World News Korner

Bernie Sanders is talking tough and taking no goddamn prisoners these days!

This is from the website of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders:

How did we go from healthy surpluses to terrible deficits? It's not that complicated. In 2001, President Clinton left office with a $236-billion surplus. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office foresaw a 10-year budget surplus of $5.6 trillion, enough to erase the national debt by 2011. It didn't work out that way.

Instead, under President George W. Bush, wars were launched in Afghanistan and Iraq without paying for them. The cost of those wars, estimated at up to $6 trillion, was tacked onto our national credit card. Then Congress passed and Bush signed an expensive prescription drug program. It also was not paid for. Then Bush and Congress handed out big tax breaks to the wealthy and large corporations. That drove down revenue. So did the recession in 2008, which was caused by a deregulated Wall Street. All that turned big surpluses into big deficits.

Interestingly, today's "deficit hawks" in Congress — Rep.Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and other conservative Republicans — voted for those measures that drove up deficits. Now that they're worried about deficits again, they want to dismantle virtually every social program designed to protect working families, the elderly, children, the sick and the poor.

In other words, it's OK to spend trillions on a war we should never have waged in Iraq and to provide huge tax breaks for billionaires and multinational corporations. But in the midst of very difficult economic times, we just can't afford to protect the most vulnerable people in our country. That's their view. I disagree.

So where do we go from here? How do we draft a federal budget that creates jobs, makes our country more productive, protects working families and lowers the deficit?

For a start, we cannot impose more austerity on people who are already suffering. When 95% of all new income between 2009 and 2012 went to the top 1%, and while tens of millions of working Americans saw a decline in their income, we cannot cut programs that working families depend on.

Instead of talking about cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, we must end the absurdity of corporations not paying a nickel in federal income taxes. A 2008 report from the Government Accountability Office found that was the case with 1 in 4 large U.S. corporations. At a time when multinational corporations and the wealthy are avoiding an estimated $100 billion a year in taxes by stashing money in tax havens like the Cayman Islands, we need to make them pay taxes just as middle-class Americans do.

You know the thing that never stops irritating the crap out of me is that we always allow the Republicans to define the debate. Even when we stand up to them we are always in a position where we have already acquiesced to most of their demands. (See Sequestration.)

I think we need to stop playing defense and start taking the fight to them. In fact I think we have to!

I do realize that Bernie Sanders is in a VERY safe district in Vermont and therefore is allowed to speak his mind with impunity, but I also know that if we were able to effectively explain to the American people what is REALLY going on these days we would start to gain ground politically and over time hopefully change the discussion to make it more factually based.

I say that after Hillary gets elected she drafts her husband, Bill Clinton to a newly formed Cabinet position, the "Czar of explaining stuff to the American people."

"Put me in Hil, I got this."

Sound good?

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