Last night, appearing on a Fox News Channel Town Hall, Democratic Primary Candidate Bernie Sanders…
…seeking to assure a voter from Russia that his brand of “democratic socialism” would not bring widespread poverty and despair to the United States, Sanders said he instead wanted a country more like Denmark, Finland and Sweden.
“What happened in the Soviet Union was not socialism, it was authoritarian communism,” Sanders said as attendees cheered.
“I’m not an expert on the current economy in Sweden,” Sanders responded when MacCallum noted Sweden was pushing towards more deregulation and less taxes, and that the population in the U.S. is much larger than that of the Nordic countries. “They have gone a long way to eliminate poverty, to make sure that all of their people have the basic needs that they need to live good lives.”
Sanders said studies have shown that countries like Denmark are among the “happiest on earth,” because they provide various free services like college and health care.
Other studies, however, have showed that Denmark essentially free-rides heavily from U.S. capitalism, and argue that mimicking their welfare programs may backfire.
Sanders also slammed President Trump’s response to the coronavirus outbreak — and said that he would not consider closing the border, no matter what.
“If you had to, would you close down the borders?” Baier asked, referring to efforts to stop the spread of coronavirus.
“No,” Sanders replied flatly.
He went on to condemn xenophobia and suggest that scientists would need to outline the appropriate approach.
Sanders also hit Trump’s appointment of Vice President Mike Pence to lead the coronavirus task force and inaccurately claimed that Trump had advised Americans with the virus to head to work. In fact, Trump told Fox News “Hannity” that, empirically, some Americans are going to work with the virus and recovering without incident.
“Sadly, we have an administration in Washington that has shown the world that it does not believe in science,” Sanders said, taking aim at the White House on issues from climate change to health care. “When you appoint Vice President Pence, an individual who also doesn’t much believe in science, what you’re telling the whole world is that you’re politicizing this issue.”
Baier pressed Sanders on the coronavirus response, saying that Trump has in fact appointed numerous experts to address the issue. Sanders responded by mocking Trump’s claim to have a “natural ability” to address disasters.
“You listen to the scientists; you don’t say stupid things,” Sanders said. “You don’t suggest to people they can go to work.”
Sanders returned to his talking points about the wealthiest people not paying their “fair share” in taxes, leading MacCallum to probe whether Sanders would reconsider his policies given the ongoing stock market crisis.
“I will not become president until January, and the economic situation will be different then,” Sanders said. As to what he would do if he were president today, Sanders said an “economic stimulus” could come in the form of “invest[ing] in working-class people in good-paying jobs by rebuiling our crumbling infrastructure — roads, bridges.”
He added that “I’m not here to demonize anybody,” after MacCallum pointed out that Bill Gates is contributing substantially to coronavirus efforts. At the same time, Sanders said, it was absurd to depend upon the “generosity” of billionaires.
Then, in a dramatic call-and-response moment with the audience at the town hall, Sanders established that Canada is not a socialist or communist system of government and yet manages to provide government-run health care at a minimal cost to patients. The president, for his part, has derided Canada’s health-care system and pointed out that even Canadians complain about their long waiting times, relatively substandard care, and high taxes.
The Vermont senator acknowledged that taxes would go up by 4 percent at a minimum to incomes over $29,000, in additional to more payroll taxes on employers and stock market transaction taxes, but asserted that “comprehensive” health care is worth it.
Sanders said he wanted a “modest” tax on “Wall Street speculation.” The proposal, according to Sanders’ campaign, specifically would place a “0.5 percent tax on stock trades – 50 cents on every $100 of stock – a 0.1 percent fee on bond trades, and a 0.005 percent fee on derivative trades.”
Sanders’ campaign has claimed that a “modest tax on Wall Street speculation … will raise an estimated $2.4 trillion over ten years” and, in one fell swoop, make all “public colleges, universities and trade schools tuition-free … and cancel all student debt over the next decade.”
However, the National Review has likened a tax on so-called “Wall Street speculation” to a de facto tax on savings, and asserted the Sanders plan is untested and “would mean paying $25 to the federal government every time you traded $5,000 worth of stock — or five times what you’d pay the typical online brokerage in fees. … Over the long term, that imposes serious costs on actively traded funds such as the ones containing many Americans’ retirement funds.”
Bernie Sanders is like all Marxists. They want all of us to “share the wealth” WITH THEM.
It’s no wonder that he makes the con job known as Socialism sound good to young minds full of mush.
He has had years of practice.
Bernard “Bernie” Sanders was born in Brooklyn, New York on September 8, 1941, to Polish immigrants of Jewish descent. After attending Brooklyn College for one year, he transferred to the University of Chicago (UC) and earned a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1964. At UC, Sanders joined the Young Peoples Socialist League (youth wing of the Socialist Party USA) as well as the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Peace Union.
After college, Sanders lived briefly on an Israeli kibbutz, then moved to Vermont where he worked variously as a carpenter, filmmaker, writer, and researcher. In 1971 he joined the anti-war Liberty Union Party (LUP), on whose ticket he made unsuccessful runs for the U.S. Senate in 1972 and 1974, and for Governor of Vermont in 1976. Sanders’s LUP platform called for the nationalization of all U.S. banks, public ownership of all utiliies, and the establishment of a worker-controlled federal government.
Sanders resigned from LUP in 1979 and became a political Independent. Two years later he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, a post he held until 1989. Sanders created some controversy when he hung a Soviet flag in his mayoral office, in honor of Burlington’s Soviet sister city Yaroslav.
According to an Accuracy In Media report, Sanders during the 1980s “collaborated with Soviet and East German ‘peace committees'” whose aim was “to stop President Reagan’s deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe.” Indeed, he “openly joined the Soviets’ ‘nuclear freeze’ campaign to undercut Reagan’s military build-up.”
In 1985 Sanders traveled to Managua, Nicaragua to celebrate the sixth anniversary of the rise to power of Daniel Ortega and his Marxist-Leninist Sandinista government.
In 1986 Sanders ran unsuccessfully for Governor of Vermont, and two years later he made a failed bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
In November 1989 Sanders addressed the national conference of the U.S. Peace Council, a Communist Party USA front. The event focused on how to “end the Cold War” and “fund human needs.” Fellow speakers included such notables as Leslie Cagan, John Conyers, and Manning Marable.
Choosing not to seek re-election to a fifth term as mayor, Sanders spent 1989-90 working as a lecturer at Hamilton College in upstate New York and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
By 1990 Sanders was a leading member of Jesse Jackson’s National Rainbow Coalition, and he ran successfully for Congress as a socialist, representing Vermont’s single at-large congressional district. The following year, Sanders founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus along with fellow House members Tom Andrews, Peter DeFazio, Ron Dellums, Lane Evans, and Maxine Waters.
During the 1990s, Sanders participated multiple times in the Socialist Scholars Conferences that were held annually in New York City.
…Sanders has long maintained that “global warming/climate change” not only threatens “the fate of the entire planet,” but is caused chiefly by human industrial activity and must be curbed by means of legislation strictly limiting carbon emissions. In 2007 Sanders and Senator Barbara Boxer proposed the Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act, which, according to an MIT study, would have imposed on U.S. taxpayers a yearly financial burden of more than $4,500 per family, purportedly to check climate change. In February 2010 Sanders likened climate-change skeptics to people who had disregarded the Nazi threat prior to WWII: “During that period of Nazism and fascism’s growth … there were people in this country and in the British parliament who said, ‘Don’t worry! Hitler’s not real! It’ll disappear!’” Accusing “big business” of being “willing to destroy the planet for short-term profits,” Sanders in 2013 said that “global warming is a far more serious problem than al Qaeda.” Stating unequivocally that “the scientific community is unanimous” in its belief that “the planet is warming up,” Sanders the following year declared that the “debate is over” and emphasized the importance of “transform[ing] our energy systems away from fossil fuels.”
In September 2011, Sanders was the first U.S. Senator to support the anti-capitalist Occupy Wall Street movement, lauding its activists for focusing a “spotlight” on the need for “real Wall Street reform.”
In March 2013, Sanders and fellow Senator Tom Harkin together introduced a bill to tax Wall Street speculators. “Both the economic crisis and the deficit crisis are a direct result of the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior on Wall Street,” said Sanders.
Over the years, Sanders’s political campaigns have received strong support from such organizations as the AFL-CIO, the American Association for Justice, the Backbone Campaign, the Council for a Livable World, the Democratic Socialists of America, and Peace Action.
In other words, he’s a Far Left, Socialist Whackjob.
French sociologist and political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) traveled to the America in 1831 to study our prisons and returned to France with a wealth of broader observations that he compiled together in “Democracy in America” (1835), one of the most influential books of the 19th century. With its spot-on observations on equality and individualism, Tocqueville’s work remains a valuable explanation of America to Europeans and of Americans to ourselves.
He once observed that
Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.
In other words, the failed political ideology of socialism takes away the exhilaration and fulfillment of individual achievement and replaces it with self-sacrifice in servitude to the State, for the good of the Central Nanny-State Government, which, in turn, promises to “share the wealth”, but, as was the case in the old Soviet Union, and more recently, Venezuela, never does.
The great Sir Winston Churchill once said that
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
I would rather be blessed than miserable.
How about you?
Bernie Sanders is indeed a shining example of the “diversity” to be found in today’s “Democratic Socialist” Party.
He is more crooked than a dog’s hind leg and he and his “fellow travelers” are attempting to prove that the political philosophy of Marxism will work in America. even though it has failed everywhere it has been tried.
Bernie constantly extols the virtues of socialism without “sharing any of HIS wealth”, somehow becoming a millionaire many times over while “working” as a “public servant”.
Ah, Liberal Hypocrisy.
Ain’t it grand?
Until He Comes,
KJ
Kingsjester's Blog 