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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe media’s sickening Sanders double standard: How the socialist brings out their true colors
Last edited Thu May 28, 2015, 11:29 AM - Edit history (1)
http://www.salon.com/2015/05/27/the_medias_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 doesnt necessarily reflect it, but Vermonts 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 hes 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 dont 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 CNBCs 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 dont think thats 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 doesnt 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, its 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. Weve 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 hes out to lunch.
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