Sanders is willing to sacrifice growth for the sake of redistribution.
“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.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/07/13/what-bernie-sanders-is-willing-to-sacrifice-for-a-more-equal-society/
This is problematic for two reasons. First, politically it is a disaster. Sure, it plays well to a portion of the base, but going into a general election arguing that we are going to sacrifice growth in order to redistribute is a losing strategy.
And the second reason is that it implicitly concedes a false right-wing economic argument, namely that sacrificing growth is necessary in order to reduce inequality. In fact, there is an argument to be made that the opposite is true: reducing inequality actually increases economic growth, particularly when inequality has reached the extreme levels we have in the US. There is research suggesting that the economically optimal tax rates on the wealthy are higher than they are right now. At worst, reducing inequality from the extreme highs we are at now is growth-neutral, so we shouldn't be talking about sacrificing growth.
Democratic policies are better for growth than Republican ones. Progressive taxation to pay for things like infrastructure, education, and scientific research increases growth in the long term. Effective financial regulation does as well, not only be preventing crises, but also by diverting more resources to the real economy rather than financial engineering. This is the argument Dems should be making.
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Because our growth model, and stressing the GNP is a problem for two reasons:
First, the growth model is not sustainable. It it the reason for environmental destruction and enslaving 'others' around the world, and the poor, especially women and children, is needed to make it work.
They are denied what the 1st world thinks we should have, such as education, healthcare and the most basic of human rights, agency over one's body. There is no such thing when one's time and one's body are for sale. The creative force of billions is being suppressed by the lack of value placed on it by the 'market.' It's great academic talk for those who have the leisure and distance to talk, but I focus on the often denied reality that influences all living things on this planet.
We're racing like raving horsemen to the edge of a cliff and we are not pulling back on the reins. All to keep our jobs and our so-called standard of living.
What kind of person does such things? What kind of system of economics does not take life into account?
GRAPHIC PICTURE: Don't worry, see explanation below:
The children on the left were rescued from the refugee camp. All were well taken care of and lived through it.
Consider the juxaposition of what the third world and the middle class believe they are entitled and have the right to have, while not solving the first side of the picture first. That's 'setting the cart before the horse' for those who believe that all are equal.
Hope that is what BS is saying but he's not talking the language of most. HRC , who has a proven track record of using the wealth from corporations to change conditions for women and children. In the words of Russell Means, a founder of the AIM, the most powerful 'economic units' on the planet are now the corporations, who are the ones we will have to talk to about this, like it or not.
Morality is lacking in all that is being done to the planet and living things. All our candidates in the Democratic Party are for a more moral society in ways they understand.
Russell Means says that the price for denying living creatures respect, will come at a terrible cost. 'There will be hell to pay,' he said, as these 'natural laws' are being broken in the name of the 'market.' Humans have come to 'a sorry pass.'
It's not a wise policy to see endless growth as the most important thing. There is more than one kind of prosperity. Those who can, buy land and produce their own food and drink water from their own well. Those who can't manage to get to or maintains that state of affairs are living at the whims of those who do.
And even after a lifetime of sacrifice and what some might call poverty holding onto that piece of earth (instead of having the cash to buy the latest consumer goods) can also be run off their land by the 'market' mentality which is capable of shoving them off their patrimony. It's to be argued whether it is theirs fairly to begin with, since the way they got it from a larger perspective was theft.
The middle class in this country and others live in a bubble that pretends by going over numbers, it created its own wealth without a negative effect on others and the planet. This is not true. It made its wealth by the greatest theft known, destroying land and resources (living ones), then making a profit by extracting the energy of the laborers without bringing them out of the system of environmental destruction.
Those pressed to work in such conditions are doing what was once called, 'eating the seed corn' or the means of biological production. In other words, the source of 'prosperity' is limited to destroying their local ecosphere for a piece of the first world pie. When it's done and gone, the first world will leave them in the dust, and they will be impoverished for many generations.
Some of what are fondly called the 'good old days' of the middle class, were built on theft from others in this country or the world. And some of the greatest wealth was made by eating through the seed corn, like privatization and bubbles. As the cash flowed freely, some got rich. But it cannot last, it never does.
And during the middle of the bubble, real people are hurt badly, but the media always cheers it on. The Iraq War, which I call 'the greatest money laundering scheme in world history,' and the entire Bush reign, bankrupted us, causing our creditors to call in their notes in 2008. They wisely wrote their terms for lending to be 'paid in kind' with trade deals that have decimated our economy and manufacturing base an enriched and strengthened theirs. These loans were not made for the sake or love or sentiment. They funded the Bush wars, not because they supported the reasoning behind them, but for their own benefit. No one lent us money because they were our allies. It was just 'good business' for them.
They didn't trust the foolish American people to be good for the payment of debt. Every GOP Congress under their baleful control proves them right and tried to renege on the payments, including pushing 'default' to make the country go bankrupt. Then we'd lose more than the 'seed corn', we'd lose the land it grew on. And we are.
For the millionth time, I say the media is not a friend, for so many reasons. All 'news' stories are designed to divert us off the theft in process and brainwash us into the next round of theft.
Endless growth for a few on the planet, including most of the fabled 99%, is just plain suicide, IMO.
Second, the GNP is touted as the solution for a nation's prosperity. It isn't. Wealth doesn't buy real joy or meaning to life, it only buys more of its own innate corruption, dead and temporary things and the destruction of the living being reduced to the level of commodities, that is by definition, for using up and then discarding. 'For whose benefit is all this chaos being done to so many?' I always ask.
The things being destroyed are irreplaceable, like species and communities. It is a function of where one is to rejoice in this state of affairs and call it wealth. I cannot be happy buying vanities, destroying the future, even the hard work of the generations passing or have passed in their idealism and sacrifice.
An example is the planned obsolence model of consumerism that is wrong and wasteful of time and resources, and the media facilitates it. (Enough about my ire for the media.)
The things being done around the planet, both to the living and our spirits, is obscene. I recall the words of RFK on GNP and I took them seriously and have pondered on it ever since:
Please forget any and all 'HRC bashers.' They're hurting themselves just by being what they are. Don't waste your time, as HRC doesn't, because she's using her fire power on the GOP, as always. It's why they hate her so much, she will not allow them to talk down to her belief system.
There are epic smack downs she has done to the GOP in Congress, in the Senate and as SoS. They always, and will continue with it, and come away looking stupid. To us in our liberal bubble. To them, it's all a big win to block their version of the natural order of things, with a few at the top ruling the rest of us. And that's even before they went apeshit. It's all they have, no substance even though power gives that appearance.
Still, we must think of something better. I see giving agency to women as an essential part of maintaining the ecosystem. Overpopulation is the breeding ground for poverty and empire which creates environmental disaster. This is history, pre-history, and a natural cycle that has been inescapable and leads to permanent changes in human and animal population and landscape.
We're going into a period of scarcity, diverted by consumerism to take our minds off of what is being degraded. Satellites are monitoring the loss of arable land and vegetation that sustains the circle of life. It's been hidden bycultural blindness. There are apocalyptic scenes that don't stay in the world's consciousness long enough to do enough.
of a person, then argues against those misrepresented views. Oh, what is the name again, let me think...
Economics and our tax structure does need to be reorganized and simplified.
There is no reason why the average Head of Household should have to seek assistance to file their year end tax return.
Even CPAs are having trouble keeping with laws and regulations and I dare say there can be found loopholes within loopholes.
It is beyond ridiculous and does not fool a thinking, reasonable person. The devil is in the details.
Town Hall site by mistake.
Never about who will benefit from it. 
