Bernie Sanders is an independent Senator representing Vermont. He is not a Democrat, but caucuses with the democratic party (that means he goes to their meetings and supports their goals). He describes himself as a democratic socialist and favors policies similar to those used by Scandinavia. He served in the House of Representatives for 16 years and the switched to the Senate in 2006. Bernie sanders is a liberal, and led Democrats on such issues as income inequality, campaign climate reform, and global warming/climate change. He was born in 1941.
Bernie Sanders was opposed to the 2008 bank bailout, and in 2010 made an 8 and a half hour speech against extending the Bush era tax rates. Bernie Sanders does not qualify as an extreme capitalist.
The foundation of his 2016 presidential campaign is income inequality. Over the last twenty years, or so, the people in the top 1 percent of earned income have gained control of more and more of America’s money. As a crude analogy, in the 1960s, the general population controlled seventy percent of the money, and the rich, thirty percent. At present, it’s more like the rich control seventy percent, and the general population has the remaining thirty percent. Bernie Sanders would like to fix that by giving us (the poor) a raise, and taxing the rich, as was done in the 1960s, before the rich got control of congress.
Bernie Sanders is critical of offshore tax havens and states, “Large corporations have evaded at least 34.5 billion in taxes by setting up more than 600 subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands and other offshore tax havens since 2008. As a result, at least a dozen companies avoided paying any federal income taxes in recent years, and even received more than $6.4 billion in tax refunds from the IRS since 2008. Something is seriously wrong with our tax system.
In regards to Wall Street reforms, Bernie Sanders believes if an institution is too big to fail, it is actually too big to exist. He points out that three of the four banks bailed out in 2008 are now bigger than they were then.
On the issue of jobs, Senator Sanders has said, “America once led the world in building and maintaining a nationwide network of safe and reliable bridges and roads. Today, nearly a quarter of the nation’s 600,000 bridges have been designated as structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. Almost one-third of America’s roads are in poor or mediocre condition.” (This is where taxing the rich once again creates jobs and improves America.)
He has not stuck his head in the sand regarding global warming, and takes the issue seriously. Bernie Sanders and Senator Barbara Boxer introduced the ‘Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act of 2007. In 2012, he made a speech basically telling Senator Jim Inhof that he was an idiot and that global warming was not a hoax. He was Climate Hawks top vote-rated senator.
He believes we need to shift away from fossil fuels. “Unless we get our act together,” Bernie Sanders said, “the planet that we’re going to be leaving to our kids and grandchildren will be significantly less habitable than we have right now.”
If you lean towards the liberal, Bernie Sanders looks pretty good.
