Climate champions: Bernie Sanders with endorsement from Bill McKibben
Be still my heart. Of course first he has got to win but then our hopes would come true. Really I'm hyperventilating right now. This is the stuff of my wildest dreams.
The Washington Post has interviewed Bernie Sanders and gained some insight as to how Sanders would operate if he was elected POTUS.
You have long been critical of the Robert Rubin style of economics that has often dominated thinking among Democrats in recent years. Who would you bring in to change that conversation? Who should have a bigger seat the table?
I’d bring Joseph Stiglitz who is a Nobel Prize winning economist. You’d get people like Robert Reich who is teaching out at University of California. He is a former secretary of Labor who has been very good. There are other progressive economists who are doing a very good job of describing why the middle class is disappearing.
Why do you think they don’t have a bigger role in the Obama administration?
I think the president is probably sympathetic to some of their ideas but they go farther than he does. In other words, the president has asked the top one percent to pay more in taxes. Fine, many of us think you’ve got to go a lot further than that. I think basically the president’s views are not as progressive as many of these economists are. And, certainly, not on trade issues.
You have a much larger and louder microphone now, as ranking member on the Budget Committee and as a candidate for president, than you had even last year. How do you hope to leverage that platform?
I think we raise issues that a lot of folks here in Congress are not comfortable talking about. That is the disastrous nature of our trade policies and the fact in my view that the evidence is overwhelming that NAFTA, CAFTA and permanent normal trade relations with China have been disastrous.
Go ahead, read the entire piece, it will put a smile on your face.
NOTE: Please keep the comments civil. Discussion is best when it's on policy.