Bernie Sanders

eridani

(51,907 posts) Tue Mar 1, 2016, 06:31 AM Mar 2016

Bernie Sanders says he would like Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Reich in a Sanders Administration

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/6/23/1395771/-Bernie-Sanders-says-would-like-Joseph-Stiglitz-and-Robert-Reich-in-a-Sanders-Administration

You have long been critical of the Robert Rubin style of economics that has often dominated thinking among Democrats in recent years. Who would you bring in to change that conversation? Who should have a bigger seat the table?

I’d bring Joseph Stiglitz who is a Nobel Prize winning economist. You’d get people like Robert Reich who is teaching out at University of California. He is a former secretary of Labor who has been very good. There are other progressive economists who are doing a very good job of describing why the middle class is disappearing.

Why do you think they don’t have a bigger role in the Obama administration?

I think the president is probably sympathetic to some of their ideas but they go farther than he does. In other words, the president has asked the top one percent to pay more in taxes. Fine, many of us think you’ve got to go a lot further than that. I think basically the president’s views are not as progressive as many of these economists are. And, certainly, not on trade issues.

You have a much larger and louder microphone now, as ranking member on the Budget Committee and as a candidate for president, than you had even last year. How do you hope to leverage that platform?

I think we raise issues that a lot of folks here in Congress are not comfortable talking about. That is the disastrous nature of our trade policies and the fact in my view that the evidence is overwhelming that NAFTA, CAFTA and permanent normal trade relations with China have been disastrous