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by conniption » Wed May 27, 2015 2:03 am
C-SPAN - Presidential Campaign Announcement - VIDEO
May 26, 2015
Senator Bernie Sanders Campaign RallySenator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) spoke with supporters at an event marking the launch of his campaign for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. Senator Sanders talked about issues such as campaign finance reform, poverty, and minimum wage.
by Luther Blissett » Wed May 27, 2015 1:11 pm
The media’s sickening Sanders double standard: How the socialist brings out their true colors
Bernie Sanders' 2016 campaign reveals how skewed our attitudes toward wealth and taxation have become
SIMON MALOY
Bernie Sanders held his first major presidential campaign event in Vermont yesterday afternoon after kicking off his 2016 bid with a delightfully offbeat Capitol Hill press conference. The tone of the coverage surrounding Sanders’ campaign doesn’t necessarily reflect it, but Vermont’s independent senator is actually pulling in a decent share of the Democratic vote. As of this writing, his support in national polling has climbed up into double digits, and the last few polls out of Iowa and New Hampshire put him at around 14 or 15 percent in those states. Of course, those numbers have to be measured against those of his chief rival, Hillary Clinton, who dominates both nationally and in the early states with more than 50 percent.
So Sanders is a long shot, but he’s not without a sizable bloc of support. In fact, when you crunch the numbers, Sanders is outperforming the combined support of several GOP presidential wannabes. The Bernie 2016 boomlet is clearly a bit puzzling to reporters, who don’t seem to know what to do with Sanders beyond treating him as a foil to Hillary, and so they default to doing nothing, even as every utterance of GOP candidates who are polling below 2 percent merits its own headline. There are clear double standards at play, and one of them pertains to how reporters cover a candidate who is unreservedly liberal versus how they cover “proudly conservative” Republicans. This dynamic is sometimes subtle, and it emerged during an interview Sanders gave with CNBC’s John Harwood.
Income inequality and the distribution of wealth are two topics Sanders hammers away at constantly, and during the interview with Harwood he brought up the fact that the top marginal tax rate for income during the 1950s was somewhere around 90 percent. Sanders’ comment took Harwood aback. “When you think about something like 90 percent, you don’t think that’s obviously too high?” he asked. “No,” Bernie shot back. Sanders’ endorsement of the Eisenhower-era tax structure also raised eyebrows at the New York Times, which observed that Sanders “doesn’t flinch over returning to the 90 percent personal income tax rates of the 1950s for top earners.” In these reactions you can easily spy an undercurrent of incredulity that a politician would enthusiastically advocate for rich people to pay more – much, much more – in taxes.
This is what happens after more than three decades of economic policymaking that has enshrined tax cuts as the greatest good one can strive for. For Republicans, the policy is tax cuts everywhere and always and most especially for the rich. For Democrats, it’s tax cuts for the middle class while the wealthy, who benefit disproportionately from a tax structure that is “barely progressive,” are asked only to “pay a little more.” We’ve become so accustomed to historically low rates of taxation for the wealthy that when someone like Sanders comes along and says the rich can and should pay a far higher rate, people assume he’s out to lunch.
But is a 90 percent top rate “obviously too high”? Is it something one should instinctively “flinch” at? Not really, says Bryce Covert:Last year, economists found that the point at which the top tax rate is high enough to maximize government revenues but not so high that it discourages the rich from trying to earn more is quite high: about 95 percent for the 1 percent. History bears that out. Economists have pointed out that post-war American growth has been higher during periods with much higher top marginal tax rates and lower when tax rates were substantially lower. When the top rate was more than 90 percent in the 50s, economic growth averaged more than 4 percent a year. But recently when the top rate has been closer to 35 percent, growth has been less than 2 percent a year on average.
The flip side to the dynamic is that while reporters and pundits raise their eyebrows at the notion of dramatically increasing the tax burden on the wealthy, absurd and irresponsible tax cuts for top earners are now just assumed to be a given when it comes to Republican policymaking. Several current Republican candidates for the presidency have laid out plans that would eliminate capital gains taxes and the estate tax while cutting the top income tax rate. They propose to offset the costs of these cuts by eliminating certain deductions, but preserving the ones that benefit the rich the most, like the mortgage interest deduction and the deduction for charitable giving.
The thrust of GOP policymaking is to redirect an even greater share of the nation’s wealth to the already engorged few sitting at the top of the income ladder. Sanders is proposing instead that we funnel some of that wealth away from the rich and toward the middle class. And while we’re supposed to “flinch” at a high rate of taxation for income, a zero percent rate on investments is taken in stride.
by redsock » Fri May 29, 2015 8:42 pm
by 8bitagent » Sat May 30, 2015 1:15 am
by Nordic » Sat May 30, 2015 1:22 am
by 82_28 » Sat May 30, 2015 3:57 am
by Wombaticus Rex » Sat May 30, 2015 3:04 pm
82_28 » Sat May 30, 2015 2:57 am wrote:
But I bet it will be RAND with the ultimate win.
by 8bitagent » Sat May 30, 2015 3:43 pm
82_28 » Sat May 30, 2015 2:57 am wrote:Warren would make an awesome preznit. In a perfect world she would school Clinton and any of the clown car.
Sadly, my bet is on RAND paul as the final outcome. He hits all the right chords with both the right and left. I'm fucking sick of "politics".
But, Warren, if she changed her mind, all the way. She would be best. Duh. Plus we could dust off our "first woman preznit" award we all have laying around with someone quality and compassionate.
But I bet it will be RAND with the ultimate win.
The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur rarely has kind words for Republicans, but on Monday he said he would be willing to bet money that Rand Paul would beat Hillary Clinton and win the presidency in 2016.
Uygur credited Paul as a “voice of reason” on fighting ISIS, in contrast to Clinton’s hawkishness. He agreed that “our invasion of Iraq in the first place and all of the other bombings we’ve done in the Middle East… has in fact led to the rise of ISIS.”
by Nordic » Sat May 30, 2015 4:51 pm
by seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 08, 2015 12:27 pm
une 08, 2015, 07:49 am
Sanders pulls within 8 points of Clinton in Wisconsin
By Ben Kamisar
Wisconsin Democrats might not be ready for Hillary Clinton, as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) finished just 8 percentage points behind Clinton in a new Badger State straw poll.
Clinton finished with 49 percent of voters at the state party convention; Sanders finished in second place with 41 percent of the vote. Vice President Biden and former Gov. Martin O'Malley (Md.) tied at third with 3 percent of the vote. Former Sen. Jim Webb (Va.) followed with under 2 percent, and former Gov. Lincoln Chafee (R.I.) closed out the poll with 1 percent.
The surprise showing is a boost for Sanders, who regularly polls about 40 percentage points behind Clinton in national poll and rarely finishes within striking distance of the former secretary of State. It's the closest he's come to toppling Clinton at the polls, outside of a 9-percentage-point margin in a Gravis Marketing poll of Washington state voters.
National Republican Party leaders have taken to Twitter to tout the results, framing them as trouble for Clinton.
Sanders's vocal support of organized labor could have helped to sway Badger State Democrats, as the issue deeply polarizes the state. Voters attempted to recall Gov. Scott Walker, himself a likely 2016 Republican presidential candidate, in 2011 over his support of a controversial law that limits the collective-bargaining powers of state employees.
The Vermont senator's campaign touted the results in a blog post on its website, quoting a story from The Nation that calls the finish "unexpected and significant."
by Wombaticus Rex » Mon Jun 08, 2015 12:29 pm
by seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 08, 2015 12:41 pm
by Forgetting2 » Tue Jun 09, 2015 12:58 am
Wombaticus Rex » 29 Apr 2015 08:46 wrote:IanEye » Tue Apr 28, 2015 9:42 pm wrote:It is like Sanders wants to make some points, but ultimately prefers Clinton in the office as opposed to Bush.
Your assessment is dead on; he's about as serious as Ben Carlson.
Nobody on his staff seems to think this is a serious bid for anything but raising his national profile to increase his clout in DC. It's a PR campaign; it is not a presidential campaign.
Edit: I want to state things strongly and clearly. The cynicism of this bothers me.
Bernie Sanders is going to spend the next 12 months promoting Facebook memes about "inequality" -- forgive me if I don't think being an info-warrior means much in the filter bubble echo chamber that is Big Blue -- and all of those memes will feature his fucking face. Bernie Sanders is working with a ghostwriter on a book. If not for the seriousness of the issues he is discussing, this would be Herman Cain level shit.
Bernie Sanders is going to be fundraising for a campaign he not only knows he won't win, but won't even seriously pursue. He is going to burn donations from idealists until it's time, inevitably, to get in line and support Hillary 2016.
So who is he really campaigning against? Elizabeth Warren. He's doing the Clinton family a big favor with this. And I get to spend a whole year watching people praise him for his courage and vision and message.
Whatever. Hopefully I get some contracts out of it, right? Let it burn, let it burn.
by IanEye » Tue Jun 09, 2015 9:02 am
by Wombaticus Rex » Tue Jun 09, 2015 11:04 am
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