalyst that saw a 150% increase in the number of people not paying income taxes to the federal government. If the Bush tax cuts were so bad, why then did the dems just vote to keep them for 99% of the tax payers? These are now the Obama cuts, our democratic friends need constant reminding that the Bush tax cuts expired 2 years ago and have been extended by both the Obama administration and a democratic Senate. As far as the casino on Wall Street, that was bi partisan legislation and it was signed into law by Clinton so Sanders is full of shit and again tries to propagate a lie. The dems had their hands all over the housing crisis just as much as Bush did.

Lastly the dems act as if they are not the whores of Wall Street, it is time that they wake up and smell the roses, both parties are owned and operated by the Wall Street banks no matter the show that they put on for the country suggesting otherwise.... The FED is owned by private banks and the Treasury is run by former Wall Street bankers, the president's nominee for treasury, Jack Lew as recently as 2008 was COO for Citibank.

As far as wealth in this country, yes the disparity is becoming a threat to the stability of social and economic structure of our country, but Sanders simple explanation is pure Bull Shit, an over simplified emotional screed that does nothing to explain how and why we arrived at this point and does nothing to address the governments role in the whole mess and the continuing threat of governmental policy to the middle class and the health and recovery of our economy.... beyond that it hardly allows for a look at the Walton family wealth and how that wealth is actually employed and working in out society, I would suggest that it is far more productive in the hands of the Waltons than in the hands of our government. The Walton's combined wealth is somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 billion, chicken scratch for our federal government, our government absolutely throws away 4 to 5 times more than that each year while showing little to no results other than a few new rich friends, the Waltons are not holding this wealth in cash, but rather in Stores and inventories, in Sam's clubs and Walmarts all over the country and world providing jobs for 100's of thousands of families and shopping alternatives for millions more. The point is is that, yes they control an inordinate amount of wealth, but the reality is is that they are simply managers of that wealth that is out working in our economy and our society, it is not something that they are going to spend.

Clif Loc: Central Ca.

" We have the best politicians money can buy"

Hunter Lou 1947 Loc: Minnesota

Yes. I like listening to Bernie. He tells it like it is, no wishy washy from him, straight forward approach always from him.

Blurryeyed Loc: NC Mountains.

ROFLMAO

ole sarg Loc: south florida

Unfortunately his numbers are correct.

Also, unfortunately the wealthy through the tea part have manipulated many to believe that they are wrong.

But, in the end one has to believe in the wisdom of the population which did re elect President Obama.

They will lose the house as the gerrymandered districts are realigned.

We should have the same tax policies as the Clinton Admin when everyone made money not just the few and the debt was projected to be a surplus.

PrairieSeasons Loc: Red River of the North

Unfortunately the tax policies of the Clinton administration would not give us a surplus with the spending policies of the Obama administration.

Blurryeyed Loc: NC Mountains.

Keep living in your dream world Sarg.... If you break down the numbers, and I mean take a good look at the federally published numbers one can only conclude that president Obama is pissing all over this country especially the youth of this country... Do a little digging sarge not by reading a bunch of liberal or conservative websites designed to form your thoughts because you refuse to do the work to have your own, but to the .gov sites and read the historical reports and follow the government expenses.... Don't let Bernie dictate your reality.