On Greed and Tax Avoidance, Says Bernie Sanders, 'Trump Is Not Alone'

[Uncle Joe]

Senator Bernie Sanders is not asking anyone to be shocked that Donald J. Trump was very good at not paying taxes, but he also wants people to know that the disgraced former Republican president is far from the only rich person or powerful corporation who gets away with paying little or nothing each year federal income tax.

(snip)

"Yes. Dr. King was right," added Sanders: "We have socialism for the rich, rugged capitalism for the rest."

(snip)

Link to tweet

ITEP's analysis shows that these 55 corporations "would have paid a collective total of $8.5 billion for the year had they paid [the staturory federal rate of 21 percent]." Instead, including by benefiting greatly from the tax law that Trump and a GOP-controlled Congress passed in 2017, those companies collectively "received $3.5 billion in tax rebates."

(snip)

https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-tax-returns-2659052893

[Hortensis]

1. Trump sure isn't! Greed is a basic human trait, not limited to class,

and not even to those with money.

But, this inference that the wealthy are wealthy from socialism only they can benefit from and therefore that everyone should covet it for themselves -- Good grief!!

Of course the wealthy classes would strongly object to their "means of production" being seized to be owned in common with 300M others. It'd be fun to see the victims portrayed on "The Real Socialists of Low-Incomeville," though. As long as it's only malicious TV and never real.

As for Sanders' beliefs about economic fairness -- they were long established among America's liberals when he was born. He just takes them waay farther.

[Uncle Joe]

2. That's true regarding greed being a basic human trait however

I'm of the same belief as Uncle Ben



Coincidentally I'm viewing the Civil War on MSNBC and a history teacher was making a great point just a minute ago about how slave owners in one sense hated the system but were extremely concerned about losing their "means of production" should the slaves be freed.

Having said that, I don't believe Bernie is for seizing everyone's means of production just that everyone should pay their fair share of taxes and currently the system is highly dysfunctional primarily serving to transfer what little bit of wealth the poor and middles class have to the mega-wealthy.

[Hortensis]

4. Uncle Joe, Bernie's socialism was the real thing for several decades before

he decided to run for president near the end of his life in politics and set about aligning his image more with what Americans would accept. I once wondered if I could vote for him and read and watched everything I could find from him and about him over the prior 55 or so years, and the change in rhetoric was extremely substantial.

Turns out what he's been running on is Americans' envy of what people in Europe tend to have -- big, rich, capitalism-funded/government-run social programs,...

PLUS a highly dishonest and acquisitive ascribing of my own lifelong liberal Democratic ideals and goals to socialism. Including on taxation. Uncle Joe, I really do know what my ideals have always been. See liberal Democrat Nancy Pelosi's quote below for one of them -- it's actually somewhere around 100 years old, originally ascribed in various forms to liberal Democrat Louis Brandeis.

If what Senator Sanders wanted was for rich people to pay a fair share of taxes, well, that's the least of what Democrats have always wanted. We're the equality people; we haven't changed, and we used taxes to smash over-powerful wealthy classes before. We want a lot more than that, though; again, see Pelosi's and Brandeis's quote below. We believe today's uber-wealthy classes are an existential threat to democracy and must be done away with.

Not that I doubt Bernie does also, as part of his ideology, but his plan for all the rest of us (but isn't talking about these days) is where we part ways.

[republianmushroom]

3. They are just using the system, the system needs to be changed.