The thing Bernie Sanders says about inequality that no other candidate will touch
July 15, 2015
There are very few unspoken rules among major-party candidates for president, and Bernie Sanders is breaking one of them. He’s saying that America’s leaders shouldn’t worry so much about economic growth if that growth serves to enrich only the wealthiest Americans.
“Our economic goals have to be redistributing a significant amount of [wealth] back from the top 1 percent,” Sanders said in a recent interview, even if that redistribution slows the economy overall.
“Unchecked growth – especially when 99 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent – is absurd,” he said. “Where we’ve got to move is not growth for the sake of growth, but we’ve got to move to a society that provides a high quality of life for all of our people. In other words, if people have health care as a right, as do the people of every other major country, then there’s less worry about growth. If people have educational opportunity and their kids can go to college and they have child care, then there’s less worry about growth for the sake of growth.”
Sanders’s position inverts decades of orthodoxy among liberal and conservative candidates alike, by prizing redistribution above all else. It taps into the mounting frustration in America, particularly among more liberal voters, with the widening gap between the rich and everyone else.
It is this kind of unorthodoxy that has helped galvanize liberal voters in New Hampshire and Iowa and elevate Sanders in early polls. It is also represents a sharp challenge to front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton, who wants to maintain broad appeal even as she expands her support among liberal Democrats.
Clinton will unveil the broad strokes of her economic vision Monday in a speech in New York. Previewing the speech, aides say she is also seeking to push economic growth whose benefits are broadly shared. Yet Clinton is not likely to say that fighting inequality requires a trade-off with growth.
Remainder:http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/07/13/what-bernie-sanders-is-willing-to-sacrifice-for-a-more-equal-society/
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