Quote Originally Posted by vidgil View Post
I think we'd all agree that if Bernie is not a full blown socialist, he's at the very least high on the "socialist spectrum"

When you're talking about things like free state-run health care and free post secondary, massive wealth distribution, massive estate taxes, gouging the rich... I mean this guy is as socialist as you can get for an American politician.
Back in the 1950s, the era when America was great and that you're aspiring to get back to, the top marginal tax rate was 91%. Investment income was taxed at the same level as earned income. The estate tax was levied at 50% on estates over a value of about a million dollars in today's dollars while today it can be as little as 10% and it's only levied on the value of any estate that's over ten million in today's dollars. You get the first ten million tax free. Bernie isn't advocating gouging the rich even a quarter as badly as they were being gouged by those socialists Eisenhower, Truman and so on. But the rich do need to pay more. Until they do the economy will continue to be largely fucked.

Bernie would like to see massive wealth redistribution but that's only to make up for the massive upward redistribution of wealth that's taken place over the past 36 years. If your wage had kept pace with productivity, like it used to when US labour had some bargaining power, you'd currently be earning 44% more than you are. The reason the economy is so slow is that your 44% and the 44% of 99% of the rest of the country is going into the pockets of 1% of the population. Redistribute that wealth back into the 99%'s pockets and you'd have the biggest economic boom in history.

The Heritage Foundation has a ranking of the most capitalist free economy states in the world. Every single country above America has a state-run single payer healthcare system. Every single first world economy other than America has a single payer system. Apart from Switzerland which is about 50/50 but there the government controls the prices that private hospitals can charge and the health insurance companies are banned by law from making a franc in profit. Even so they have the second most expensive healthcare in the world after America.