David Cay Johnston: You agree with Bernie Sanders

[Nanjeanne]

Johnston is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter on tax and economic issues who teaches at Syracuse University College of Law.

Worth reading the whole article. Just another reporter with a background on taxes and economic issues (and college professor) who disputes the mainstream meme that Sanders' policies are fantasy.

http://m.nydailynews.com/opinion/david-cay-johnston-agree-bernie-sanders-article-1.2521997

The zeal of Bernie Sanders supporters is a mystery to many people, especially those who cringe at the word "socialist."

How, can a geriatric Brooklyn-born Jew who speaks in long, complex sentences, his hands providing the punctuation, draw bigger crowds than Donald Trump, despite claiming a tiny fraction of the mogul's TV news coverage? How could he battle Hillary Clinton to a virtual tie in Iowa, with a good chance of beating her Tuesday in New Hampshire? How could he be closing the gap with her in national polls?

The answer is that large majorities of Americans are, like Sanders, "democratic socialists."

Sanders is not a socialist. He is a "democratic socialist." That one word makes for a world of difference. Sanders favors private ownership and markets, but with rules that protect little people from abuses and uncertainties.

<snip>

But there's a deeper issue with how we engage with our elections. You don't have to be a Sanders supporter to recognize that America's political reporters are good at covering the horse race, but terrible at explaining policies of the candidates.

<snip>

He wants to use the power of government to insulate working people from economic upheavals on Wall Street, not bail bankers out. He wants investment bankers and others held accountable for their mistakes. He wants the people who were able to get rich because they live in America to bear a larger burden in supporting the government from which they benefitted.

And when hard times come, he wants government to first take care of the little people, not the political donor class, as both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have done. Sanders also wants universal health care, paid for with tax money.

Those who call such ideas radical or outside the mainstream — including Hillary Clinton, who asserts Sanders push for universal health care would mean dismantling Obamacare — are stretching.

<snip>

Universal health care paid with taxes is an idea akin to Social Security, which now pays benefits to about 60 million people. It is the best-funded government program — with a huge surplus and a dedicated revenue stream — yet many people wrongly believe it is going broke.

More than 80% of Americans support raising taxes if necessary to permanently maintain Social Security, with strong majority support among Republicans, according to surveys by the National Academy of Social Insurance, Social Security Works and others.

This is essentially Sanders' stance. What's so radical about that?

<snip>

The average income reported on tax returns by the bottom 90% of Americans in 2014 was virtually the same as it was in 1967, once inflation is taken into account. The $30,068 average was up just $328, or 1%, more after nearly 50 years.

Count that $328 as one inch. By that standard the richest 16,000 households have seen their income soar more than a mile.

Almost as bad, the median wage — half make more, half less — in 2014 was only a dollar a working day more than it was back in 1999. Because the median wage has been stuck at less than $550 a week for so many years, large numbers of workers are worse off now than they were in the last century.

<snip>

If Sanders wins the Democratic Party nomination, we can expect all sorts of television commercials wrongly describing him, as Trump has done, as a communist.

It's unlikely we will ever get to test that proposition; Hillary Clinton remains the heavy favorite in the primary, for a host of reasons. But what we do know for sure is that our current elected federal leaders are not pursuing the economic policies that most Americans, including most Republicans, favor.

And those are the policies of the Sanders campaign.

[libdem4life]

1. It just depends upon the perspective of what can and cannot be done. I'm with Yes, we can.

Not no, it's impossible. The incredible lunacy that Bernie just pulled some figures out of the air is preposterous. Pretty sure he owns a calculator and knows how to use it. He just isn't as Packaged Neatly as some candidates. As the OP stresses, it may be beyond the capacity of the average voter to understand. It wouldn't be the first time.

[Matariki]

2. :-(

"Compounding this is the terrible job our education system does teaching young people about economic and political philosophies, to distinguish between the -isms. I've learned that you can have a more informed conversation about politics and economics with the average waiter or petty merchant in Europe or Canada than with the executive sitting next to you on a domestic flight."


Really great article, although I wish he wouldn't use horrid terminology like "little people" and "petty merchant". Sounds freaking feudal.

[snagglepuss]

3. Bookmarked k n r

[Uncle Joe]

4. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Nanjeanne.