After doing their very best to ignore Bernie Sanders upstart campaign over the last year, the Washington Post’s Editorial board has changed tactics, launching an all out editorial assault on the Sanders Campaign. It starts with a full throated defense of the Big Banks.
Bernie Sanders’s fiction-filled campaign
Here is a reality check: Wall Street has already undergone a round of reform, significantly reducing the risks big banks pose to the financial system. The evolution and structure of the world economy, not mere corporate deck-stacking, explained many of the big economic challenges the country still faces.
Never mind the fact that what were the Too Big To Fail Banks in 2008 have gotten much bigger and fewer in number posing an even greater systematic risk to the economy if any one of them were to face insolvency. A mere reduction in systematic risk is not enough. Americans should expect and demand their government do its best to eliminate systematic risks to the economy. Only Bernie Sanders is willing to what’s most prudent to protect the economy on Main Street from the boundless greed of Wall Street’s titans of finance.
He admits that he would have to raise taxes on the middle class in order to pay for his universal, Medicare-for-all health-care plan, and he promises massive savings on health-care costs that would translate into generous benefits for ordinary people, putting them well ahead, on net.
Why does the Editorial Board emphasize a small proposed tax on the Middle Class when Sanders proposals would make our whole tax system much fairer?
Sanders Tax Proposals Would Make the Tax System Fairer and More Sustainable
Following is a statement by Robert McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice, on Bernie Sanders’s new plan to raise revenue to pay for a proposed Medicare-for-All plan.
“The tax changes recently proposed by presidential candidate Bernie anders would represent an important step toward a fairer and more sustainable tax system. Sanders’ proposal to eliminate special tax breaks for capital gains, increase the payroll tax and increase income tax rates for the very best-off would raise needed revenues while moving us closer to a tax system that treats wealth the same as work.”
Back to this disgusting WaPo editorial.
Mr. Sanders is a lot like many other politicians.
Excuse me? Do any other politicians raise their money the same way Sanders does? Overwhelmingly in small amounts from an unprecedented number of people? No, Sanders is nothing like many other politicians.
Mr. Sanders’s success so far does not show that the country is ready for a political revolution. It merely proves that many progressives like being told everything they want to hear.
So according to the WaPo’s Editorial Board Americans are just fine with the nation moving toward a full blown Plutocracy. Only those annoying progressives think we should be able to aspire to more than what our corporate masters are willing to concede. How delusional!
From Jane Mayer’s Dark Money’s dust cover:
Why is America living in an age of profound economic inequality? Why, despite the desperate need to address climate change, have even modest environmental efforts been defeated again and again? Why have protections for employees been decimated? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay far lower than tax rates for middle-class workers?
Those questions bother a lot of Americans not just progressives. That’s made this the year of the outsider. The the WaPo’s Editorial Board is oblivious to what’s really driving voters this year.
Bernie Sanders is the only candidate willing to grapple with those issues honestly.