A guy named Bernie Sanders has an article in The Guardian. Who is Bernie Sanders, asks the UK audience. According to the article, “Bernie Sanders is a US senator. He represents the state of Vermont”. According to this Bernie Sanders,
If the Democratic party wants to avoid losing millions of votes in the future it must stand tall and deliver for the working families of our country who, today, are facing more economic desperation than at any time since the Great Depression. Democrats must show, in word and deed, how fraudulent the Republican party is when it claims to be the party of working families.
And, in order to do that, Democrats must have the courage to take on the powerful special interests who have been at war with the working class of this country for decades. I’m talking about Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance industry, the fossil fuel industry, the military industrial complex, the private prison industrial complex and many profitable corporations who continue to exploit their employees.
If the Democratic party cannot demonstrate that it will stand up to these powerful institutions and aggressively fight for the working families of this country – Black, White, Latino, Asian American and Native American – we will pave the way for another rightwing authoritarian to be elected in 2024. And that president could be even worse than Trump.
The Guardian
It’s ironic that as the excitement of the election begins to fade, and the feeling sets in that we have dodged the bullet of a second Trump term, we now feel comfortable with beginning to feel disappointed with the Biden administration before it even takes power!
Prove us wrong Joe! I think Bernie has it right. The Democratic party’s message is overly focused on putting everything in race and gender terms, and not focused enough on an economic message that appeals to the working people of this country, which is the vast majority of people. Getting the basic benefits in place that people in other functioning modern societies take for granted – child care, education, health care, infrastructure in good repair – would disproportionately help people who need the most help, without the race and gender-based messages that are a turnoff to many voters and are ultimately ineffective at bringing about change.
“Fighting the special interests” means campaign finance reform. It probably means legislation or even a constitutional amendment clarifying that the right to free speech applies to humans and not dollars.
I have friends and family that voted for Trump. None of these people is openly racist, although only the hypocritical or naive among us think we are completely free of bias. Most of them honestly believe that Trump lowered their taxes and that Biden will raise them. Some are small business owners who honestly believe Trump, or any Republican at all, is pro-business and that Democrats are hostile to business. Some believe 1990s-era free trade agreements took away their jobs, the issue that I still believe edged out Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The solutions are pretty clear. The U.S. probably needs to take in more taxes and reinvest the money in smart ways that benefit working people, and that set the stage for long-term sustainable growth and innovation. This means the social programs I mentioned earlier, plus investments in infrastructure, capital goods, skills and training, research and development. These are also pro-business policies!
But how can you get people to support paying taxes when they have been subjected to decades of extreme anti-tax propaganda? This is really tough. That propaganda was created by decades of the rich and powerful buying off politicians to implant their extremist ideology in all our heads. I think Bernie is right that attacking those forces of propaganda is absolutely necessary. This is politically very tough and a very long game, and it is fighting the anti-tax message which is so simple to understand and so brutally effective.
Another idea, also politically very, very difficult, is to make taxes psychologically easier to pay. A value added tax would do this. This is how the rest of the developed world does it. It is the equivalent of a saved credit card in your iTunes app being so much psychologically less painful than writing a check each month to pay the electric bill. You just don’t “feel” that payment as much, and you see and enjoy the benefits that you getting in return every day. When I worked in Singapore, I submitted a tax return not unlike the one I submit here. But then someone reviewed that tax return and sent me a clear bill for the exact amount I had to pay. I was then able to set up an auto-pay from my bank account in twelve equal installments. Anything that gets tax payments into the background of people’s minds, kind of like the stored credit card on your Netflix account, might help.
People need to see and understand the value of the goods and services they are getting from the government in exchange for their taxes. We get enormous value from the government but we tend to take it for granted. Part of the propaganda has been for working people to believe that the taxes they pay provide benefits to other people, people not like them in one way or another, or people far away. I don’t have all the answers here, we could look at how companies create a sense of value for services. Advertising, branding, and marketing are part of the answer, whether we find that unsavory or not. Monthly statements, or the digital equivalent, might help.
There is also the flip side of helping people understand how much they pay for war and weapons, payments that do not bring any direct, measurable benefits to the people paying them. Federal tax revenue also gets sucked out of population centers where most economic value is created and redistributed to rural areas where it is not (out of proportion to the populations served, I am not suggesting rural people deserve nothing.) The brilliant, successful propaganda then convinces those rural voters that the exact opposite is true, that they are subsidizing the lazy people in the cities who do not create value! So we have to fight this too, and it brings us back to campaign finance reform, constitutional reform, and maybe democratic (small-d) reforms that get us closer to one-person, one-vote and lower the barriers to entry of candidates outside the two large parties. All politically very, very difficult! So who in the next generation will take up the Bernie Sanders mantle and make this case to the UK voter?!?
