Bernie Sanders has announced his campaign to defeat Donald Trump in 2020. I am all in, as I was in 2016. It boils down to two words, really:
Class Warfare.
“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
― Warren Buffett
Bernie talks about class warfare more than any other 2020 contender. This is my number one issue, the one on which every other significant issue hinges. But don’t take me and Warren Buffet’s word for it! In 2013, Obama shocked me by referring to inequality as “the defining issue of our time,” in his final state of the union address. It was a little late in his administration to be using that framing, welcome as it was. But his insight was not news to me, nor anyone else who had been following the slow drift toward plutocracy that we’ve been experiencing since the 1970s, which Fortune magazine has dubbed the Gilded Age 2.0 (my emphasis added):
inequality in the U.S. ...has reached levels last seen in the years just before the Great Depression, according to a recent economic analysis.
In a paper authored by UC Berkeley economics professor Gabriel Zucman and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Zucman determined that in 1929, just before the Wall Street Crash that helped precipitate the Great Depression, the top 0.1% richest adults’ share of total household wealth was close to 25%. During the Depression and World War II, the share of the top 0.1% declined until it “reached its low-water mark in the 1970s,” .
…
“Wealth inequality has increased dramatically since the 1980s, with a top 1% wealth share around 40% in 2016 vs. 25%–30% in the 1980s,” Zucman wrote, noting that “the share of wealth owned by the bottom 90% has collapsed in similar proportions.” The only country Zucman found with similarly high levels of wealth inequality was Russia.
The paper also cautioned that, as bad as these numbers look, they could be even worse in reality because the recent decades of financial globalization have made it harder to measure the wealth of the richest people.
Bernie ran on this in 2016. Note his framing the problem as one of class warfare, which no other candidate, not even Elizabeth Warren, who I love, is thus far willing to adopt on the campaign trail:
This is not just an academic distinction, it is hugely important to me that the 2020 nominee view things in this way. Since Trump took office we have seen so much happen to exacerbate the already-existent inequality mentioned above, all of which must be rolled back immediately before making any real progress, and all of which requires getting a class warrior on the side of the 99% into office:
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Judges: the Supreme Court overturned a 40-year old union-protection called Abood v. Detroit Board of Education in the Janus decision, making it possible for any public sector union member to stop paying dues but keep getting the same representation as their dues paying brethren. This means that we must get truly economically progressive judges onto the Supreme Court, and probably add judges as well, in order to undo that damage and unforeseen other inequality-exacerbating decisions, to be sure. And it’s not just the Supreme Court. As NPR points out, Trump's Judicial Appointments Were Confirmed At Historic Pace In 2018. And these appointees have already begun to make the courts more conservative. So we need to correct for ALL of that, which would require the rigor and dedication of a class warfare analysis.
- Taxes: the Trump tax code gave a huge tax cut to the super rich and corporations. As New York Magazine put it, The Trump Tax Cuts Did One Thing: Give Rich People More Money. These must be reversed. But Bernie is the most likely candidate to go the extra step of revolutionizing the tax code, making it more progressive, on a par with the New Deal era brackets and rates. Here was his proposal in 2016, which included a top marginal tax rate of 52% on those earning more than $10 million. He has also proposed significantly increasing the estate tax to a top marginal rate of 77%, to get at wealth as well as income inequality.
- Safety nets: Attacks on food stamps, welfare, medicaid and housing subsidies have led the UN Special Rapporteur on Poverty to conclude that “This is a systematic attack on America’s welfare program that is undermining the social safety net for those who can’t cope on their own. Once you start removing any sense of government commitment, you quickly move into cruelty”. This must also be immediately reversed. But how can we reverse cuts on medicaid without also passing Medicare for All? Written by Bernie and introduced with 16 cosponsors (including 2020 hopefuls Kamala Harris, Corey Booker, Kristin Gillibrand, and Elizabeth Warren) Senator Sanders’ comprehensive, $32 Trillion Medicare for All Legislation would bring us into the rest of the civilized world community, the entirety of which has, in one form or another, a universal and/or single payer healthcare system. It makes good fiscal sense, which is why both the right leaning Mercatus Institute and the left leaning Urban Institute have concluded that it would be cost neutral based on total US expenditures, i.e. 18% of our GDP (although the rich would pay a disproportionate share compared to now, because it would shift the burden from household medical expenditures to taxes once implemented—an added bonus). As Vox puts it, that is actually a bargain, because the cost of extending coverage to the uninsured under our current system would be enormous, and balloon the national debt, but this is, again, cost neutral. But more than that it is the moral thing to do, as tens of thousands of families face bankruptcy and financial calamity because they can’t afford necessary medical care.
- Environment: Trump has been an environmental disaster. Bernie is a cosponsor of the Green New Deal.
- Student Loan Debt: According to Forbes, “Student loan debt is now the second highest consumer debt category - behind only mortgage debt - and higher than both credit cards and auto loans.” These debtors (and I am one, paying off the remaining 2/3 of my $150k in undergraduate and graduate debt from Columbia) will not respond to weak fixes such as tax-free savings accounts or what have you. Bernie is boldly proposing free tuition for state colleges. That’s a plan we can get behind.
I could go on and on but I digress. I think that Bernie is the best candidate for the moment to both beat Trump and fully roll back the damage that Trump has done, and get us on the right path again in a way that will ensure our survival as a species on this planet, a species that includes my first newborn child, Lucas. He has the class warfare analysis necessary to take the hard stances on key economic policy issues, against entrenched special interests employing lobbyist armies tasked with keeping them entrenched and in power and wealth, and root out those interests through sweeping, broad social changes. He has the people-funded campaign to ensure he will not be breaking any promises or pissing off any allies in doing so. Finally, he understands that he will not do that alone, but that it will take a political revolution, “from the bottom on up” to achieve. That is why I am again strongly supporting Bernie’s campaign for President.