An Unusually Optimistic Conversation With Bernie Sanders - Ezra Klein
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An Unusually Optimistic Conversation With Bernie Sanders
The Vermont senator discusses the Rescue Act, cancel culture, the filibuster and more.
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2021
Ezra Klein
Excerpt:
So I have Senator Sanders to join me on the show to talk about the American Rescue Plan, the changes in the Democratic and Republican parties, how Democrats should approach voters who agree with them on economics but fear them on culture, what the next investment plan should include, how his views on the filibuster have changed, and much more. Here we go.
So let’s go back. The 2009 stimulus, it was about 5.6 percent of the 2008 GDP level, and the Rescue Plan this year, it’s 9.1 percent of last year’s GDP, so it is much bigger and the individual policies in it are, in my view, at least much less compromise down. So why are 50 Senate Democrats in 2021 legislating so much more progressively and ambitiously than 59 did in 2009?
Bernie Sanders
Well, I think that there is a growing understanding that we face unprecedented crises and we have got to act in an unprecedented way. And members of Congress look around this country and they see children who don’t have enough food, people facing eviction, people can’t get health care. We have, obviously, the need to crush this terrible pandemic that has taken over 500,000 lives. And I think the conclusion from the White House and from Congress is, now is the time to do what the American people need us to do. Let’s do it. And it turned out to be a $1.9 trillion bill which, to my mind, was the single most significant piece of legislation for working class people that has been passed since the 1960s.
Ezra Klein
Let’s say I’m someone on the left who supported you in 2020 and I’m looking at the American Rescue Plan and I see the $15 minimum wage got dropped, paid family leave got dropped, the child tax credit, which is my favorite part of the bill, it’s only temporary. Convince me that I should be excited about this. Why do you think it’s so significant?
Bernie Sanders
I don’t have to convince you. We have already convinced 75 percent of the American people that this is a very good piece of legislation. And I think progressives out there understand that, given a fairly conservative Congress, it is hard to do everything that we want to do. So I was bitterly disappointed, obviously, that we lost the minimum wage in the reconciliation process as a result of decision from the parliamentarian, which I think was a wrong decision. But we’re not giving up on that. We’re going to come back and we’re going to do it. But in this legislation, let us be clear. We have gotten for a family of four, a working class family, struggling to put food on the table for their kids, not get evicted, a check of $5,600. Now, people who have money may not think that’s a lot of money. But when you are struggling day and night to pay the bills, to worry about eviction, that is going to be a lifesend for millions and millions of people. We extended unemployment to September with the $300 supplement. We, as you indicated, expanded the child tax credit to cut poverty in America by 50 percent. Now, that’s an issue we have not dealt with for a very long time, the disgrace of the U.S. having one of the highest rates of childhood poverty of any major country on Earth. Well, we did it and we hope to make it permanent. That is a big deal. And obviously, we invested heavily in dealing with the pandemic, getting the vaccines out to the people as quickly as possible to save lives, producing the vaccines that we need. In terms of education, billions of dollars going to make sure that we open our schools as quickly and as safely as we can. We tripled funding for summer programs so that kids will have the opportunity to make up the academic work that they have lost. Tripled funding for after school programs, so when kids come back next fall, there will be programs the likes of which we have never seen. So this is not a perfect bill. Congress does not pass perfect bills. But for working class people, this is the most significant piece of legislation passed since the 1960s and I’m proud of what we have done. However, it is clear to me, and I think the American people, that we have more to do. What this bill was about, Ezra, is an emergency bill that says, in America, families should not go hungry. People should not be forced out of their homes. That’s an emergency response. Now we have to deal with the long term structural problems facing our country that have long, long been neglected way before the pandemic, and that is the need to rebuild the crumbling infrastructure, the need to address the existential threat of climate change, the need to create many millions of jobs, decent paying jobs, as we do that by raising the minimum wage to a living wage. The need to build the affordable housing, the millions of units of affordable housing that we need. And that’s just some of the economic issues. In terms of the social issues, the need to fight structural racism, the need for immigration reform, the need to fight against the growing trend of authoritarianism. We’re living in a nation today where 30 percent or 40 percent of the American people have given up on democracy, a worldwide problem. How do we combat that? That’s something we’ve got to do. We’ve got to deal with voter suppression and the effort of Republicans to make it harder and harder for people of color, lower income people, to vote. So there is a huge number of issues out there and some of them are existential. They have to be dealt with, and I intend to do everything that I can as chairman of the budget committee to make sure that we continue to move forward.
You can listen to the entire conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” wherever you get your podcasts, or clicking play below.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bernie-sanders.html
