As the corporate mass media (CMM) continues to largely ignore socialist Bernie Sanders for President, and media polls predict his campaign's early demise, the curmudgeonly senator from Vermont forges ahead to a showdown with Joe Biden, or Elizabeth Warren at the convention. Bernard has raised $25.3 million in the third quarter from small donors exclusively (average just $18 each), a feat of political support matched by no other candidate!
Bernie has responded to his deep grass-roots popularity with ground breaking policy positions. US Person is utterly amazed that the corporate press seems to be more concerned with were he buys his suits (Khol's) than our society's widening social equity gap. The top 0.1 now control about a fifth of the nation’s wealth. Senator Sander's latest proposal is a far reaching wealth tax, more aggressive than the wealth tax proposed by Ms. Warren. His tax would start out at 1 percent on net worth from $32 million to
$50 million, and it would top out at 8 percent on net worth over $10
billion. Bernie makes no bones about the existence of a plutocracy in the United States. “There’s no question to my mind that the United States is moving toward
an oligarchy,” Mr. Sanders said. “This is an issue that has to be
addressed, and this wealth tax begins to do that.” He has often said he does not think billionaires should exist in our society. Recent figures from the US Census Bureau reveal that income inequality has reached its highest level since the government began tracking the data in 1967. A professor of law and politics at Yale University commented, “We are living in the second Gilded Age.” The idea of taxing the wealthy is popular with 'Mericans who have seen Il Douche give away $1.5 trillion in tax revenue to the already rich, on the discredited grounds that such leniency stimulates economic growth that "floats all boats". Despite his munificence, the US economy is slowing down causing the Fed to create more low interest money.
Sander's tax plan would raise $4.35 trillion over a decade. It also includes mandatory audits of all billionaires and establishing a "national wealth registry". One criticism of a wealth tax is the difficulty of detecting cheating and its enforcement. The plan has the goals of reducing the share of the national wealth that is scooped up by the richest 1%, and of paying for new social programs like universal child care and low-come housing. His tax plan would hardly leave billionaires destitute. For example if his plan had been in effect since 1982, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, would be worth $43 billion today instead of the obscene $160 billion Forbes estimates he is worth now.